Rules for Ghosting - Shelly Jay Shore - ★★

AUTHOR: Shelly Jay Shore

GENRE: Fantasy Romance

PUBLICATION DATE: August 20, 2024

RATING: 2 stars.

In a Nutshell: The title and the cover are awesome, but they don’t suit the content. This book is more about human issues than about paranormal entities. Too many characters, too many themes, too many traumatic events, too few “ghostly” vibes, too convenient in the flow. Great inclusivity but even that goes a step too far. Basically, it tries too hard to deliver and hence falls somewhat flat. Might work better as a family drama.

Plot Preview:

Ezra Friedman has been seeing ghosts since his childhood. This makes his work in the family-run funeral home complicated. It’s not like Ezra doesn’t have other challenges in his life as a trans + bisexual Jew who works as a birth doula. On top of it all, his mom announces during a family seder that she’s been a closet lesbian and is now eloping with the rabbi’s wife. As the funeral home has no one else to handle what his mom used to, Ezra has to step in and help out with the accounts.

After all these years, Ezra thinks he knows the ways of ghosts. So when one ghost suddenly breaks the rules by talking to Ezra and appearing in multiple locations, Ezra doesn’t understand what’s happening. Things are further complicated when Ezra discovers that the ghost happened to be the late husband of Ezra’s crush, Jonathan who works at the funeral home as a volunteer.

The story comes to us in Ezra’s third-person perspective.

As you can see, there’s way too much happening in this book. Therein lies its undoing.

Bookish Yays:

👻 The sibling relationship among Aaron, Ezra and Becca, as well as the friendship between Ezra and his friends and roommates – a great depiction of closeness, support, and leg-pulling. Some of their banter comes through text messages – I wish there had been more of this.

👻 The Jewish rep, especially in terms of death rituals - quite enlightening. I was surprised to see how inclusive some Jews are about nonbinary identities performing gender-based rituals. (This was confirmed by the author’s note.) Respect!

👻 Not all the characters come in picture-perfect fictional bodies. Love the variety and the realism!

👻 Sappho the dog – as wonderful as dogs always are. (I must add, using a photo in the book to represent Sappho was a great idea, but that was NOT how I had pictured Sappho in my head!)

Bookish Mixed Bags:

🎃 The title (with all those little Halloween-y elements on the cover) grabs the potential reader’s eye instantly. Then again, it also makes the reader believe that ghosts or ghosting would be the centre of this story. Incorrect! So it is a very misleading title.

🎃 The prologue, which establishes how little Ezra learns two things: that he wants to be a boy, and that he's psychic. A great start with a momentum that continues well until the seder with the big announcement. But one big gap in the information: if the prologue was set twenty years ago and seven-year-old “Ezra”, still a girl to “his” family, knew that “he” much preferred to be a boy, how come “his” name was Ezra (a traditional masculine Jewish name)? The dialogues cleverly circumvent his actual name through the use of endearments, but I’d have loved to know how “Ezra” decided that “he” wanted to be called Ezra.

Bookish Nays:

⚰️ Ezra and his narration – so very frustrating. He has a poor self-esteem, which causes him to get lost into his head for introspecting multiple times. Somehow, his narration gives off YA vibes, through he isn’t in that age group.

⚰️ The blurb reveals a lot, and for a change, so does my plot preview. I had to break my rule of not going beyond the first 10-15% for the preview because there is hardly anything happening until well into the book. It is a very slow-moving storyline with barely any substance. This would have been okay had the book been character-driven, but it is a mix of character and plot, with too much of the former and not enough of the latter.

⚰️ Imagine the main character being Jewish, queer, FTM trans (who is still transitioning), bisexual, psychic, a yoga teacher, a birth doula, dealing with body dysmorphia AND having a major crush on a colleague who isn't available – all at once! It is too much for a single character arc.

⚰️ Further, there are so many minority representations. There’s the lesbian mom who elopes with the rabbi’s wife, one ace character, one MTF trans character, one trans who is pregnant by choice,... Plus, Ezra’s roommates are from various BIPOC backgrounds, including one Indian whose ethnic identity stays unclear until it is explicitly brought up and then forgotten again for the rest of the book. None of these characters’ identities are explored in detail. We just get their labels. I accept that books must be inclusive, but couldn’t some points have been kept in reserve for the author’s next novel?! It shouldn’t feel like a checklist is being ticked.

⚰️ As if all this wasn’t enough, we even have a horde of external traumatic events such as the financial struggles of a family business, the forced corporatisation of small businesses, the ghostly appearances, and a few more events (not going into these as they are major spoilers!) that create further challenges in Ezra’s life. All this is too much for a single book. I didn’t even need to look at the author’s bio to know that this was a debut work – I guessed it at the 10% mark itself. That infamous kitchen sink (which I have so often mentioned in my reviews of debut novels) is cluttered to the brim in this novel.

⚰️ I had grabbed this mainly for the ghosts. But the ghosts have only minimal importance in this novel. Except for two ghosts, the others get blink-and-you-miss-them appearances.

⚰️ With a main character who is transitioning from female to male, I’d have expected at least some part of the book to focus on the emotional upheaval of being born with the wrong body. But there’s zilch about this. In childhood, Ezra knows that “he” wants to be a boy, and in adulthood, he is a man with some surgeries still pending. That’s all we get.

⚰️ I couldn’t feel connected to any of the characters, not even to Ezra who is the primary narrator. Somehow, we see a lot of their actions, but their feelings come across as surface-level, even when the topics are intense. Difficult conversations never happen on page, or just, never happen.

⚰️ Many of the plot developments are overly convenient. The most obvious one is how Ben, Jonathan’s late husband, is the only ghost who can speak to Ezra. Why? No idea! Just because the plot wants/needs it that way. Too easy and not at all convincing. This also happens with character development, where the secondary characters have the *second* qualification/profession required at that point of the story.

⚰️ The romance is so awkward! Jonathan is shown mourning, even crying for his late husband who died a year ago. Ezra even knows that Jonathan still wears his wedding ring. Yet, he doesn’t stop lusting after him. Worse, Jonathan’s feelings swing almost instantaneously, though he still keeps proclaiming Ben to be his true love, until we learn that there’s more to this than previously mentioned. It all feels too quick and smooth to be appealing.

All in all, the concept of the book was good, but the execution needed a lot more finetuning. With so many themes and characters, it is way too messy. It might have worked far better had it focussed on a few core themes and delved deeper into those. In its current state, it is akin to taking a one-day tour covering fifty locations; you get a bit of everything and an in-depth feel of nothing.

Not for me. It might work better with those looking for a family drama with mildly paranormal, albeit non-spooky, vibes.

2 stars, mainly for the rep and the Jewish traditions.

My thanks to Random House Publishing Group – Ballantine for providing the DRC of “Rules for Ghosting” via NetGalley. This review is voluntary and contains my honest opinion about the book. Sorry this didn’t work out better.