Ghost in My Soup by Judi Miller
My rating: 5/5 cats
i am reviewing this today because at some point, the plan is to review all the books on my “favorites” shelf, in order to try to understand my own taste. i was thinking about this book earlier this morning (and as it is only 8:30 now, you can see i spend a lot of early morning-time devoted to serious intellectual thought) because i was thinking about writing a review for harington’s With, until i realized i already had, but that it wasn’t a very good one; it was more of a placeholder review, and how i could re-write a more useful one that would actually get people to read more harington, but that i didn’t know where that book was, and since i wanted to quote from it to give a sense of what he does in that book that is good, but then i started thinking about the elements of that book that are problematic and controversial; pedophile kidnaps young girl from the roller rink, takes her to secluded mountaintop retreat, dies, she ends up living an edenic life with a ghost lover and many animal friends, which just makes it sound ridiculous, and it is not. and then i remembered that one of my very first crushes was malcolm, the ghost in the soup. this very soup. and he was the ghost of an elderly gentleman. talk about understanding my own tastes…but i did, i had such a thing for him, even though as far as ghosts go, he is pretty inept. but i was eight, so i guess my standards were different then. eight-year-old boys probably seemed pretty inept as well. so i understand the ghost-lover business. is all that line of thinking was to explain, but this ghost is no lover. not within the confines of this book, at any rate. this book is about upward mobility, and the transplanting of a young boy into a new environment where he is forced to make new friends, some dead, some less dead, and come to terms with life’s changes. good sound advice. hot old ghost. i think i am the only one to have taken that particular lesson from this book. but come on:
“There are lady ghosts as well. And they’re all my friends. They haunt big mansions and wrecked ships. Lovely creatures. I’ve always been faithful to my Martha, but they’re still my friends. Some of them I met almost one hundred years ago, when I first started ghosting.”
you know he’s a player. he just doesn’t want the eight-year-old to know it.
(and, yes, this book i can find, but with remains elusive. typical.)
so—yeah—welcome to my “favorites” shelf. and my interior monologue. and my slow slippery nervous breakdown. welcome.
read my book reviews on goodreads
