I love getting these books that I’ve had on hold for ages. I have no memory of what made me put the book on hold, no idea what I’m walking into, only that the wait list was over 20 people and it’s taken months for it to finally get to me. Did I look at the summary to see what I was getting into? Of course not!
The story follows the inhabitants of the Dellawisp, an apartment complex on the infamous Mallow Island. Zoey, the young girl with the invisible bird is moving into her late mother’s suite to start over and hears the untimely demise of one of her neighbours. Slowly, we meet the inhabitants of the Dellawisp (4 of them? This is a really small place) and start to see the secrets they are hiding and the pasts that they cannot let go of.
This felt like a strange reading experience in that it felt like a book that I would grow to hate as soon as my English teacher tried to make me find the author’s intended meanings. The subject matter dipped into prostitution, sexual assault, drug use, and child abuse among other things, but the tone stayed squarely in that new girl in town trying to win the county fair pie contest range. It was like the tone was trying to make the subject matter more tame for a younger audience.
The story itself was fine. I do think it would have been stronger if the perspectives of the ghosts were cut as one didn’t add anything to the narrative and the other actively made it worse. The jumping between characters means the focus keeps changing and, though it’s all connected by the themes of loss and grief and moving on by finding your new chosen family, it did feel meandering.
Overall, not bad, but not one that’s particularly memorable. It’s pretty quick and not a bad use of time, but there are a lot of books I’ve liked more lately.