Among Ghosts
Aug. 29th, 2025 12:22 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
psocopteraAmong Ghosts, Rachel Hartman, 2025 YA fantasy (or possibly middle-grade? really heavy/graphically violent middle-grade??). Set in Goredd some years/decades/(centuries??) prior to Amy or Seraphina/Tess, but was written to stand alone and imo would read just fine if you've never read any of her other work. There is a *lot* going on here in terms of plot elements/characters/things needing resolution but I felt like it all fit together and hung together. More emotionally resonant for me than the second Tess book. Some really heavy/bleak events and backstory but I thought Hartman handled it well (matter-of-factly without downplaying); she also did a really nice job with the lighter and happier stuff. A sequence involving a bird was just gorgeous (as well as doing a neat job of letting her fill in some of the stuff happening outside the protagonist's POV). I do recommend this but I wouldn't give it to a younger reader without getting a rundown on some of the content, which I suppose I will put behind this cut.
Grisly burning/drowning death, plague, deaths from plague, body horror involving insects, intimate partner violence, child abuse, genocide, human sacrifice of children, burning at the stake, implied rape (but very implied)
Second cut for more specific spoilers : something very interesting to me in the conclusion that only a monster can defeat a monster; there's a lot about pacifism in this book and Charl coming to choose the path of caretaking rather than the path of violence for himself, but he gets his happy ending because there's someone else around who's willing and able to be violent. Some interesting non-idealism from Hartman.
Grisly burning/drowning death, plague, deaths from plague, body horror involving insects, intimate partner violence, child abuse, genocide, human sacrifice of children, burning at the stake, implied rape (but very implied)
Second cut for more specific spoilers : something very interesting to me in the conclusion that only a monster can defeat a monster; there's a lot about pacifism in this book and Charl coming to choose the path of caretaking rather than the path of violence for himself, but he gets his happy ending because there's someone else around who's willing and able to be violent. Some interesting non-idealism from Hartman.
