The doll funeral

Kate Hamer

eAudio - 2017

Venturing into the forest with nothing but a suitcase and the company of her only true friend-the imaginary Shadow Boy-Ruby discovers a group of siblings who live alone in the woods. The children take her in, and while they offer the closest Ruby's ever had to a family, Ruby begins to suspect that they might need her even more than she needs them. And it's not always clear what's real and what's not-or who's trying to help her and who might be a threat. Told from shifting timelines, and the alternating perspectives of teenage Ruby; her mother, Anna; and even the Shadow Boy, The Doll Funeral is a dazzling follow-up to Kate Hamer's breakout debut, The Girl in the Red Coat, and a gripping, exquisitely mysterious n...ovel about the connections that remain after a family has been broken apart.

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Subjects
Published
[United States] : HighBridge 2017.
Language
English
Corporate Author
hoopla digital
Main Author
Kate Hamer (-)
Corporate Author
hoopla digital (-)
Edition
Unabridged
Online Access
Instantly available on hoopla.
Cover image
Physical Description
1 online resource (1 audio file (9hr., 29 min.)) : digital
Format
Mode of access: World Wide Web.
ISBN
9781681687889
Access
AVAILABLE FOR USE ONLY BY IOWA CITY AND RESIDENTS OF THE CONTRACTING GOVERNMENTS OF JOHNSON COUNTY, UNIVERSITY HEIGHTS, HILLS, AND LONE TREE (IA).
Contents unavailable.
Review by New York Times Review

LOUISE PENNY wrote the book on escapist mysteries - a dozen of them, in fact, almost all set in the sheltered Canadian village of Three Pines. "It was a haven, a buffer, from the cares and cruelty of the world," she tells us in GLASS HOUSES (Minotaur, $28.99), a place seemingly so free of malice and discord that Armand Gamache, chief superintendent of the Surete du Québec, and his wife, Reine-Marie, have made it their sanctuary. One of the pleasures of returning to this series is visiting old friends in the village like Gabri and Olivier, who run the convivial B&B; the artist Clara Morrow, whose startling portraits will haunt you; and (a personal favorite) Ruth ¿ardo, a poet who accurately describes herself as "a crazy old woman who prays for Satan and has a duck." The strangeness starts with the traditional Halloween party at the local bistro, attended by a masked, hooded figure in a black cloak who reappears the following day to take up sentry duty on the village green. Still as death and silent as the grave, the visitor resists efforts to engage him in conversation. After a while, people just leave him alone and go about their business - all except a Spanish-speaking guest at the B&B who identifies this specter as a cobrador del frac, a collector of unpaid debts (including moral debts) who follows defaulters, shaming them with his remorseless gaze. In the presence of this wraith, the villagers begin to exhume their own guilty secrets. A creepy twist in the narrative traces the cobrador back to medieval Spain, when plague victims, lepers and witches were consigned to a remote island to die. Those who survived and managed to return to the mainland silently stalked the people who had banished them and, over the years, became mythic figures. In his dark robes, the cobrador becomes a vivid metaphor for opioids like fentanyl, the "modern-day Black Death" that drug cartels are smuggling across the border through Three Pines and into Vermont. If Gamache can't contain this plague, our last hope may be Superman. WELCOME TO THE CRYPT, a "celluloid necropolis" for folks like Alex Whitman, a snarky film fanatic who has been hired by another fanatic to find what may be the first motion picture ever made. Jonathan Skariton's debut novel, SÉANCE INFERNALE (Knopf, $26.95), named for that very item, is a dense but thrilling exploration of the mystery surrounding a film that was said to have predated both Edison and the brothers Lumiere, but disappeared, along with its inventor, on a train to Paris in 1890. The plot is packed with film ephemera, some of it mesmerizing, some of it as unnecessary as the secondary plot, set in Edinburgh (what would mystery writers do without Edinburgh?), about a present-day serial killer who stashes his victims in the underground vaults of the Old City. "Some of these art-house freak films make my skin crawl," says a police constable, referring to the killer's snuff video. But as long as Skariton keeps to movie history, we can concentrate on other mysteries - like whether Edison murdered his rival. A CHILD'S rage can be fierce. Consider Ruby, the almost feral heroine of Kate Hamer's domestic thriller, THE DOLL FUNERAL (Melville House, $25.99), who learns on her 13th birthday that she was adopted. Ruby is helpless to do anything about the beatings she receives from the man she thought was her father, but the dramas she stages for her dolls tell the story. "My play had changed: I now arranged for them to have little accidents about the house - a trip and a tumble down the stairs, or Sindy's head stuck in the oven while Paul stood outside and watched her through the window." So it's no surprise when Ruby puts a match to her tormentor's clothes and sets a greenhouse on fire. Hamer's melodic voice hovers between the cold realism of those vicious beatings and an otherworldly mysticism that empowers Ruby to see dead people like Shadow, a young soul who longs to be alive again. But it takes a kind doctor to identify Ruby's ghosts as her ancestors. "There's no specters, or apparitions," he tells her. "The real ghosts are just family." The family she's longed for her entire life. GUTS, GORE AND A LITTLE S&M - what else would you expect from Paul Cleave, a New Zealand author who uses words like lethal weapons. A KILLER HARVEST (Atria, $26) tosses another ingredient into the mix: the fear of losing your identity. In an experimental operation, Joshua Logan, 16 years old and blind since birth, receives the eyes of his father, a detective with the Christchurch Police Department who died during the ill-timed arrest of a chain-saw killer. The operation doesn't go exactly as planned, leaving Joshua's newfound vision a bit, well, warped. Cleave follows the boy as he explores his surroundings with a sense of anxiety and awe, but for the most part he writes rough stuff. Dogs are killed, young women are kidnapped and tied up, and one unfortunate soul is chopped into pieces, then stashed in the freezer for a rainy day. And there's an inspired cliffhanger ending that promises a lot more mayhem to come. MARILYN STASIO has covered crime fiction for the Book Review since 1988. Her column appears twice a month.

Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [September 10, 2017]
Review by Booklist Review

*Starred Review* On Ruby's thirteenth birthday, she learns that she's adopted, and her heart sings; she sends up a whispered wish for her real parents to rescue her from her abusive home. After a severe beating, Ruby runs away and finds refuge with three siblings who have been abandoned by their eccentric parents, but their house holds secrets that throw Ruby for yet another loop. Ruby's story is overlain with a gossamer of the supernatural so delicate only she can see it and the lost souls it conceals. These figures haunt the narrative, particularly Ruby's friend Shadow Boy, as she endeavors to survive the world's harshness. Her original quest to find her real parents gradually distills into a search for love, during which she assumes the responsibility of helping the mired spirits move on. Hamer (The Girl in the Red Coat, 2016) handles language beautifully, fashioning effortlessly evocative sentences that place the reader beside Ruby, like one of her many ghosts. Her narrative is intercut with that of her birth mother's and the slightly cryptic monologues of Shadow Boy, all necessary threads in a well-designed whole. An unblinking light shines through this tenacious girl, who makes a goddess of Siouxsie Sioux and dreams of the mother she never knew, for she refuses to be broken.--Smith, Julia Copyright 2017 Booklist

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

How desperately do the dead wish to interact with the living? This is a strong underlying theme in Hamer's second novel (after The Girl in the Red Coat). Ruby can see dead people, an ability she's been peripherally aware of since she was very young. On her 13th birthday, Ruby learns she was adopted; she confides this to someone she refers to as Shadow, an ever-present ghostlike companion who has tried to protect her all her life. Ruby, energized by the desire to find her birth parents, finally fights back against her abusive adoptive father. The consequences lead to her taking up with an odd group of siblings living hand-to-mouth in their family's rundown mansion while their parents are away in India on a spiritual quest. As Ruby's history becomes clearer, Hamer-with evocative and vivid prose-explores the depths to which a mother will go to connect with her child, while Ruby discovers her family's secrets and learns a true family can be the people we choose to live with, not just the family into which we are born. (Aug.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review

When Ruby learns on her 13th birthday that her mom and dad aren't her real parents, she sets out with her friend Shadow Boy to find the truth about her origins. Shadow Boy isn't real, and he isn't imaginary; he is one of the many spirits that interact with Ruby, as she has a connection with the dead that she has never fully understood. Her spirit friends appear throughout the novel, playing a crucial role in muddling Ruby's progress while she stays with a group of seemingly abandoned children for a month-an interlude that is mildly reminiscent of the lost boys in Peter Pan but not nearly as clever. Since Ruby is easily distracted, the sharpest components of this novel are those in the voice of Anna, Ruby's birth mother, as she explains why she was forced to abandon her child and how Ruby came to live with her abusive adoptive family. Verdict Parts of Ruby's mythology are underdeveloped, as her role as a "hunter of souls" is never fully explained, but Hamer's sophomore effort (after The Girl in the Red Coat) is reminiscent enough of Kim Edwards's The Memory Keeper's Daughter to continue reading.-Tina Panik, Avon Free P.L., CT © Copyright 2017. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review

