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Not sure what this is or what it's supposed to be, just shocked that it won awards.

It's allegedly a horror novel, written in 1st person POV, and that was a big red flag off the bat, but I persevered. Waiting for the horror to kick in.

The horror never kicked in, though. It's a mystery-crime novel in which the protagonist accepts that ghosts are real about 30% in. She then tries to work along with the ghost to solve a murder mystery—the murder having occurred 80 years ago. (Very boring.)

I kept going, hoping there'd be a plot twist of some sort... And the plot twist was that the protagonist was solving the wrong murder mystery. (Somehow even more boring. Impossibly boring.)

There are a lot of reviewers giving this one star for racism, transphobia, fatphobia... All of that is arguable. I don't know what kind of point the author was trying to make, if they wanted to highlight the stigma against substance abuse, the pressure on young people to achieve excellence in academics or sport, the damage done by delinquent parents vs helicopter parents... All of that is irrelevant because this is objectively a poorly constructed horror novel.

It is structurally unsound. Readable, but there's no substance to it unless you're looking for stories about addicts beating their demons. It gets one star for that, but I'm not reading horror novels for Christian inspiration. At the very least, I need full Christian warfare against demonic forces, not some racist-next-door with a Ouijia board. It is 2024. Enough with the Ouija boards.

"Identity fraud + ghosts" is not something that needed to be converted into a 10-hour novel. That's a Scooby-Doo twenty-minute cartoon at best.

Imagine a 10-hour episode of Scooby-Doo with zero red herrings, no comic relief, no talking dog, just Fred and Daphnie but Daphnie is a recovering addict. That's what this book is.