VIOLET GHOSTS

Fifteen-year-old Dani knows a few things for sure: He is a transgender boy, ghosts are real, and most victims are murdered by someone they know.

After escaping Dani’s abusive father, he and his mother move to Michigan. His only friend is Sarah, an angry teenage ghost who hates men and keeps the details of her murder a closely guarded secret. When they meet Patricia, another ghost, lying dazed in the woods, they decide they need to find a way to help the ghosts of murdered women. Meanwhile, Dani reluctantly begins to befriend taciturn classmate Seiji, who is also haunted by ghosts both real and metaphorical. Ghosts are not the scary things in this story, however. The characters, the living ones as well as the ghosts, explicitly and honestly deal with the traumas of physical and sexual abuse, rape, violence, abandonment, suicide, and murder. Some forgive, some hide, and some rage while others feel inexplicably drawn to return again and again to their abusers. The author evokes the setting of the late 1990s and early 2000s with plenty of pop-culture references, but the characters’ knowledge and attitudes about transgender issues are often optimistically—but not impossibly—contemporary. Dani, Patricia, and other major characters seem to be White; Sarah has pale brown skin and black hair, and Seiji is White and Japanese.

A haunting and hopeful story of self-discovery.