Title: Ghost Talkers
Author: Mary Robinette Kowal
Publisher: Tor Books Books
Publication date: August 16, 2016
Length: 304 pages
Genre: Historical fiction / fantasy
Source: Purchased
Rating:
Ginger Stuyvesant, an American heiress living in London during World War I, is engaged to Captain Benjamin Harford, an intelligence officer. Ginger is a medium for the Spirit Corps, a special Spiritualist force.
Each soldier heading for the front is conditioned to report to the mediums of the Spirit Corps when they die so the Corps can pass instant information about troop movements to military intelligence.
Ginger and her fellow mediums contribute a great deal to the war efforts, so long as they pass the information through appropriate channels. While Ben is away at the front, Ginger discovers the presence of a traitor. Without the presence of her fiance to validate her findings, the top brass thinks she’s just imagining things. Even worse, it is clear that the Spirit Corps is now being directly targeted by the German war effort. Left to her own devices, Ginger has to find out how the Germans are targeting the Spirit Corps and stop them. This is a difficult and dangerous task for a woman of that era, but this time both the spirit and the flesh are willing…
How might the Great War have been different if soldiers killed in battle could report back, in real time, on what they saw and experienced?
In Ghost Talkers, the British army employs a top-secret corps of mediums, known as the Spirit Corps, to receive the ghosts of newly dead soldiers and take their final reports. The ghosts appear to the spirit circles and can, in some cases, provide useful information — such as where the German soldiers were firing from, or what they saw immediately before dying. The information gathered is sent directly back to the front, and then the mediums take any final messages before the ghosts move on through the veil to the next plane.
Ginger is one of the lead mediums, working double shifts to take reports — an exhausting process that involves extending her soul beyond her physical body to interact with with ghosts on the spirit plane. This is dangerous for the mediums: Being on the spirit plane is freeing in many ways, and there’s a risk that the medium will lost contact with their body, perhaps never to return. The spirit circle grounds the medium to the physical realm, but the danger is constant.
These spiritual risks are amplified when evidence comes through the reports of the deceased that the Germans are aware of the Spirit Corps and have plans to sabotage them. Ginger finds herself pursuing leads that the top brass choose to ignore, and soon finds both her physical and spiritual self in grave peril.
Ghost Talkers has a fascinating premise, and I mostly enjoyed it. However a couple of small points kept me from fulling engaging. Chief among these is the lack of emotional connection. We’re thrust right into the action, and I did enjoy Ginger and Ben as characters, but because the plot is so in-the-moment, there’s no backstory. I don’t necessarily need every moment of their past to appreciate them in the present, but I would have liked to know more about how Ginger ended up in the war in the first place, what her family life back home was like, and most importantly, at least a little bit more about her romance with Ben.
My other issue is that the plot is rather convoluted, and there are so many soldiers and officers named and involved, some of whom only appear in the briefest of scenes, that it’s difficult to sort them all out. By the time the traitor is revealed, I’d lost track of some of the potential suspects, so the impact was a bit lost on me.
Ghost Talkers has been on my shelf for several years now — it was my last remaining book by Mary Robinette Kowal that I hadn’t read, and now I can say that I’ve read all of her novels! This author is one of my favorites, and I’m glad to have experienced Ghost Talkers, but in terms of total immersion and investment, it doesn’t quite reach the greatness of many of her other books.
Still, I appreciated the interesting premise and the spotlight on women’s roles during a time when their contributions were not valued. If you enjoy historical fiction with a ghostly twist, this is a good one to check out.
Bookshelf Fantasies 