The Extra Large Medium - Softcover

Slavin, Helen

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0802170323 ISBN 13: 9780802170323

Publisher: Grove Press, Black Cat, 2007

Synopsis

In this delightful debut novel, Helen Slavin takes the ghost story into a new dimension. Ever since she was a child, Annie Colville has been talking to the dead. She knows they’re dead because for some reason they’re always dressed in chocolate brown. But Annie’s grown up now, and things are getting serious. Especially after she falls for and marries Evan Bees. It’s hard enough to lose someone you love; but what if you know they could come back to you? And they just . . . don’t? During her long wait for her missing husband to come back to her, in chocolate brown or not, Annie searches through her mother’s vast collection of lovers for the other missing man in her life — her father — and struggles with the questions her gift asks of her. Quirky, irreverent, moving and a little bit spooky, The Extra Large Medium will charm you completely — even as it’s raising the hairs on the back of your neck.

About this title

Reviews

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. (May)
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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 aunt's 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, Slavin's delightful novel takes the reader happily all the way to the ever after. Emily Cook
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Edition details

• Publisher: Grove Press, Black Cat
• Publication date: 2007
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0802170323
• ISBN 13: 9780802170323
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 240