Ghost Train to New Orleans
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4.5 • 15 Ratings
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
COULD YOU FIND A MUSEUM FOR A MONSTER?OR A JAZZ BAR FOR A JABBERWOCK?
Zoe Norris writes travel guides for the undead. And she's good at it too -- her new-found ability to talk to cities seems to help. After the success of The Sbambling Guide to New York City, Zoe and her team are sent to New Orleans to write the sequel.
Work isn't all that brings Zoe to the Big Easy. The only person who can save her boyfriend from zombism is rumored to live in the city's swamps, but Zoe's out of her element in the wilderness. With her supernatural colleagues waiting to see her fail, and rumors of a new threat hunting city talkers, can Zoe stay alive long enough to finish her next book?
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Zo Norris (introduced in The Shambling Guide to New York City) writes travel books for the coterie, America's community of supernatural entities. Zo is human, but her boss is a vampire, her bestie is a death goddess, and at least one of her coworkers wants to eat her. Dispatched with her team to create a guide book for exotic New Orleans, Zo finds betrayal, disquieting revelations, power, and danger. Team members go rogue and demon dogs stalk the streets while Zo learns more about the history of her fellow citytalkers and sleepwalks into a confrontation with one of New Orleans's deadliest figures. Lafferty's writing has an easy style that draws the reader in, and while many of the elements are familiar from other urban fantasies, she manages to shape the well-worked clay in entertaining new ways.
Customer Reviews
Another amazing book
It's nice to have a great author tell an amazing story. I loved her first book, Shambling Guide to New York City... This one was good!!! Can't wait for the next!
A spiky profile - some good worldbuilding, but the characters are kind of adrift
The premise from the first book carries over pretty well, and it’s fun to spend a bit more time with Zoë and this alternate version of our world. But the characters just didn’t gel for me this time around.
There were a *lot* of moments of people deciding to do things in seemingly arbitrary ways, and Zoë never reflects on this being weird. That, combined with other times where the plot veers abruptly without any kind of comment, left the book feeling unfinished. In book one, I really liked that Zoë was a character who reflected on her circumstances and I missed that here.
Most of the fun that I had with this book was in enjoying the small bits of expanded worldbuilding that we got around citytalking, then taking the ‘what ifs’ that came from that and imagining other possible stories in my head.
Additionally, there’s some pejorative language about mental health when talking about Granny Good Mae, who was misdiagnosed. (Zoë also seems to no longer think she was misdiagnosed?)
There’s also some lazy anti-fat bias, a bit more overt than the first one in the series. (Fat as a generic stand-in for negative character traits, a couple of descriptions of fat bodies meant to evoke disgust.)