Why am I passionate about this?

Sadie Hoagland teaches in Louisiana, where eight out of ten of her students believe in ghosts. She loves a good ghost story, where the ghost, too, is haunted. In her novel, Strange Children, the ghost of a murdered girl whose murder happens at the end of the book narrates the story leading up to her death. In her short story collection, American Grief in Four Stages, ghosts appear as mirages of grief, presences who only serve to further the absence. Fiction allows her to think about both embodiment and disembodiment, and what it really means to give a character a voice even if they can only talk to the reader.


I wrote

Strange Children

By Sadie Hoagland,

Book cover of Strange Children

What is my book about?

In a polygamist commune in the desert, a sixteen-year-old boy and a twelve-year-old girl fall in love and consummate that…

When you buy books, we may earn a commission that helps keep our lights on (or join the rebellion as a member).

The books I picked & why

Book cover of Beloved

Sadie Hoagland Why did I love this book?

I cannot talk about ghosts in books with pausing to give homage to the outstanding and heartbreaking story of Sethe and the ghost of her daughter, called Beloved after her gravestone, whom Sethe killed to spare her a life of torture and rape as a slave. An embodied, adult Beloved returns to Sethe, "a greedy ghost" that "needed lots of love, which is only natural, considering." Beloved only speaks in her own voice for a brief period in the book, and when she does we see her embodiment waver, she is both herself and others ("there is no place where I stop"), both a murdered daughter and a conglomeration of generations of suffering under slavery. Morrison's employment of a ghost seems only natural considering the story she tells, one that asks us to truly see the horrific conditions of slavery in the pure poetry of her prose.

By Toni Morrison,

Why should I read it?

40 authors picked Beloved as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

'Toni Morrison was a giant of her times and ours... Beloved is a heart-breaking testimony to the ongoing ravages of slavery, and should be read by all' Margaret Atwood, New York Times

Discover this beautiful gift edition of Toni Morrison's prize-winning contemporary classic Beloved

It is the mid-1800s and as slavery looks to be coming to an end, Sethe is haunted by the violent trauma it wrought on her former enslaved life at Sweet Home, Kentucky. Her dead baby daughter, whose tombstone bears the single word, Beloved, returns as a spectre to punish her mother, but also to elicit her…


Book cover of Sing, Unburied, Sing

Sadie Hoagland Why did I love this book?

Reading a ghost talking in a book can sometimes feel just like a person talking to you. Or they can tell you strange, beautiful visions and show you the chasm between them and the living, like the ghost of Richie does in Sing, Unburied, Sing. The book ties the crippling poverty and systemic racism of today with the violent racialized past through Richie, who was a boy killed in a prison a generation ago. It’s a book that's almost viscerally uncomfortable to read as Ward asks us to bear real witness to her characters' suffering, but her prose is astounding and her language provides us the air we need to breathe in her story. Here’s an example of both what the dead see, and how strong the writing is as she describes a vision of a white snake: "It raised its white head in the air and swayed, and slowly, like paint dissolving in water, its scales turned black, row by row, until it was color of the space between the stars."

By Jesmyn Ward,

Why should I read it?

4 authors picked Sing, Unburied, Sing as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

SHORTLISTED FOR THE WOMEN'S PRIZE FOR FICTION 2018 WINNER OF THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD 2017 ONE OF BARACK OBAMA'S BEST BOOKS OF 2017 SELECTED AS A BOOK OF THE YEAR BY THE NEW YORK TIMES, THE NEW STATESMAN, THE FINANCIAL TIMES, THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW, TIME AND THE BBC Finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction Finalist for the Kirkus Prize Finalist for the Andrew Carnegie Medal Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award 'This wrenching new novel by Jesmyn Ward digs deep into the not-buried heart of the American nightmare. A must' Margaret Atwood 'A powerfully…


Ad

Book cover of A Beggar's Bargain

A Beggar's Bargain by Jan Sikes,

Historical Fiction Post WW2.

A shocking proposal that changes everything.

Desperate to honor his father’s dying wish, Layken Martin vows to do whatever it takes to save the family farm.
Once the Army discharges him following World War II, Layken returns to Missouri to find his legacy in shambles and…

Book cover of As I Lay Dying

Sadie Hoagland Why did I love this book?

Addie Bundren, the matriarch of the family, is the ghost that haunts this narrative. While she is largely absent save her marked presence in the title, her death and the transportation of her body form the arc of the book, and she arrives in the narrative in the later sections to tell her story. She asserts that her father had told her "the reason for living was to get ready to stay dead a long time," and it's true that her life does not seem remarkably different from her death. Her bitterness remains, and her narrative voice does not differ much at all from the Faulknerian voices of her living children, whose perspectives dominate the book. But in a book about the hardships of life, this similarity between life and death does not seem out of place.

By William Faulkner,

Why should I read it?

5 authors picked As I Lay Dying as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

The death and burial of Addie Bundren is told by members of her family, as they cart the coffin to Jefferson, Mississippi, to bury her among her people. And as the intense desires, fears and rivalries of the family are revealed in the vernacular of the Deep South, Faulkner presents a portrait of extraordinary power - as epic as the Old Testament, as American as Huckleberry Finn.


