Book: One for Sorrow

Title: One for Sorrow
Author: Christopher Barzak
Thoughts: I really enjoyed this book. It's been a long time since I read a good ghost story, and this one does something magnificent: it sets up a world in which the main character has these completely believable and moving experiences with another character, but it just so happens that character #2 is dead. No laborious over-thinking passages about the meaning of life and death; no painful attempts to delve into the physics of why the ghost is possible; no saccharine musing on the nature of the afterlife. Yet the world of the novel is richly sketched, and never once did I set the book aside thinking 'Hmm, I don't believe it.' At its heart it is a story about grief: the toll it takes, the long process of overcoming it. It is also a coming-of-age story, a growing-up story. Beautifully written and beautifully realized. I'm only sad it's the author's first novel, because I can't run out to find something else of his to read.