I thought I knew what I was getting into when I read the summary: a new mother, physically and mentally exhausted from giving birth, finds that the ghost of Margaret Wise Brown has taken up residence in her building. Margaret Wise Brown is the author of Goodnight Moon and other childrens’ stories, but I’d had a glimpse of her biography; she seemed glamorous to me, tragic given her premature death, but a kind of feminist hero in a sense. I expected the kind of narrative you get when an exhausted mother meets a feminist hero.
This book is so much better than that. It is visceral and unrelenting in the way it depicts the physicality of the narrator’s postpartum body, her chaotic emotions, her guilt and anxiety about the academic life she put on hold, her craving for the company of the mature, intellectual woman she perceives Margaret Wise Brown to be. But Margaret is, after all, a ghost–and ghosts are unpredictable, frightening, something other than human. This was a suspenseful, compelling read.