Book cover of Lincoln in the Bardo

Sadie Hoagland Why did I love this book?

Ghosts are the story in this book, and they are haunted by the living. We rarely think about grief from the perspective of ghosts, but Saunders gives us spirits in woe who witness a grieving father—Lincoln—who dares to touch, to hold even, his young son's corpse and the heart breaks in layers. While bodies and embodiment shift in this piece, the voices do not and they echo both their own historical moment, the modernist style of James Joyce or TS Eliot in their multiplicity, and our own time, when the book was written. The Bardo, the world of ghosts that Saunders sets his story in, is reminiscent of a Hieronymous Bosch painting, and gives us ghosts who barter in suffering (a hunter who must cuddle all the animals he killed in his life), who learn what it means to inhabit each other's subjectivities, and who feel that terrible distance between them and the living.

By George Saunders,

Why should I read it?

14 authors picked Lincoln in the Bardo as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

WINNER OF THE MAN BOOKER PRIZE 2017 A STORY OF LOVE AFTER DEATH 'A masterpiece' Zadie Smith 'Extraordinary' Daily Mail 'Breathtaking' Observer 'A tour de force' The Sunday Times The extraordinary first novel by the bestselling, Folio Prize-winning, National Book Award-shortlisted George Saunders, about Abraham Lincoln and the death of his eleven year old son, Willie, at the dawn of the Civil War The American Civil War rages while President Lincoln's beloved eleven-year-old son lies gravely ill. In a matter of days, Willie dies and is laid to rest in a Georgetown cemetery. Newspapers report that a grief-stricken Lincoln returns…


Ad

Book cover of Hatching Love

Hatching Love by Heidi Matonis,

This is a story of how the human-animal bond can heal, connect and redeem us all – even possibly a very jaded ghost!

The story opens with Tom’s wife, Beth, receiving a shipment of duck eggs. She has watched a YouTube video and was charmed by the idea of hatching…

Book cover of The Lovely Bones

Sadie Hoagland Why did I love this book?

Our culture is too emotionally immune to murdered women and girls, our television programming saturated with young, female victims. While we become obsessed with finding their killers, we are rarely asked to empathize with the dead. But right from the first line of Sebold's book, the dead—in this case, Susie Salmon—have complete agency. Susie immediately tells us that she looks like all the other missing girls from that era, but also that she hated home ec, and wanted to be "thought of as literary." We watch her suffer the search for her killer, and follow her friends and family in their grief. Eventually the chasm between the living and dead seems to shimmer just enough for Susie to reach across it, to embody a friend and share a first kiss. Sebold asks us to really imagine all that is lost when we read those headlines about murdered girls.

By Alice Sebold,

Why should I read it?

9 authors picked The Lovely Bones as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

The internationally bestselling novel that inspired the acclaimed film directed by Peter Jackson.

With an introduction by Karen Thompson Walker, author of The Age of Miracles.

My name was Salmon, like the fish; first name, Susie. I was fourteen when I was murdered on December 6, 1973.

In heaven, Susie Salmon can have whatever she wishes for - except what she most wants, which is to be back with the people she loved on earth. In the wake of her murder, Susie watches as her happy suburban family is torn apart by grief; as her friends grow up, fall in…


Explore my book 😀

Strange Children

By Sadie Hoagland,

Book cover of Strange Children

What is my book about?

In a polygamist commune in the desert, a sixteen-year-old boy and a twelve-year-old girl fall in love and consummate that love, breaking religious law. They are caught, and a year later, she gives birth to his father's child while the boy commits murder four hundred miles away--a crime that will slowly unravel the community.

Told by eight adolescent narrators, this is a story of how people use faith to justify cruelty, and how redemption can come from unexpected places. Though seemingly powerless in the face of their fundamentalist religion, these "strange children" shift into the central framework of their world as they come of age.

Book cover of Beloved
Book cover of Sing, Unburied, Sing
Book cover of As I Lay Dying

Share your top 3 reads of 2024!

And get a beautiful page showing off your 3 favorite reads.

1,720

readers submitted
so far, will you?

Ad

📚 You might also like…

Book cover of Draakensky: A Supernatural Tale of Magick and Romance

Draakensky by Paula Cappa,

A murder. A wind sorcerer. A dark spirit.

On Draakensky Windmill Estate, magick and mystery rule. Sketch artist Charlotte Knight is hired to live on the estate while illustrating poetry under the direction of the reclusive spinster, and wind witch, Jaa Morland—who believes in ghosts. Charlotte quickly encounters the voice…

Book cover of The Edge of Too Late

The Edge of Too Late by Jan Sikes,

What's the point of having it all when you have no one to share it with? Brandon Miller has everything—except a commitment from the woman he loves. Angela Cooper has deep scars from a previous marriage. She's not interested in a do-over with Brandon or anyone.

Yet, he arranges a…

5 book lists we think you will like!

Interested in Mississippi, grief, and murder?

Mississippi 89 books
Grief 91 books
Murder 1,080 books