The story of a resilient young girl who has the eerie ability to see and speak with the dead.Set in the Forest of Dean and in London, this novel moves back and forth between two girls, 13-year-old Ruby, in 1983, and Anna, Ruby's young mother, in 1970. A third point of view peppers the novel, that of a boy simply called Shadow who follows alongside Ruby and has been by her side for as long as she can remember. Shadow, it becomes clear, is one among many specters only Ruby can see who begin to appear more and more over the course of the book. When the story begins, Ruby is living with her adopted parents, Mick, who is horribly abusive, and Barbara, who is helpless; back in 1970, Anna is pregnant and determined to put her child up for adoption, knowing that her lover, Lewis, will be crushingly disappointed to have to raise a child and stay in the Forest of Dean. Ruby's and Anna's stories develop side by side: Ruby eventually strikes back against Mick, hitting him with a wooden board as revenge for a particularly horrible beating, and runs away, finding refuge with her friend Tom and his sister and brother who are living alone in the hillstheir parents having abandoned them to "find themselves" in India. When Ruby is born, Anna cannot bear to give her up, and she and Lewis move with the baby to London, where he falls in with a criminal crowd, and Anna begins to feel detached, ultimately succumbing to postpartum psychosis and abandoning Ruby. Throughout the novel, Ruby is desperate to find her biological parents, thinking they will care for her as she's never been cared for. She discovers the truth in an unexpected place and more violence ensues. Hamer (The Girl in the Red Coat, 2015) has created a mystical world in which characters are haunted by specters of their present as well as their past, by the living and the lost. Her diction is lovely and tangible; describing the heightening frequency of Ruby's experiences with specters, she writes, "the skin of this world was thinning hour by hour so you could look through it like the papery bit of an onion." A powerful paranormal novel. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

