Novels with dead young girls narrating seems to have
hardened into a genre of its own. Leila Sales examines the paradox of a
protagonist who doesn’t have to deal with consequences.
From the piece on the Daily Beast...
For most of the book, Brie is able
to interact with our world only in the way that ghosts are supposed to.
For example, her dog, Hamloaf, sees her even though she is invisible to
humans, and he does that crazy barking thing that causes dog owners to
say, “For Chrissakes, there’s no one at the door.” Occasionally, when
Brie focuses very hard, her loved ones can briefly sense her, can hear
her whispering in their ears. There is one scene in which Brie sends a
text message, which is a little more high tech than ghost mythology
usually goes, but otherwise the world is beyond her reach. It is changed
by her death, but not by her actions.
Why
do we care? If the protagonist can do anything she wants—run all over
San Francisco, swim through the ocean, show up at her friends’
parties—but none of these actions affect anything on Earth, then do they
even matter? This is the challenge of writing about dead girls, and
every one of those bestselling authors had to deal with it.
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