These Ghosts are Family (Unabridged)
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3.9 • 13 Ratings
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
PEN/Hemingway Award For Debut Novel Finalist
Shortlisted for the 2020 Center for Fiction First Novel Prize
A “rich, ambitious debut novel” (The New York Times Book Review) that reveals the ways in which a Jamaican family forms and fractures over generations, in the tradition of Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi.
Stanford Solomon’s shocking, thirty-year-old secret is about to change the lives of everyone around him. Stanford has done something no one could ever imagine. He is a man who faked his own death and stole the identity of his best friend. Stanford Solomon is actually Abel Paisley.
And now, nearing the end of his life, Stanford is about to meet his firstborn daughter, Irene Paisley, a home health aide who has unwittingly shown up for her first day of work to tend to the father she thought was dead.
These Ghosts Are Family revolves around the consequences of Abel’s decision and tells the story of the Paisley family from colonial Jamaica to present-day Harlem. There is Vera, whose widowhood forced her into the role of a single mother. There are two daughters and a granddaughter who have never known they are related. And there are others, like the houseboy who loved Vera, whose lives might have taken different courses if not for Abel Paisley’s actions.
This “rich and layered story” (Kirkus Reviews) explores the ways each character wrestles with their ghosts and struggles to forge independent identities outside of the family and their trauma. The result is a “beguiling…vividly drawn, and compelling” (BookPage, starred review) portrait of a family and individuals caught in the sweep of history, slavery, migration, and the more personal dramas of infidelity, lost love, and regret.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
Maisy Card’s debut is a mesmerizing depiction of the mess many of us inherit along with our DNA. These Ghosts Are Family picks through the tangled stories of several generations of the Paisley family, whose roots are in Jamaica and New York. Card alternates between first, second, and third person to paint a 360-degree portrait of the various Paisleys’ struggles to wrestle with ghosts from their past as well as present-day demons. Her stunning novel explores Jamaican history, the devastations of colonialism, addiction, and adultery, and the reality that one individual’s bad choices can create craziness for generations to come. “I loved listening to the audiobook,” the author tells Apple Books. “Narrator Karl O’Brian managed to give every character, no matter how minor, their own unique voice and understood the different regional and generational nuances in Jamaican patois.” We loved Card’s bold creativity and the way her story linked the dead and the living, reminding us of our deep connection to those who came before us.
Customer Reviews
What a trip
This is second book I have read about a transplant from Jamaica who has assumed the identity of their dead best friend. I’m starting to think this was common practice, or maybe just a popular story telling trope in Caribbean literature.
Everybody is a trip in this book. We meet Abel who has faked his death because he believes he is worth more to his wife dead than alive. Especially since his wife Vera wants a certain lifestyle, that he doesn’t have the desire to keep up with and really can’t afford.
We meet Vera at several points in her life, as a mistress, as a wife cheating on her husband and unsatisfied with her husband’s station in life, as a single woman frolicking naked outside at night with her yard boy, and dead with her haunting her husband and plotting how she would like to kill him.
We meet Vera and Abel’s children, a son who is happy he alone inherits his mother’s house upon her death, and a daughter who was treated terribly by her mother and believes her father is dead.
We also meet Vera’s boy toy, she was diddling the “yard boy” at her big age when he was just a teenager. Upon her death poor Bernard just wants to find some proof he mattered to Vera and their love was real. Unfortunately, homeboy comes up empty
handed and steals three little girls from the funeral.
Vera’s daughter Irene feels nothing but resentment and anger toward her mother. It was Vera’s poor treatment of Irene that created their tumultuous relationship and forced her to flee Jamaica and bring her family to New York. The only problem is that in America she is reduced to a servant a luxury she had a child growing up on the island.
“History is easier to digest when you are disconnected from it, when you stare it through a glass display case…knowledge is overrated” interesting enough the white characters in the novel want to distance themselves from history, all except Debbie.
Debbie a white woman who struggles with her history and her ancestors enslaving Jamaicans. She even journeys to Jamaica where she meets Vera’s son Vincent and marries him, not realizing they are probably some form of kin, considering her family owned his.
We then find out Abel has another daughter, Ruthie, who is the product of an affair he had with a patron in his shop.
Readers then return to Jamaica and so many characters are introduced it’s hard to keep the story straight. But eventually you can see connection, and realize that this novel is one huge generational story told from multiple perspectives and locations. I find it very strange that Card ends the book with the final chapter about the three little girls who were stolen at Vera’s funeral, and their story, which not only includes the supernatural but the embodiment of ghosts. It was an interesting read but a lot to decipher towards the end.