A review by citrus_seasalt
The Ghostkeeper by Johanna Taylor

3.0

A friend recommended me this and I thought I should check it out! This is an objectively good book—I might raise my rating by .5 stars—but I didn’t like it enough to give it 4 stars. The concept was interesting, the therapy sessions felt like conversations that could actually happen(which I am never used to seeing in fiction), and I thought some of the characters were interesting (see: the ghost kid! I think her name was Lucy?). Some of the humor was a bit morbid, and I always find that fun in a historical fantasy setting, the inclusion of ghosts and horror made that all the better. But the romance didn’t capture my attention, the character arcs were fairly predictable (also, while it’s nice to have a fluffy cat sidekick, Muffins was… standard), and the message around burnout and trauma was heavy-handed in a way that felt akin to Steven Universe Future’s finale.

Also, the turnarounds of the side characters really bugged me?? The twist villain didn’t have an understandable motivation, one of the other side characters became a hero way too quickly, and the plague doctors who were the antagonists for most of the book had very little personality to them. 

The art was nice, though. (But not scary, even with the body horror elements.) And I specifically liked how showing grief through familial relationships with the ghosts was done in a slightly different manner than what I’m used to seeing.

Dorian you cannot be your own therapist for the love of god