The Doll Funeral

July 3, 2017
How desperately do the dead wish to interact with the living? This is a strong underlying theme in Hamer’s second novel (after The Girl in the Red Coat). Ruby can see dead people, an ability she’s been peripherally aware of since she was very young. On her 13th birthday, Ruby learns she was adopted; she confides this to someone she refers to as Shadow, an ever-present ghostlike companion who has tried to protect her all her life. Ruby, energized by the desire to find her birth parents, finally fights back against her abusive adoptive father. The consequences lead to her taking up with an odd group of siblings living hand-to-mouth in their family’s rundown mansion while their parents are away in India on a spiritual quest. As Ruby’s history becomes clearer, Hamer—with evocative and vivid prose—explores the depths to which a mother will go to connect with her child, while Ruby discovers her family’s secrets and learns a true family can be the people we choose to live with, not just the family into which we are born.

June 15, 2017
The story of a resilient young girl who has the eerie ability to see and speak with the dead.Set in the Forest of Dean and in London, this novel moves back and forth between two girls, 13-year-old Ruby, in 1983, and Anna, Ruby's young mother, in 1970. A third point of view peppers the novel, that of a boy simply called Shadow who follows alongside Ruby and has been by her side for as long as she can remember. Shadow, it becomes clear, is one among many specters only Ruby can see who begin to appear more and more over the course of the book. When the story begins, Ruby is living with her adopted parents, Mick, who is horribly abusive, and Barbara, who is helpless; back in 1970, Anna is pregnant and determined to put her child up for adoption, knowing that her lover, Lewis, will be crushingly disappointed to have to raise a child and stay in the Forest of Dean. Ruby's and Anna's stories develop side by side: Ruby eventually strikes back against Mick, hitting him with a wooden board as revenge for a particularly horrible beating, and runs away, finding refuge with her friend Tom and his sister and brother who are living alone in the hills--their parents having abandoned them to "find themselves" in India. When Ruby is born, Anna cannot bear to give her up, and she and Lewis move with the baby to London, where he falls in with a criminal crowd, and Anna begins to feel detached, ultimately succumbing to postpartum psychosis and abandoning Ruby. Throughout the novel, Ruby is desperate to find her biological parents, thinking they will care for her as she's never been cared for. She discovers the truth in an unexpected place and more violence ensues. Hamer (The Girl in the Red Coat, 2015) has created a mystical world in which characters are haunted by specters of their present as well as their past, by the living and the lost. Her diction is lovely and tangible; describing the heightening frequency of Ruby's experiences with specters, she writes, "the skin of this world was thinning hour by hour so you could look through it like the papery bit of an onion." A powerful paranormal novel.

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Starred review from July 1, 2017
On Ruby's thirteenth birthday, she learns that she's adopted, and her heart sings; she sends up a whispered wish for her real parents to rescue her from her abusive home. After a severe beating, Ruby runs away and finds refuge with three siblings who have been abandoned by their eccentric parents, but their house holds secrets that throw Ruby for yet another loop. Ruby's story is overlain with a gossamer of the supernatural so delicate only she can see it and the lost souls it conceals. These figures haunt the narrative, particularly Ruby's friend Shadow Boy, as she endeavors to survive the world's harshness. Her original quest to find her real parents gradually distills into a search for love, during which she assumes the responsibility of helping the mired spirits move on. Hamer (The Girl in the Red Coat, 2016) handles language beautifully, fashioning effortlessly evocative sentences that place the reader beside Ruby, like one of her many ghosts. Her narrative is intercut with that of her birth mother's and the slightly cryptic monologues of Shadow Boy, all necessary threads in a well-designed whole. An unblinking light shines through this tenacious girl, who makes a goddess of Siouxsie Sioux and dreams of the mother she never knew, for she refuses to be broken.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2017, American Library Association.)