Sparrow Hill Road
The Ghost Roads series, Book 1
Seanan McGuire
DAW
Fiction, Collection/Fantasy/Horror
****+ (Good/Great)
DESCRIPTION: The Phantom Prom Date, the Girl in the Green Silk Gown, the Spirit of Sparrow Hill Road... around every camp fire, in every truck stop and greasy-spoon diner, people know the tragic story of the sweet young girl from the small town who died before her time, hitchhiking her way across North America. Some say she leads drivers to their deaths, some say she saves their lives, but none of them know the truth, and if they did they'd never believe it. Some stories, you have to die to believe.
Rose Marshall was sixteen when she was run off the road by Bobby Cross, a man who bargained for immortality at the cost of harvested souls - but she got away before he could claim hers, and she's been running from him ever since. Now she's a hitcher, a ghost of the twilight Americas that lie just beneath the skin of the living world, tethered to existence by unfinished business as she haunts the highways and diners and the hidden ghostroads. It's not the greatest afterlife, but she's seen enough to know there are fates far worse than death... such as the fate that awaits her should Bobby Cross finally get hold of her. Only Rose is getting a little tired of running away, and though she may be forever sixteen, she's not the same sweet, innocent small-town girl she used to be.
REVIEW: Built around ghost stories and urban legends and rooted in travelers' tales as old as the first trade routes, Sparrow Hill Road creates a modern American roadside mythology, where hitchhikers are as liable to be dead as alive, late-shift diners host spirits, crossroads bargains are not to be made lightly, and roadways can take on lives of their own. Rose Marshall makes a decent guide, a gutsy girl whose decades of death have hardened her in many ways; innocence is the first thing to go if one wants to survive the twilight ghostroads. Her adventures are laced with horror and beauty, sadness and humor, with nostalgia for a lost America alongside darker shadows of history that refuse to stay in the past. Rose collects some interesting allies and enemies on the road, all bound in some way by peculiar magicks that even long-time spirits or the most learned of routewitches can't fully explain. Rather than feeling plot-convenient or random, though, they fit the shifting, spectral nature of the twilight America McGuire crafts, which is a feat in and of itself. The rules are both simple and inexplicable, with no need for triple-appendiced magic systems (which have their places in fantasy, but can also overburden a story.) This book collects several short stories about Rose, some of which read as standalone adventures but all of which, especially towards the end, build into a greater arc as her confrontation with Bobby Cross looms ever closer. The conclusion wraps up character growth, even if threads are naturally left dangling for the rest of the series. I guess now I'll have to order Book 2... dang it.
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