(Pub date 9/1/2026)
"Gram calls photographs paper ghosts. She says they're the only ghosts everyone can see."
—Willamena Wester
Paper Ghosts is a character-driven, atmospheric novel steeped in family secrets and literal ghosts, told in Allen's beautiful prose with her signature touch of magical realism. I've read and loved her previous work, especially Garden Spells and First Frost, and her latest is cut from the same cloth: historical, familial, magical.
At its heart, this is both a ghost story and a love story—one that digs into family history and legacy, the secrets we keep, and the ways parents and grandparents try to protect us from their own mistakes, often without realizing they're passing those same mistakes down. You try not to repeat your grandmother's choices, and somehow you become her anyway. Nobody gets it right. Parents are people. Grandparents are people. Even the ones who can talk to ghosts. Plus, it features an old, kind of creepy house that is a character in its own right.
The novel follows Willamena Wester, descended from a line of Wester women both respected and feared in their small North Carolina town. We come to know Willamena—"Wills" to her friends—through the eyes of two other women: her grandmother, Alice, and her own granddaughter, Bailey. We meet Wills first as a teenager, then later in life through Bailey's perspective, as Bailey returns to the small town she was raised in but once tried to outrun.
There, she realizes that Wills, though distant, has always been her fiercest protector. And for Bailey's sake, Wills is finally forced to confront the questions she's spent a lifetime avoiding: in a world built on hidden truths, can a legacy of unhappiness be unmade? What does it take to finally break a family curse?
That tension is what stayed with me after finishing the book: how responsible are we, really, for our own choices? Are we shaped and steered by our parents to the point that our choices aren't fully our own? And if that's true, maybe what we call free will is really just the illusion of control—a story we tell ourselves to feel like we're steering, when so much was set in motion before we ever arrived.
Paper Ghosts is for readers who love evocative stories where family mysteries and a touch of the supernatural blend into a vivid setting. Perfect for the start of September and kicking off the fall season!
reviewed by Ashley Ewing
