Suffused with humor and characters that delight, Sparks’ tale is sensitive to the protagonists’ varied frustrations and hesitations, ghostly or otherwise.
For anyone who has ever wished they made Nancy Drew novels for grown-ups ... Like, say, Tim Burton or Neil Gaiman, Sparks works within a highly stylized mix of quirky and eerie—but from within her own idiosyncratic vision, she celebrates the power and strangeness of weird women and girls.
Playful ... The zaniness can sometimes feel forced, and a few of the novel’s many threads are left dangling at the end, but beneath the spunky girl detective plot is a finely crafted novel about fraught relationships, both between a mother and daughter and between the living and the dead. It’s a cozy supernatural delight.
