The Girl Who Would Speak for the Dead

In this first novel by Paul Elwork, Emily Stewart discovers early in the summer of her thirteenth year that she can making a knocking noise when she cracks her ankle.  When she frightens her twin brother, Michael, with this trick one night, he devises a game that they call "spirit knocking".  The two start with the "ghosts" of relatives.  Michael asks the ghosts questions that can be answered "yes" - two knocks, or "no" - one knock.  Soon children from all over the rural neighborhood come to the little tea house on the Stewart estate to ask questions of "ghosts", mostly created from Michael's boundless imagination.

When adults show interest in the game, Emily wants to quit but Michael insists that they continue and they do...longer than they should.

The Girl Who Would Speak for the Dead is set in the years after World War I, when people were desperate to reach their dead loved ones, lost in the war and to influenza.   The stories of the twins' widowed mother, their dead father, their parents' friends and ancestors and the losses of their neighbors are all woven into the story of a child's game, made all too serious because of the grief that pervades the era.  Changes in attitudes towards the landed rich, like the Stewarts, also flavor this book.  Emily carries a lot of the narrative burden.  Michael is a shadowy puppet master, pulling the strings, plotting their next moves.  He is a boy of immense talent and too much energy and restlessness.  Emily is, as the old women who interview her say, "an old soul" at the age of thirteen.

This is a book that moves with the gentle pace of a swollen river, carrying the reader along, closer and closer to the rapids, lulling the reader into a bemused and fascinated calm.  And then, we are beyond our depth and drowning.   Read it!