by Sarah Adler
Read by Mara Wilson
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Content: It’s sweary including many -bombs, and has on-screen, explicit sex. It’s in the romance section of the bookstore.

Gretchen Acorn is a con artist. She runs a business where her job is to connect to the spirit world and help her clients connect with their dead loved ones. She tells herself that she’s doing them a service, comforting them in their time of grief. Then one of her clients pays her to go perform an exorcism at the farm of her bridge partner. Gretchen was expecting a quick, weekend job with a nice septuagenarian, and instead gets Charlie Waybill – hot, skeptical, and not at all grateful Gretchen is there. She also gets… a real ghost and a family curse. So, instead of performing an exorcism, she’s tasked with keeping Charlie at the goat farm because his life is in danger if he sells. And she ends up upending her own life in the process. 

By any measure, this was a fun book – a morally gray main character (that you can’t help but really like), a hot guy that pushes her to question her life, while also understanding where she comes from, a clever ghost sidekick. There are baby goats and goofily-knit sweaters! And a slight love triangle, not to mention a sassy best friend (that isn’t a goat). There are bad parents and questionable decisions. Oh, and the narrator is fabulous too. 

But. 

Something is off with it. I’m not sure if it was the sex – they were exceptionally rough, and there was some transactional quality to it that rubbed me a bit wrong – or if it was something else – the quick way Charlie came around to Gretchen (it was only a month, and yet there are books that move faster and I don’t mind), or… I’m not entirely sure. So, while I enjoyed this one, I didn’t outright love it (at least not as much as I loved Adler’s first book). It’s worth reading, though.