The first third of this novel is very slow, almost glacial, and the remainder flies with nonstop, eye-widening, what the hell did I just read seriously what. I think that change of pace is deliberate given what happens in the story, but I’m still debating whether the pace and the plot worked for me.

The book opens with Sally and Peter’s wedding. Sally is happy but calculating, and sneaks away to deal with her mother, who is an uninvited guest. They are clearly very estranged and Sally tells her to go away and never come back; her mother gives her a lottery ticket as a wedding gift. Later, as they’re driving to the honeymoon, Peter and Sally end up scuffling in the car over that ticket, and that causes an accident that leaves Sally in a coma from which she can’t awaken.

The slow first third takes place mostly at the hospice where Peter has placed Sally. He visits every day, but doesn’t really interact with anyone. Around him, though, the family that forms within a hospice center of the staff, patients, and family members come together to work on refurbishing a lounge. Among them is Grace, a young woman whose mother died after a long illness, and who comes to the hospice to visit Margaret, one of her mother’s friends. Grace and Peter meet, and there are subtle indications that Grace might be waking Peter from the stasis of caring for his comatose wife. All of this is very quietly developed, from the visits to the hospice to Peter’s one-sided conversations with Sally, to Grace’s experience moving on from caring for both her parents before they died. Sally has some point of view as well – she’s floating in what she calls “tranquility,” where there isn’t pain but there isn’t much else except for stray bits of the conversations around her, most of which bore her.

Look, pretty much everything that happens after this paragraph is a spoiler, but I can’t discuss how the book worked without revealing a lot. So if you’re curious, here’s the short version: there is a lot going on with the portrayals of people who put themselves last vs. people who put themselves first and far above others, and that neither is ideal. The romance, which is understated and not the primary element to the story, evolves when the protagonists who can grow and evolve do so, and learn that some of their habits are healthy, and others are detrimental and should be changed. There are three parties in this story, so there is a triangle, and unfortunately, the revelations about the third person vilify that character consistently until there’s no pity or empathy left, and that didn’t sit well with me. Honesty and caring are the valued elements of the protagonist couple, and the escalating deceit and sociopathic disregard for others made the third party into a villain in a way that disappointed me. That said, this book is firmly lodged in my brain and I’m still pondering the characters, the construction, and the meaning.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Here comes all the spoilery spoiler parts.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Ready?

One stormy night, lightning hits the hospice or near it, and boom, there’s Sally. She’s a ghost – sort of. Grace can see and hear her. Peter cannot. Sally is Not Pleased. Her body, in the bed, which she can see, looks terrible – her blonde dye has grown out over the past year she’s spent in the coma, and her muscle tone is gone. Ghost Sally is in her wedding dress, blonde and perfect, and she’s not happy to be caught in an in-between world where she has the ability to hear what’s happening around her, but can’t interact with anyone aside from Grace.

There are consistent rules to the ghost element in this book: Sally can’t appear in places that she as a living person hadn’t visited, so there’s a limited range to where she can go. She doesn’t have much ability to affect the physical world initially, either. Her ability to influence people grows and changes, but in a way that shows she’s practiced and experimented, even if those experiments aren’t written on the page, and that her goals are increasingly mercenary.

Ghost Sally reveals Real Sally through her actions; as the reader we only saw a bit of her point of view before the car accident. Now that she’s Ghost Sally and has some ability to talk, interact, and witness things – and travel instantly, which was fascinating – she tries to regain control of her life and restore it to how it was before the accident. She’s not too focused on waking up or trying to get her Ghost Self back into her Real Self. She wants to stop all the changes that are happening around her because she’s losing control of Peter and of their relationship.

Sally is really, really awful. She’s a sociopath; her emotions are a performance, and her goal is consistently infused with self-absorption and self-promotion. She’s increasingly deceitful, mean, and cruel to Grace, who, as the only person who can see her, feels obligated to help her (plus helping other people is sort of a default setting to Grace’s personality after caring for her parents through their long declines). Once Sally figures out there are sparks between Grace and Peter, I was genuinely worried about them – with reason. Ghost Sally is horrible.

