These Ghosts Are Family
Author: Maisy Card
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
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Note: Trigger warnings are provided for those who need them at the bottom of this page. If you don’t need them and don’t want to risk spoilers, don’t scroll past the full review.
Cover Description
A transporting debut novel that reveals the ways in which a Jamaican family forms and fractures over generations, in the tradition of Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi.
Stanford Solomon has a shocking, thirty-year-old secret. And it’s about to change the lives of everyone around him. Stanford Solomon is actually Abel Paisley, a man who faked his own death and stole the identity of his best friend.
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 single mother. There are two daughters and a granddaughter who have never known they are related. And there are others, like the house boy who loved Vera, whose lives might have taken different courses if not for Abel Paisley’s actions.
These Ghosts Are Family 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 an engrossing 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. This electric and luminous family saga announces the arrival of a new American talent.
TL;DR Review
These Ghosts Are Family is an incredible debut about the ghosts — figurative and perhaps literal — that follow a family tree through time. It’s family saga, ghost story, and historical fiction all rolled into one.
For you if: You’re intrigued by the secrets of family history, want to read diversely, and don’t mind bouncing around between time periods, settings, and narrators.
Full Review
BIG thanks to Simon & Schuster for sending me an early copy of this book! It will be published March 3rd, and you can pre-order it here.
These Ghosts Are Family is the kind of debut that will leave your jaw on the floor. Maisy Card has woven an incredible tapestry across generations and geography. The author herself grew up in a family built on a mountain of secrets never revealed, which inspired her to write this story. And wow.
The premise starts thus: A man (now) named Stanford Solomon decides to reveal his true identity to his remaining family. He was born in Jamaica as Abel Paisley before faking his death and assuming a new identity to escape his previous life and start another. We get an intro to a few of his family members. Then the next chapter jumps backward in time to before he left Jamaica, and then we spring forward and back and forward and back, from the 1800s to 2020, learning a little bit more about this family’s history and secrets with every turn of the page.
Almost every chapter has a bit of a different format, as the author uses timing, perspective, and point of view to pull the story’s strings. And what starts feeling like a character study on Abel/Stanford and the people closest to him turns into a giant puzzle as we, the readers, attempt to figure out how all these people from across time fit together.
The book is also a love story to Jamaica — its beauty and its pain. All the dialogue is written in Jamaican Patois. We dive deep into the ugliness of slavery on the island and feel its lasting effects. And, of course, there are the ghosts. (Don’t finish this book in the middle of the night, as I did.) By the end, I was reading faster and faster, and my heart was racing.
If you find yourself getting lost or disconnected when a story bounces between characters, timeframes, and settings — especially when it doesn’t move linearly — then this might be tough for you. But if you stick it out, I think it will be very worth it.
Maisy Card’s heart and skill ring throughout the novel. Her use of language is pristine. Her ability as a storyteller is gripping. And her characters will stay with me for a long time.
Trigger Warnings
Sexual assault / rape
Physical abuse
Drug abuse
Kidnapping and abduction
Abortion
Racism and racial slurs
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