English
MG & Up
Ghosts
Family
Parent Loss
Fantasy
Servitude
Enslavement
Moving
Pittsburgh
Justina Ireland
summary
Ya’ll, this book is sooooo good!! Ophie and her mother have moved to Pittsburgh after their house is burned down, and her father is killed by white supremacists. This evening is also when Ophie found out she can see ghosts, something that is both exciting and overwhelming. In Pittsburgh, Ophie has to leave school and take a job with her mother so they can save money to move into their own house instead of living with some wretched family members.
Ophie becomes the caretaker of an elderly, cantankerous, and racist woman. In small moments of peace, Ophie becomes friends with a beautiful ghost named Clara and tries to help Clara solve her own murder. The book itself is mostly in Ophie’s point of view, but occasionally different inanimate objects (like a streetcar or the attic) is the narrator, giving sentience to the objects that have witnessed decades of history and hauntings. There is a delightful twist at the end, and I was immediately hooked when I began reading. Ophie is a fantastic narrator, and I enjoyed learning some of the ghostly haint history of the South, which I first read a bit about in Root Magic.
This book was kindly sent by Harper Kids, but all opinions and decisions to review are my own.
Justina Ireland
Justina Ireland is the author of Dread Nation (Balzer + Bray/HarperCollins), a New York Times bestseller as well as the sequel Deathless Divide. Her earlier works include the fantasy young adult novels Vengeance Bound and Promise of Shadows (both Simon and Schuster).
Justina also writes for the Star Wars franchise, including the books Lando’s Luck, Spark of the Resistance, and the upcoming A Test of Courage, part of the High Republic publishing initiative.
She is the former co-editor in chief of FIYAH Literary Magazine of Black Speculative Fiction, for which she won a World Fantasy Award. She holds a BA from Armstrong Atlantic University and an MFA from Hamline University.
