Lilibet Bombshell's Reviews > The Ghosts of Beatrice Bird

This was a lovely, if terribly sad, book. Even with how sad it is, I found it almost impossible to put down because the writing is just so elegant and the story is engrossing.

It’s interesting how sometimes the same old story can captivate you just being packaged in a slightly different way. Here, Morgan takes a basic plot we’ve definitely seen before: two women who are both running from their own kinds of ghosts and end up fighting them together in some sort of way, and keeps one woman’s ghosts mundane and turns the other woman’s ghosts supernatural. I also found myself surprised to be as invested in the story as I was, given I knew what was coming most of the time and knew most of what was going to happen in this book. Did I know it all? No. But I knew enough that there were few surprises. Usually, this would make me whine and moan, but I kept on being just as invested as I was from the beginning. I think that may have been because the writing was just that good and because I cared about the characters that much.

Two things that I loved so much about this book: One, the time period this book is set in. I love a good historical fantasy setting, and books set in the late 1960’s are some of my favorites. It was a time of so much social, political, and religious upheaval. It makes for excellent storytelling fodder. The second thing is the geographical setting of this book. The isolated, gothic-like setting of a very isolated island somewhere (I’m guessing from the text) in Puget Sound made not only for picturesque passages full of evocative imagery, but it also matched the mood of our protagonists and gave the story the supernatural feeling of liminal space that I found to be essential to the story being told.

There’s this ribbon woven through the text of this story about the spirit world and whether or not it’s tied to religion and faith or not, or whether it matters at all. Is it a gift or a curse? Burden or blessing? This question goes unanswered and I believe that’s the moral of the story. It’s all in what you carry with you.

I recommend this for fans of elegant prose, books about women fighting back without violence, books about unlikely and fast female friendships, and fans of 1960’s historical fantasy.

I was provided a copy of this title by NetGalley and the author. All thoughts, opinions, views, and ideas expressed herein are mine and mine alone. This review was written without compensation.

File Under: Domestic Thriller/Ghost Fiction/Gothic Fiction/Historical Fantasy/Historical Fiction/Psychological Fiction/Supernatural Fantasy/Suspense Fiction/Women’s Fiction