Dusk or Dark or Dawn or Day by Seanan McGuire
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

So. A ghost who suicided is forced to work as an operator at a suicide help hotline. Sounds like a neat setup for a joke, right?

Partially. The thing is, this UF is a ghost story where the ghost is just trying to get by, dealing in the coin that only she and her ghostly friends can spend... Time. Time and Ghosts. I guess Alan Moore has it right that we become creatures of the fourth dimension after we die! :) Or something. :)

But even though this is a pretty cool UF setup and I love the idea, we've also got witches. All kinds of witches. Corn witches, Water witches... and of course they prey on the ghosts and the power struggle can become quite predatory in that the poor ghosts can be trapped in mirrors.

Also cool.

It reminds me a damn lot of Angela Slatter's great fantasy stories, only a bit more accessible and mainstream.

The personal small-town nostalgia is nearly as heavy as the pathos of the main emotional arc, and I'll be honest... I probably would have enjoyed this more as a full novel with a longer, more developed end. Maybe not as a series, despite Seanan's proclivity with writing great series, but as a straight novel, I think this could have been a lot more solid and satisfying.

As it is, I'm just fine with the end, I just think it might have been a tad less easy. :)

Still, Seanan's a great writer, no doubting this!

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