The Magic of Ink: Nothing but Ghosts

Thursday, June 11, 2009

Nothing but Ghosts

It came on a gray December Wednesday afternoon, the postal carrier’s loud knock startling me out of my seat. Opening the door I found a package, flipped it over, read the return address. “It’s my book!” I practically shrieked, so loud I’m sure my sister heard me upstairs. My first ARC copy! Signed! By an awesome author who writes beautiful books! Ms. Kephart had graciously offered me a copy after I posted Nothing but Ghosts as one of my "Waiting on" Wednesday books in November.
I tore open the envelope immediately, I could hardly wait to crack it open! But at the time I was currently in the middle of Gary D. Schmidt ’s Trouble and felt it was an inopportune place to stop reading. Soon though, my eagerness to read Ms. Kephart’s newest work won and I sat down and read the entire novel in almost one sitting. (Unfortunately I’m still rather busy and must again use the publisher’s summary instead of my own if I ever want to review this.)

Ever since her mother passed away, Katie’s been alone in her too-big house with her genius dad who restores old paintings for a living. Katie takes a summer job at a garden estate, where, with the help of two brothers and a glamorous librarian, she soon becomes embroiled in decoding a mystery. There are secrets and shadows at the heart of Nothing But Ghosts, symbols hidden in a time-darkened painting, and surprises behind a locked bedroom door. But most of all, this is a love story—the story of a girl who learns about love while also learning to live with her own ghosts.

I don’t feel like I can do justice to this lovely novel because it was so beautiful. I guess I’ll go for short but heartfelt and say: Nothing but Ghosts includes a little mystery, a little romance, a touch of sadness, and many images of hope and summer. And, as always with Ms. Kephart’s books, beautiful writing that makes me want to linger in the novel as long as possible. Nothing but Ghosts is perfect for a lazy summer day, the plot unhurried but wonderful and the images as crisp as a glass of ice-cold lemonade.

Nothing but Ghosts will be available June 23rd, 2009.
Read the story of the cover at Reading Keeps You Sane’s “On the Outside” feature, and check out Beth’s own trailer:

3 comments:

prophecygirlJune 11, 2009 at 1:46 PM
This sounds really good. Thanks for the review, I'm definitely going to check it out!
ReplyDelete
Replies
Beth KephartJune 16, 2009 at 10:29 AM
You are the sweetest. I loved finding this story right now, on another gray day. It lifted my spirits enormously. Thank you.
ReplyDelete
Replies
Laurie SchneiderJune 17, 2009 at 12:55 AM
I feel the same way about Beth's books. Lucky you for getting yours early.
ReplyDelete
Replies

Add comment

Hey, thanks for stopping by! We'd love to hear from you, whatever your opinion, so please write any comments below.

Thoughts on Novels, Books, and Reading

“So many people I know say they hate reading. What they seem not to get is that a book is an alternate universe, where you can go anywhere, or choose to just set the book down and leave that universe alone.” –Zeke Willey

“To read is to fly: it is to soar to a point of vantage which gives a view over wide terrains of history, human variety, ideas, shared experience and the fruits of many inquiries.” –A.C. Grayling, in a review of A History of Reading, by Alberto Manguel

“Read in order to live.” –Gustave Flaubert

“People say that life is the thing, but I prefer reading.” –Logan Pearsall Smith

“Books have a sense of honor. If they are lent out, they will not come back.”

“Books, I found, had the power to make time stand still, retreat, or fly into the future.” –Jim Bishop

“Read the best books first or you may not have a chance to read them all.” –Henry David Thoreau

“One glance at a book and you hear the voice of another person, perhaps someone dead for 1,000 years. To read is to voyage through time.” –Carl Sagan

“Book-love...never flags or fails, but, like Beauty itself, is a joy forever.” –Holbrook Jackson

“The love of learning, the sequestered nooks,
And all the sweet serenity of books.” –Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

“Poetry, plays, novels, music, they are the cry of the human spirit trying to understand itself and make sense of our world.” –Annie Sinclair in Annie, Between the States, by L.M. Elliott

“There is no frigate like a book to take us lands away.” –Emily Dickenson

“I declare after all there is no enjoyment like reading! How much sooner one tires of anything than of a book! When I have a house of my own, I shall be miserable if I have not an excellent library.” –Jane Austen

“Where is human nature so weak as in the bookstore?” –Henry Ward Beecher

“I ransack public libraries, and find them full of sunk treasure.” –Virginia Woolf

“When I step into this library, I cannot understand why I ever step out of it.” –Marie de Sevigne

“A sure sign of a good book is that you like it more the older you get.” –Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

“Literature is a luxury; fiction is a necessity.” –G.K. Chesterton

“Just the knowledge that a good book is awaiting one at the end of a long day makes that day happier.” –Kathleen Norris, Hands Full of Living

“A novel is never anything but a philosophy put into images.” –Albert Camus

“I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library.” –Jorge Luis Borges

“Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested.” –Francis Bacon

“When I read a book I seem to read it with my eyes only, but now and then I come across a passage, perhaps only a phrase, which has a meaning for me, and it becomes part of me.” –W. Somerset Maugham

“When you sell a man a book you don’t sell him just 12 ounces of paper and ink and glue—you sell him a whole new life.” –Christopher Morley

“When we are collecting books, we are collecting happiness.” –Vincent Starrett

“I cannot live without books.” –Thomas Jefferson

“Books allow you to travel wherever you like. And no ticket is required. No toothbrush, even. Just pick your century, your continent, your character—and go.” –T.A. Barron, in an interview with WORD for Teens

“The person, be it gentleman or lady, who has not pleasure in a good novel, must be intolerably stupid.” –Henry Tilney, Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey

“...a story was a form of telepathy. By means of inking symbols onto a page, she was able to send thoughts and feelings fromher mind to her reader’s. It was a magical process, so commonplace that no one stopped to wonder at it.”
—Ian McEwan (Atonement)

“A good bookshop is just a genteel Black Hole that knows how to read.” —Terry Pratchett (Guards! Guards!)

“Never put off till tomorrow the book you can read today.” —Holbrook Jackson

“You know you’ve read a good book when you turn the last page and feel a little as if you have lost a friend.”
—Paul Sweeney

“There is no mistaking a real book when one meets it. It is like falling in love, and like that colossal adventure it is an experience of great social import. Even as the tranced swain, the booklover yearns to tell others of his bliss. He writes letters about it, adds it to the postscript of all manner of communications, intrudes it into telephone messages, and insists on his friends writing down the title of the find. Like the simple-hearted betrothed, once certain of his conquest, “I want you to love her, too!”” —Christopher Morley

Thursday, June 11, 2009

Nothing but Ghosts

3 comments:

Meet the Bloggers

Novels on the Big Screen!

Blog Archive

View Posts by Subject

Followers

Bookish Links

Thoughts on Novels, Books, and Reading

I would like to see...