Sparrow Hill Road

Today's post is on Sparrow Hill Road by Seanan McGuire. It is the first in her Ghost Stories. It is 312 pages long and is published by DAW. The cover is a sunset scene with a girl on a classic car but as you look down you see that the girl is fading out. The intended reader is someone who likes ghost stories and heroines who just won't die. There is mild foul language, mild sex, and violence in this novel. The story is told from the first person close of the main character. There Be Spoilers Ahead.

From the back of the book- Rose Marshall died in 1952 in Buckley Township, Michigan, run off the road by a man named Bobby Cross—a man who had sold his soul to live forever, and intended to use her death to pay the price of his immortality. Trouble was, he didn’t ask Rose what she thought of the idea.
It’s been more than sixty years since that night, and she’s still sixteen, and she’s still running.
They have names for her all over the country: the Girl in the Diner. The Phantom Prom Date. The Girl in the Green Silk Gown. Mostly she just goes by “Rose,” a hitchhiking ghost girl with her thumb out and her eyes fixed on the horizon, trying to outrace a man who never sleeps, never stops, and never gives up on the idea of claiming what’s his. She’s the angel of the overpass, she’s the darling of the truck stops, and she’s going to figure out a way to win her freedom. After all, it’s not like it can kill her.
You can’t kill what’s already dead.

Review-This is my second favorite thing from McGuire that I have read. World building is one of McGuire's strong points as a writer but she pulls out all the stops for this novel. Rose is on the run from the man who killed her but she also is trying to discover how she can stop him forever. We travel with Rose at different times and doing different things; from saving innocents from the man who killed her to helping new ghosts decide if they want to move on or not. We get some very interesting characters in this world of roads and ghost and magic. I hope that McGiure does more in this world because there is just so much to see and do here!

I give this novel a Five out of Five stars. I get nothing for my review and I stole this book from my spouse's TBR pile.