Paper Ghosts by Sarah Addison Allen

Paper Ghosts by Sarah Addison Allen
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Thank you to St. Martin's Press and NetGalley for providing me with an advanced copy of this book in exchange for my honest review!
----------
For decades, the women of Wester House have unsettled and fascinated their small, timeless North Carolina town. Their home is full of whispers, old griefs, and uncanny knowing. But when Willamena Wester reaches out to the granddaughter she once pushed away, long-buried truths begin to stir.

1976: Restless young Willamena falls for a stranded musician who brings freedom and the promise of another life to her carefully controlled world. Their brief, incandescent love story promises to escape the pull of the Wester legacy until Willamena makes a fateful choice that changes her life forever.

Present day: Returning home is the last thing Bailey Wester wants. Yet as she reconnects with Willamena, the grandmother she feared, Bailey begins to understand the love, heartbreak, and impossible choices that shaped the women in her family and realizes the past may not have been trying to haunt them after all. A luminous novel filled with Sarah Addison Allen’s stunning prose and signature blend of romance, Southern charm, and wonder, Paper Ghosts reminds us that in order to have the future we really want, sometimes we need to live with the past, and not let go of it.
----------
The knowledge that there is a new novel by Sarah Addison Allen on its way into the world is always a cause for celebration, and the fact that I got to read this one ahead of everyone else was just the icing on the cake. Her books were my first introduction to the specific type of magical realism I have really come to enjoy from authors like Heather Webber and Rebecca Serle, and there is something haunting and compelling about the stories she weaves. Here again, we are introduced to complex characters who are carrying the trauma of their ancestors forward as they try to heal the past and move ahead toward a better future.

While her books often have romance in them, romance is usually just a supporting player, and this is the case once again in Paper Ghosts. Plenty of the plot is focused around relationships, but there is heartbreak and sorrow, deep regret, tragedy, and self-imposed exile at the center of these relationships, which is far from the HEA of a traditional romance novel. However, while the author visits some dark themes in this book, her gift for lyrical prose makes this a must-read for fans of her other works, as well as an excellent introduction to the magical world of Sarah Addison Allen.

View all my reviews