This week's novel is Ghost Talkers by Mary Robinette Kowal.
Ginger is a medium working for the British Spirit Corps during WWI. Ostensibly, the Spirit Corps is a group of women who entertain the troops and keep their moral up. But actually, the British servicemen are conditioned to report to the Spirit Corps as ghosts after they die to describe the events of their deaths, like the locations of snipers and machine guns. The women of the Spirit Corps speak to the ghosts and take their reports before releasing their spirits. But now the Germans have figured out that the British are using ghosts and are trying to find details of the project's operation, and there's a spy in the British ranks giving the Germans information about the ghosts--a spy that killed Ginger's intelligence officer fiancé, Ben, when he got too close to discovering the leak. Now Ginger and Ben's ghost have to go to the front, find the leak, find Ben's murderer, and save the Spirit Corps.
My favorite thing about this book was how Ben's ghost deteriorated over time. His memory would slip, so he couldn't remember the specifics of what he had learned in his investigation. This worked well for the story's plot in that he couldn't just tell Ginger who the spies were, so she had to go on an adventure to retrieve his notebook and then figure out how to decode it, because he couldn't remember the cipher he used. But it also worked to raise tension, because it wasn't simply that he had amnesia, but that he also misremembered things. He talked about memorizing poems in school that didn't come out until years later. He confused the cipher he used on his notes about the spies with the cipher he used to talk to Ginger. So in all this, Ginger not only has to find the truth herself, but she has to sort what he says as true or false. This was on top of suspicions from early in the book that the war has changed Ben and that he might be the spy and might be misdirecting everyone even after death.
He becomes more and more driven by his base emotions, like protecting Ginger and taking revenge on his murderer. He went into rages and poltergeisted at people who hurt Ginger on accident because she startled them. Eventually there wasn't much left of him and what was left wasn't recognizable as Ben, or even as human. My favorite image of the book is that ghost Ben would be both standing at attention and crumpled in a ball, holding his own head.
This is all putting the emphasis on Ben a bit more than I would like, so let me clarify: my favorite part was that Ben deteriorated and Ginger handled it. She was professional as a trained medium who constantly experienced death. She was afraid of Ben's rages and of his personality being lost. She was broken up that he had died, yet glad he was still around, and ashamed that she wanted him to stay and worried that he would stay too long, and then pained again that he would leave eventually. There was so much love in her, and she was so strong in the face of supernatural yet relatable hardship.
I did get confused sometimes as to why Ginger wasn't talking to certain people, when they would probably have valuable information. Sometimes it seemed a bit because the plot needed her to not know things and to be in certain places. For instance, at one point Ginger and Ben's former assistant get separated on a train because the doctor in charge drags the injured assistant off to a car with people with similar injuries and sends Ginger to go nurse the not-so-wounded guys in the car for the not-so-wounded. When she gets off the train, she can't find the assistant. Instead of asking the doctor where the assistant went, she hides so she's not spotted. I almost get that. But not completely. It would have saved a lot of time if she'd kept up her nurse-supervising-one-wounded-guy disguise to have one conversation with the doctor who was supposed to have taken responsibility for her charge. Oh well.
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Next week: On the Edge of Gone, apocalyptic YA, by Corinne Duyvis.
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