The Doll Funeral 1 CAKE 20 August 1983 I knew the moment that Mum called me something was going to happen. I heard it in her voice. 'Ruby...' The open eye of the hall mirror watched as I came downstairs humming a nervous tune, my yolk yellow birthday blouse done right up to the neck and my brown cord skirt flicking against a knee scab. The light from the open kitchen doorway, where my parents waited, puddled onto the dirty carpet in the hall. On the Formica table was the birthday cake. It had white icing, Smarties, and thirteen candles. A big triangle wedge had been cut out and the sharp carving knife lay close by, pointing into the gap. I blinked. I'd expected punishment for some minor crime committed, a cup broken or left unwashed. The back door left open or closed or whichever way my father didn't want it that day. But instead it seemed my mum and dad had turned into dolls or puppets: hard lines had appeared, running from their noses to their chins. Mum's cheeks were blotched with anxious red paint, corkscrew curls exploding from her head. Dad was strung stiffly behind her in his grey felt jacket. His arm came up and swiped at his nose. Mum jiggled, her shoes clacking menacingly on the lino. Her jaw opened. 'Ruby. Now, we don't want you to create a scene or start trouble but it's time you knew.' From behind her Dad said, in that furred up voice of someone who's kept quiet for a bit, 'Yes. Thirteen is old enough.' On the cake between us, the Smarties had started to leak sharp colours--as if they were flies that had got trapped there and were now slowly bleeding to death. 'Ruby, there's something we've been keeping from you all these years,' Mum said. She paused, then spoke in a rush. 'It's that you are not our natural child. We didn't give birth to you.' 'Which explains a lot--' 'Stop it, just for this once, Mick. Leave the girl alone.' She turned to me. 'Ruby, you were adopted when you were four months old. You are not our child--d'you hear me?' She turned. 'Honestly, Mick, I don't think she's taking it in.' But I was. I ran into the garden and sang for joy. The legs of the chair shrieked against the kitchen floor as I pushed it back and I burst through the kitchen door that led out into the garden. Outside, there was a thunderous sky and air the colour of dark butter. Beyond the garden, trees shaded the distance. I plunged into the waist-high grass with my arms outstretched to feel the feather tops of the grasses snaking under my palms. I glimpsed red, the corner of the toy ride-on plastic bus half embedded in the tangled growth, and the arm of a doll, its chubby fingers pointing straight up to a sky of seething grey scribble. Tall spikes of evening primroses glowing the brightest yellow punched up from the grass as I waded to the middle where I stood and sniffed at the sweet dust of pollen on my hands. Then, arms raised, I started my song to the storm clouds. 'There's a brown girl in the ring ...' And it must have been my tenth or maybe twelfth time singing the verse when Mick's voice crackled a cold path out from the back door. 'Ruby. Stop that and get back in here, now.' I dragged my feet all the way back up the path. Just inside the doorway his fist jumped out like a snake and cracked my head. 'Sit down,' he said. I scuttled away and sat on the other side of the table, holding my head. 'Dear, dear,' Barbara muttered. 'Dear God.' She sat and folded her arms. 'Ruby, you were only a tiny baby when you came to us,' she said. 'It's hard to think of that now.' 'So I was smaller than...' 'Yes,' she said quickly. 'But not like her,' said Mick. Their daughter. Trudy. She died when she was three. Mick always called her 'sweet pea'. When he got drunk he cried for her--big drops of tears slid down his face and dripped on his jacket. 'No. You were a small...' Barbara said. 'But strong.' 'A whiner,' Mick interrupted. He was fiddling round with the gas stove now, so he had his back to us. He struck a match to light the flame under the kettle and the sulphur smell took to the air. Three quarters on from behind I could still see the quiff sticking out like a horn from his head. 'Was I born here? Here in the forest, I mean?' The idea I could have come from anywhere else seemed strange and improbable. The Forest of Dean. Here we lived in one of a row of small stone cottages with trees stretching over us like children doing ghost impressions with their hands, surrounded by closed coal mines slowly getting zipped back up into the earth. Barbara screwed up her eyes as if she was looking, trying to see me being born in the distance. She nodded, like she'd caught a glimpse of it. 'Yes, you were.' 'What about my name?' I asked. 'Flood is ours but Ruby was the name you came with,' she said. 'When you were little you thought it was because of...' Without thinking my hand flew to the birthmark covering the left side of my face. 'I know.' Mick started picking Smarties off the cake, so Mum snatched it up and carried it to the sink. 'Well, that's over,' she muttered, examining the pits the Smarties had left. 'But, but...nothing else?' 'No, not really.' She let out a breathy sigh and the cake wobbled in her hands. 'That's all.' 'Can I do my wish?' 'You've had it already.' 'I want to do it again. I've thought of something else.' 'Go on then. Mick, give her the matches.' Barbara set the cake back on the table and I arranged the yellow candles, their heads already bubbled from burning. I touched a match with its little ball of flame to each one and closed my eyes and wished and wished and wished. The twin stars of my real parents orbited my head, blinking on and off. 'Come and get me,' I whispered. -- I found the Shadow on the stairs, his boy shape hunched over. He made way for me as I sat beside him and whispered, 'Mick and Barbara are not my real mum and dad.' The curled bones of his ear brushed against my lips and I thought I felt him shiver in excitement. Then I shut myself in the bathroom and ran the bath so hot it gauzed the walls in steam. I imagined my real parents appearing to me through the white clouds. My mother looked like me but with an arctic sparkle of glamour. My father had the same crow's wing hair as mine and a belted raincoat like the men wore in old films. I reached out to touch but my finger made them explode into a hundred droplets that fell in rain back into the bath, so I opened the tap to make more steam. 'Come and find me,' I begged again, hugging my wet knees to my chest. 'Ruby.' I wondered how long Mick had been behind the door, lurking. 'You seem to be using an awful lot of hot water. That sounded like a fiver's worth that just went in then.' 'Sorry, sorry,' I called, holding my cheeks so he couldn't hear my smile. I'd always been a scavenger of small things. The glittering dust mote I reached up and tried to grab. The layers of shadow in the corner like piled clothes on a chair. Sliding my hands under rugs for what might be living there. Grubbing in the dirt for treasure. But that night I became a proper hunter. Of true family. Of the threads that ghosts leave behind. A hunter of lost souls. Excerpted from The Doll Funeral by Kate Hamer All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.