Literary paranormal thriller set in 1990 in a small southern Ontario border town that once had a famous amusement park. At the start, the haunted main character reminded me in attitude and sensibility of a more sombre version of the titular character from TV’s Wynonna Earp, with her mouthy ways, her personal and sexual recklessness, and her return to the small town that raised her but that is none too fond of her. That didn’t last, though, as navigating legacies of abuse and shame took central stage…and of course as the story focused not on the zombie-like creatures Wynonna is cursed to combat but on a passionate, intense, and increasingly terrifying relationship with a single beautiful angry ghost. Really good writing. Great look at working-class, small-town life in the early years of the shift towards de-industrialization and neoliberal precarity. I particularly appreciated its organic recognition that small-town southern Ontario has never been uniformly white, as it is so often narrativized and remembered, and its portrayal of overlapping experience and the difficult but real possibilities for cross-racial solidarity among poor and working-class women. I think I liked the book more at the beginning and the end than I did in the middle, but I enjoyed it all the way through.
Originally posted by Scott on Goodreads.