Fabulous reads – If you could speak to ghosts…

The Doll Funeral, Kate Hamer, Jonathan Ball Publishers, ISBN: 9780571334421

THE cover for The Doll Funeral is both beautiful and eerie. It made me want to pick it up.

The back page synopsis is filled with short and punchy sentences that practically beg you to open its pages and bury yourself in its words.Ruby lives with her parents, Mick and Barbara, and on her 13th birthday they reveal she is adopted.

Rather than a face of surprise most people would wear at this statement, she runs out into the yard to celebrate.

The reader will experience shock as the burly Mick beats this tiny child to a pulp. The beatings are so severe that it takes her days, sometimes weeks to recover.

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Climbing into her mind during and after these events gives the reader the impression she has become emotionally damaged and possibly also suffers from a mental illness.

The book is a hit and miss affair. The plot is a hit, the execution is a miss.

Ruby can see and interact with the dead and this in itself could have created a breathtaking adventure as she sets out to find her real parents.

The way in which the story is written is less of a mystery novel and more of a poetic journey. Metaphors can be found on nearly every page and some don’t land, forcing you to re-read the sentence to achieve the ‘ah-ha!’ moment.

Despite the deep back story and plot, the characters were bland and uninteresting, the pace was slow and its storyline had the opportunity to enchant but instead left a stale taste in my mouth.

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