The Extra Large Medium

March 5, 2007
Annie Colville sees dead people, and in British television and scriptwriter Slavin's debut, the dead wear chocolate brown while inhabiting the "Waiting Room of Heaven World," which overlaps with the everyday "Living Room World" that the rest of us see. The ghosts reach out to Annie to enlist her in tidying up unfinished—and mundane as often as unconventional—business: which niece should get the Wedgwood teapot, which romantic path a lesbian daughter should follow. Annie also has problems of her own: her husband, Evan Bees, disappeared seven years ago, and though he's assumed dead, Annie hasn't seen him among the cocoa-clad (the countdown to when Annie can have him declared legally dead provides the book's time line); her quest to discover which of her mother's many lovers is her father is leaden with disappointment; and some ghosts prove to be more haunting than others. Annie endears herself to the reader, in part because her gift exhausts her more than it elevates her, and also because she embodies a genuine purity of heart that, in lesser hands, would be cloying.

April 1, 2007
Bridget Jones meets ghost stories in this light comic read by debut British author Slavin. Annie Coville is born with an unusual gift: she can see dead people, souls stuck wandering the earth, stranded between worlds and always clad in drab chocolate brown. She escapes childhood relatively unscathed, save the time spent as unwitting psychic for her aunts friends, paired with eerie haunting incidents. Upon adulthood she finds solace at the university, working among the bones and ghosts of Roman soldiers in the archaeology lab. It is there that she falls in love with Evan Bees, and they are happy until he disappears. If he was killed in an accident, his soul would have found her, so where is he? Annie is unable to give up on her true love, and while she waits, she decides to start helping lost ghosts, whether their business is trivial or not. Complete with chatty prose, the requisite tea shop, and spooky clues, Slavins delightful novel takes the reader happily all the way to the ever after.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2007, American Library Association.)