One Hell of a Journey: Seanan McGuire’s The Girl in the Green Silk Gown

Happy October! It’s that time of year when we start prepping for the most important holiday of the year. Some people are more into the winter season, with trees, elves, and tinsel, and that’s perfectly lovely for them. Give me pumpkins, ghosts, and more candy than any one human being logically needs any day. With that in mind, let me introduce you to one of my favorite ghosts.

The Girl in the Green Silk Gown (2018)
Written by: Seanan McGuire
Genre: Urban Fantasy
Pages: 352 (Kindle)
Series: Book Two of Ghost Roads
Publisher: DAW

Disclaimer: I received a copy of this book from the publisher, via NetGalley, in exchange for an honest review.

Why I Chose It: I read and loved the first book in the series, Sparrow Hill Road, and I couldn’t wait to see what Rose Marshall was up to in this new novel.

The premise:

Once and twice and thrice around,
Put your heart into the ground.
Four and five and six tears shed,
Give your love unto the dead.
Seven shadows on the wall,
Eight have come to watch your fall:
One’s for the gargoyle, one’s for the grave,
And the last is for the one you’ll never save.

For Rose Marshall, death has long since become the only life she really knows.  She’s been sweet sixteen for more than sixty years, hitchhiking her way along the highways and byways of America, sometimes seen as an avenging angel, sometimes seen as a killer in her own right, but always Rose, the Phantom Prom Date, the Girl in the Green Silk Gown.

The man who killed her is still out there, thanks to a crossroads bargain that won’t let him die, and he’s looking for the one who got away. When Bobby Cross comes back into the picture, there’s going to be hell to pay — possibly literally.

Rose has worked for decades to make a place for herself in the twilight.  Can she defend it, when Bobby Cross comes to take her down?  Can she find a way to navigate the worlds of the living and the dead, and make it home before her hitchhiker’s luck runs out?

There’s only one way to know for sure.

Nine will let you count the cost:
All you had and all you lost.
Ten is more than time can tell,
Cut the cord and ring the bell.
Count eleven, twelve, and then,
Thirteen takes you home again.
One’s for the shadow, one’s for the tree,
And the last is for the blessing of Persephone.

There will be no spoilers for this novel; this review does assume that one has read Sparrow Hill Road — seriously, don’t read this review unless you’ve finished the first book.

Discussion: When we last saw Rose Marshall, she was fresh off of a victory against Bobby Cross, her eternal nemesis and the man who led to her death in the first place. She was in a good place, as much as a ghost can be. Best of all, she had been somewhat reunited with the love of her young life, Gary (“somewhat” because Gary happens to be a car…I told you to read Sparrow Hill Road). Things were looking up!

Until they weren’t.

I promised no spoilers, and I’m going to stick with that. What I can tell you is this: poor Rose, who hasn’t yet been able to rest quietly in her grave, is forcibly removed from her home on the Ghost Roads and forced into situations that she thought that she’d never have to face. She finds herself truly alone and vulnerable for the first time in sixty years, and it’s heartbreaking.

What do you do when you’re far from home and have literally zero allies that you can turn to for assistance? You make it up as you go along. Fortunately, Rose has decades of experience as a hitchhiking ghost to aid her in this outrageous situation. Not only is she pretty good at reading people, but she’s practical and can think on her feet. I shudder to think of what might have happened to her had she not been so resourceful in the face of a genuine crisis. I kind of envy her; I’m not sure that I would have been that calculating and calm in the face of such a situation.

We learn a little more of what Rose’s life might have been like if she’d been allowed to live longer than only sixteen years. It turns out that she very likely would have had a fascinating life. We get to watch, with genuine sympathy, as Rose deals with being essentially powerless and lost. McGuire’s characters are always well-developed and complicated. They are some of the most human characters walking around the fictional world these days. Rose is no different. She’s not perfect, by any means. She’s moody, stressed out, and Really Sick Of This Shit. Watching her do her best to hold things together is a more than a little bit empowering. If Rose can survive this ordeal, surely I can defeat the tedium of my own daily life, right?

In Conclusion: This is a worthy follow-up to Sparrow Hill Road. I enjoyed the first book more, but that’s only because “enjoyment” is something that’s hard to say about this book. Rose deals with so many genuinely terrible things here that it’s hard to say that this was something that I enjoyed reading. It was, however, absolutely engaging and well-written. I appreciate this book in spite of (or maybe because of) the discomfort that it brought me. Will I read it again? Yes, because I know how it ends, and Rose is an excellent character. I hope that we see a lot more of her, either in her own solo adventures, or in InCryptid (which is Ghost Roads adjacent). Spoilers forbid me from going into detail, but if you’ve read the book, speak up! I’d love to chat.