by Ambelin & Ezekiel Kwaymullina
♦publisher: Knopf Books for Young Readers
♦release date: May 14th, 2019
♦hardcover, 224 pages
♦Intended audience: Young adult
♦stand-alone
♦arc from publisher for honest review
Nothing's been the same for Beth Teller since the day she died.
Her dad is drowning in grief. He's also the only one who has been able to see and hear her since the accident. But now she's got a mystery to solve, a mystery that will hopefully remind her detective father that he is still alive, that there is a life after Beth that is still worth living.
Who is Isobel Catching, and why is she able to see Beth, too? What is her connection to the crime Beth's father has been sent to investigate--a gruesome fire at a home for troubled youth that left an unidentifiable body behind? What happened to the people who haven't been seen since the fire?
As Beth and her father unravel the mystery, they find a shocking and heartbreaking story lurking beneath the surface of a small town, and a friendship that lasts beyond one life and into another...
Her dad is drowning in grief. He's also the only one who has been able to see and hear her since the accident. But now she's got a mystery to solve, a mystery that will hopefully remind her detective father that he is still alive, that there is a life after Beth that is still worth living.
Who is Isobel Catching, and why is she able to see Beth, too? What is her connection to the crime Beth's father has been sent to investigate--a gruesome fire at a home for troubled youth that left an unidentifiable body behind? What happened to the people who haven't been seen since the fire?
As Beth and her father unravel the mystery, they find a shocking and heartbreaking story lurking beneath the surface of a small town, and a friendship that lasts beyond one life and into another...
{My Review}
Small but mighty! The Things She's Seen looks like a little slip of a book, but inside the story is a wondrous tale, a ghostly mystery full of scandal and sharp turns, a touching father-daughter relationship that has proven itself stronger than death, and a glimpse of aboriginal mythology and history.
The story is told in two perspectives. Beth is a recently deceased teen who hasn't left the side of her living father and now helps him in his job as a detective. He's the only one who can see her and sometimes it's just like she never left, other times he is consumed with the sadness and guilt that comes with grief. Their path crosses with that of Isobel Catching, a supposed witness to a crime they are investigating and she lends her voice to the story with a curious tale of her capture by strange creatures told in verse. Through it all we get a dark and magical look at both ancient and modern aboriginal culture, community, and legend. The history of the Stolen Generation is woven in in such a personal way and I love how it showed the characters finding strength in her ancestry. Meanwhile, Beth coming to terms with her ghostly existence and trying to help her father reconnect with the world was incredibly poignant. Though I do feel the darkly enchanting and courageous chapters in verse overshadowed the murder mystery plot just a bit, it all converged into a horrifying and satisfying end. I hope that this brother/sister author team write more like this.
{ABOUT THE AUTHORS}
Ambelin and Ezekiel Kwaymullina are a brother-sister team of Aboriginal writers who come from the Palyku people of the Pilbara region of Western Australia. They've worked together on a number of short novels and picture books. Catching Teller Crow (original AU title of Things She's Seen) is their first joint YA novel. They believe in the power of storytelling to create a more just world.
(source: www.curtisbrown.co.uk)
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