There’s a story about a boy in quarantine who is a Patient Zero for an epidemic. There’s a story about a boy who knows the day he’s going to die. There’s a story about a disagreeable baby who gets possessed by a calming spirit and that’s it. Reading Ghost Summer: Stories is like talking to that friend of yours who has so many cool ideas and then just doesn’t do anything with them. Due can set up such a intriguing idea and then the story just ends. Perhaps if I were a WOC, specifically a black woman from the Southern US, I would feel some of the horror more acutely, like how certain stressors (like reactions to racist violence) can be passed down bloodlines.īut the real meh for me comes in the fact that most of these stories are less self-contained stories than starting points. The stories don’t necessarily speak to my experience, which is fine I don’t expect all books and all stories to be geared towards me. They’re kind of spooky, but nothing really terrifying, so that likely added to my assessment of meh. Going back to my complete obliviousness, I’d thought Ghost Summer: Stories would be more of horror stories, probably because of the ghost in the title. I could have probably guessed I’d go meh after Hopkinson’s Introduction, because that’s how I feel about Hopkinson’s work as well. I feel like just going meh about this review and leaving it at that.

I can’t really say I’ve been on the ball lately. I amended my thoughts to Just in time for International Woman’s Day after I realised about half-way through Nalo Hopkinson‘s introduction that Ghost Summer: Stories, that Tananarive Due is female. I guess I am still unstuck in time because as I read the first few pages of Ghost Summer: Stories by Tananarive Due I thought to myself just in time for black history month.

Ghost summer stories by tananarive due