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Annie O'Neill is leading an uneventful, not fulfilling, life as a single person who owns a used bookstore in New York City. Her days are repetitious and boring. Nothing changes. Nothing happens. Until an elderly man, Robert Franklin Forrester, appears at the store with a chapter from a manuscript for her along with letters from her father to her mother that her mother had never received. In GHOSTHEART, Annie is launched into her family's past. Because her father had died when she was young and her mother when Annie was 17, Annie didn't have a sense of who she was with her heritage and her beliefs. Fortunately, Annie has a wonderful and supportive best friend in her neighbor, John Sullivan, a 55-year-old, retired investigative photo-journalist. As a single, 32-year-old woman this relationship with John is loving and understanding, and replaces the family that was taken from her. With John's care and background, Annie reads the manuscript, delves into the possible meaning of every word, and helps to search for the link that Annie is looking for to connect the past with now. "She looked down as Sullivan turned to the first page, and they started reading together, page for page, line for line almost, and there was something special about their closeness that made her feel that this -- once upon a time -- might have been something she'd have shared with her father." With comparing the story of the past to John's Vietnam War horrors, both Annie and John look for answers and healing to the questions of the past. "There were three types of people in Vietnam," Sullivan had said. "Those who thought a lot about why they didn't wish to kill anyone, those who killed first and thought later, and lastly there were those who just killed as many as possible and never thought about it at all. They were frightened kids, Midwestern schoolteachers or homicidal maniacs." While John attempts to balance and bury the horrors of his past life, Annie starts to take chances and begins to have a life. GHOSTHEART is an introspective novel of the past, the present, the future, revenge, hate, and most of all, unconditional love. The mystery? What is in each chapter of the past and how does this change the present? Many of the sentences throughout GHOSTHEART, are so thought-provoking that the reader actually has to re-read the sentence so as not to miss the mastery of the ideas so perfectly captured. The book is beautifully written, and Roger Jon Ellory is definitely a talented author who has just written a modern day classic. This is one book that a reviewer is hesitant to write too much about since that could give too much of the mystery away to a reader. I won't do that. Definitely, unquestionably, read GHOSTHEART.
Reviewed by Teri Davis, March 2004
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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)
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