Books › The Time of the Ghost
The Time of the Ghost
304 pages
A delightfully chaotic and darkly poignant puzzle-box of a ghost story about feral sisters and fractured identities.
What it feels like
Reading this book feels like trying to solve a brilliant, slightly sinister puzzle while trapped in a chaotic childhood memory. The narrative moves at a brisk, dizzying clip, plunging you into the feral, unsupervised world of four eccentric sisters living on the grounds of a boys' boarding school. Beneath the wry, darkly comic surface lies a deeply unsettling exploration of parental neglect, fractured identity, and the lingering trauma of adolescence. The prose is sharp and unsentimental, treating time travel and ancient goddesses with the same matter-of-fact exasperation as a ruined dress. It is a perfect fit for readers who crave atmospheric, time-bending fantasies that refuse to sugarcoat the darker, messier realities of growing up, offering a profoundly satisfying journey of self-reclamation.
- Mood
- eerie
- chaotic
- unsettling
- nostalgic
- Tone
- wry
- darkly comic
- unsentimental
- eccentric
- Pace
- brisk
- Themes
- alienation from self · feral sisterhood · parental neglect · childhood bargains · fractured identity
- The writing
- Sharp, unsentimental, and deceptively breezy, masking dark undercurrents with sharp wit and chaotic energy.
- The arc
- Moves from disorienting, ghostly detachment to a frantic, deeply grounded fight for survival and self-reclamation.
- Who it's for
- Readers who love messy, complicated family dynamics wrapped in eerie, time-bending fantasy that refuses to talk down to them.
Content notes
- parental neglect
- abusive relationship
- severe injury
- hospitalization
About the book
From Publishers Weekly Published in Great Britain in 1981 and available here for the first time, this gripping novel serves up often giddily hilarious fantasy that nonetheless deals unflinchingly with some ugly issues. At least twice in the course of the multi-layered narrative, the heroine has not the faintest idea who she is?a powerful metaphor for the novel's underlying theme of alienation from self. The story begins with the as-yet-nameless heroine floating?literally?through a boys' boarding school and its outlying grounds, a setting she finds oddly familiar. With a little spectral sleuthing (easy enough to accomplish when you're invisible) the disembodied spirit concludes that she is Sally Medford, one of a quartet of eccentric sisters who live at the school and are grossly neglected by their overworked schoolmaster parents. As the plot continues on its intriguingly convoluted path, evidence of time-travel begins to emerge: the college-age Sally is in a hospital, gravely injured after her abusive boyfriend throws her from a speeding car. Some part of her has journeyed back seven years into the past, where?with the help of her sisters and their schoolboy friends?she must undo a rash bargain with a powerful and ancient goddess. Given the violent boyfriend and the girls' ill-tempered father (prone to referring to his daughters as "bitches"), this tale is less overtly lighthearted than such Wynne Jones works as Howl's Moving Castle and Charmed Life but it is just as profoundly satisfying. Ages 10-up. Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Description from Open Library.
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