And that disappointed me, because once the story took off post-lightning, Ghost Sally, when she wasn’t being evil, was pretty interesting. She grew up very poor, she’s estranged from her mother who is an alcoholic, she’s clever and an excellent judge of character and weakness (especially the latter), and she’s talented in interior design and styling other people. Out of boredom or maybe a splinter of a moment of kindness, Ghost Sally helps Grace with her home, and with her clothing choices for an event, and she’s genuinely good at both. Having her character descend into selfish, petty cruelty made her such a villain that I felt bad for the loss of her character. But perhaps that was the point: Sally rarely if ever was truly herself, or revealed her true feelings or motivations, and when she did, in those moments of genuine generosity, she was unique and interesting.

Generosity of feeling and of effort, and the connections between people, are major themes in this story, despite the romance being very, very minor, and I’m still thinking about how those themes interplay. At heart, Sally is mercenary, vindictive, cold and selfish; Grace is kind, patient, loving, and dedicated – to her work as a scientist, to her parents, to her childhood home where she lives, to Margaret, and to the hospice. The family that forms within the hospice walls, too, is one of caring and generosity, and demonstrates the power of interconnectedness and the need to sometimes depend on others.

Sally was isolated and mistrustful of others, never letting anyone see her true self, not even Peter. Grace, Peter, and the people around them never quite sever all their connections, though Peter comes close and then steps back from the sharp edge of isolation. As Peter reconnects with people, starting with his family,  then Grace, and to a lesser extent people at the hospice, he also learns more about secrets Sally kept from him, and who she really was. He recognizes his feelings for Grace as Ghost Sally recognizes that she’s losing control of him, and of the life she carefully built.

The contrast between Grace and Sally is the point on which the story balances; Peter has a role to play but it’s not as significant as the evolution and revelations about the two women. Grace is half Sri Lankan, and as she wakes up from her grief, she reconnects with her parents through their history, and travels to her father’s homeland. She keeps selected mementos of her parents in their home, now hers, but is increasingly willing to let go of everything her parents placed in the house. Grace’s selflessness is only rewarded when she rewards herself and takes charge of her life, and makes changes around her so that her world is the way she’d like it to be. She didn’t grow or evolve until she began to take care of herself.

Peter wakes up from his grief and stasis to find himself having real, tangible feelings for people who are genuinely caring for him, and realizes that his wife really isn’t one of those people. When he starts to care about other people more, and reaches out to help them and ask for help, he begins to evolve, too, and “wakes up” by degrees to who he was, and who he would like to be.

Sally, however, can’t wake up. She can’t change or grow, and she can’t stop being the cruel version of herself as she watches her life, the life she designed and built, come apart around her. She still wants to hide her mother’s existence from Peter, and she doesn’t want him to know about the degree of poverty of her childhood, or about how little she thinks of what she calls his “middle class” solutions to every problem. She doesn’t want help unless she can’t avoid asking for it, and she’s much more comfortable using people or taking advantage rather than asking for assistance. She can’t grow or evolve, even when she has the chance to do so.

This is one of those books where I’m still thinking about it even though I I’m not entirely sure WHAT I think about it. I am thinking about how the characters reflect one another and serve as foils and mirrors, especially Grace and Sally. I’m thinking about how the portrayal of the hospice center was so powerful, and that people who have navigated hospice care in their lives will find a lot of poignant moments in this book. I keep pondering the rules of Ghost Sally’s haunting, how it worked and what the boundaries meant in terms of the story.

If I had to name this book’s genre, I wouldn’t call it romance, though the growing feelings between Peter and Grace are part of what cause all the changes and the movements toward happiness. It’s not quite women’s fiction, but it’s also not entirely paranormal, either. There are no other ghosts aside from Sally. I think it’s more like magical realism: ghost variety, with a very heavy romantic element, and I think it’s going to haunt my brain for quite awhile.