Set in an alternate Victorian England where mediums control the dead, sixteen-year-old autistic transgender boy Silas must expose a power-hungry secret society while confined to a cruel finishing school designed to turn him into the perfect wife. London, 1883. The Veil between the living and dead has thinned. Violet-eyed mediums commune with spirits under the watchful eye of the Royal Speaker Society, and Silas Bell would rather rip out his violet eyes than become an obedient Speaker wife. According to Mother, he will be married by the end of the year: it does not matter that he has needed a decade of tutors to hide his autism; that he practices surgery on slaughtered pigs; that he is a boy, not the girl the world insists on seeing. Silas is diagnosed with Veil sickness— a mysterious disease sending violet-eyed women into madness— and shipped away to Braxton’s Finishing School and Sanitorium. The instructors are merciless, and the students either bloom into eligible wives or disappear. When the ghosts of missing students start begging Silas for help, he decides to reach into Braxton's innards and expose its guts to the world... if the school does not break him first. -- adapted from jacket