Rating: WORTHY!
This was another audiobook experiment, and a successful one for a change. The weird thing is that I'm not sure exactly why I liked it. I think a part of it is the reading voice of Amy Landon who did the audiobook, which is really pleasant on the ear, but the story itself is engaging. It's well-written and has a charmingly innocent feel to it. I guess it just captured my mood. Not that I'm innocent by any stretch of the imagination, but it was truly easy listening, both the way the story was written, and the way it was told. The Perfect Calm.
It is described as 'Ghost Stories #1', and I am not a fan of series, so while I enjoyed this particular one, especially after I understood why it was written the way it was, I don't think this is a series I will follow because the way this was written has made it somewhat disjointed and repetitive, and there's very little in the way of narrative thrust in any particular direction, or indeed of any urgency at all! if the next book in the series (if there is to ever be one) is written as a whole coherent tale, rather than as a series of installments, then maybe!
The book was apparently originally published over a period of a year in monthly episodes, with each section being a self-contained story. When they were combined, no additional editing was done, so the story begins to sound rather repetitive after you've been through several segments. That didn't bother me as much as the fact that Rose, the ghost who is telling her story (and in first person too, although in this book it didn't feel totally nauseating), seems to have no direction in life...er, death. She's just ghosting along, relating events in her life, with lots of flashbacks. Normally these annoy me too, but in this case they were not bad, and understandable in context, since Rose died in 1952, and has been a ghost for about four times longer than she actually lived.
Her stated goal is to bring to justice the guy who ran her off the road, but we get no explanation as to why it's taking her so damned long to get there. In the meantime, we get some interesting stories of Rose escorting people to the other side - her self-appointed duty - or actually, in some cases, saving the lives of people who otherwise would have died in a traffic accident. She always tries, but mostly she fails. At one point she's able to lead a lost child back to her parents. On another occasion, Rose herself is hunted by a...should I say dispirited...girl who doesn't understand why her dead boyfriend never came back to say farewell.
The author seems to have borrowed heavily from the work of Jan Brunvand a collector of urban legend. Once a good friend (thanks Aimee!) had pointed me in his direction and I looked him up, I recognized many elements from this novel. The author also adds in other things, such as Rose's ability to take on physical form if she wears something from a living person. This enables her to touch people, to eat food, feel pain, and even have sex! How she manages to grasp the object to wear it in the first place is a bit of a mystery.
Overall, the story was well written and interesting, even amusing in places and intriguing in others, and I liked it, but I have to say some readers will find it a bit repetitive. It could have used some editing to remove the repetitive introductions, but I'm not sure what could be done about the increasingly common element wherein Rose Marshall, who is the ghost, keeps getting kidnapped by people! That happened a bit too often. Each time it was different, but it was beginning to feel a bit tedious, and she never seemed to learn from it.
One particularly amusing segment was where Rose somehow managed to get herself assigned to a team of ghost hunters who were actually hunting Rose herself. The team of college students met her in corporeal form, because she can become solid if she dons a jacket or something like that, so they had no idea who she really was. In real death, Rose was a legend - the prom date, the hitchhiking girl. She had several names and many more stories than she had names. All of them were different, and while some were close to the truth, others were wild fantasy. Rose accepts them with aplomb. It was her easy-going and accepting manner which made her a delight to read about. She was written beautifully, and created magically by the author.
You may think it's hard to kidnap a ghost, but it happens to Rose all the time! One time she was abducted to meet the queen of the route witches. She had no problem with this woman, so why there was a need to kidnap her rather than simply invite her to visit is an unexplained mystery. The route witch thing never really was explained to me. Ironically, I listened to this whilst commuting to work, so stories about route witches were highly appropriate, but when I'm diving, I'm primarily focused on driving with the story playing second fiddle, so I may have missed something. Of course, when you're driving, it's actually a good idea to miss things.... Maybe the explanation came during one of these time, but it meant that it remained a mystery to me. A route witch isn't an actual witch, but some sort of specialized ghost, and it appears that Rose was one, but it took forever for the story to reveal that.
Overall though I really enjoyed this, and I recommend it to anyone who likes to listen while driving - or at any other time for that matter.
