PAPER GHOSTS, Sarah Addison Allen's latest novel, is a lush, magical realism-infused story of grief, longing, love and the fictions we try to prop up as reality. 

Willamena “Wills” Wester is about to meet her granddaughter, Bailey, for the first time following the death of Bailey’s mother. Cursed with a lineage of second sight, Wills knows that she alone has the power to change her granddaughter’s life. How? By letting her know that she, too, may possess the gift, opening her world to ghostly apparitions and a lifetime of grief. But Wills’ story begins long before Bailey walks up the stairs to the family estate.

In 1976, Wills is the “it” girl of her small, timeless home of Hen Town, North Carolina. Born into the Wester family, the town’s fabulously wealthy and esteemed founders, Wills has the latest clothes from all the fashion catalogs, private lessons in whatever subject she chooses, and the devotion of her grandmother, Alice. But this adoration comes at a cost. Gifted with second sight, Alice can see Wills as she walks about town, goes to school, and gossips with her two best friends. This means that she can see when Wills disobeys her strict rules, which include staying in Hen Town forever in order to receive her inheritance.

"[W]hat truly sets this book apart is its lessons in love, life and legacy.... Sarah Addison Allen proves the power of fiction to invent real worlds, characters and stories so poignant and touching that they’ll haunt you forever. And that’s a good thing."

Nearing her high school graduation, Wills figures that this isn’t a bad deal, but she longs to experience the world at large, to meet new people and maybe fall in love. Love, according to Alice, is a threat, so she already has secured Wills a betrothal to a distant cousin, a vain attempt to ensure that the family name carries on with Wills at its helm. Terrence is likable enough but is sufficiently dull. So it’s a surprise to Wills when hometown hero Andy Smooth returns to put on a performance with his band, Andy Smooth and the Silks, and exposes her to an exciting new possibility: his guitar player, Jack.

The attraction between Wills and Jack is immediate --- so much so that even when Andy warns Jack never to get involved with the Wester family, particularly its matriarch, Alice, Jack cannot deny the pull he feels to the mysterious princess of Hen Town. At the same time, and although Wills is desperate to obey her grandmother and secure her inheritance (with which she plans to redesign Hen Town and bring in new people and businesses), she cannot ignore the magnetic draw she feels to Jack. An outsider like her in a town that never seems to change --- and therefore resists anything unconventional or out of the ordinary --- Jack pushes at her adherence to her grandmother’s rules, forcing her to question why she has been kept under such tight control for so long. 

But Alice --- nicknamed the Witch of Wester House for her uncanny, dangerous abilities --- has eyes and ears everywhere, and her hold over the town and its people is absolute. When she discovers the affair between Wills and Jack, tragedy unfolds, forcing Wills to give up all her dreams of leaving Hen Town and rendering Jack 23 years old forever. He will be a permanent inhabitant of Wester House and will haunt Wills for the rest of her life --- through her marriage to Terrence, the birth of her son, and now her first meeting with her granddaughter. Swearing to sidestep the mistakes that her own witchy grandmother made while raising her, Wills promises to keep herself from Bailey, to do everything she can to let the girl live a life she can choose.

But life and lineage have other plans. Already, at five years old, Bailey is clearly gifted with second sight, which she reveals unwittingly when she begins to play at the family’s grand piano with her “imaginary friend,” Jack. As Bailey and her father, Tug, come to terms with life in Wester House, Bailey starts to long for a relationship with her beautiful, mysterious and much-gossiped-about grandmother, whom she calls Mim. Imposing and reserved, Mim seems every bit the fairy tale witch of her storybooks. But Bailey cannot deny that she feels drawn to Mim and her history, of which the town has plenty of rumors and theories, but very little in the way of facts. 

Slowly, and as Bailey’s powers continue to sparkle at the periphery of her vision, Wills begins to thaw. She invites Bailey to weekly teatimes but refuses to share her story --- or the story that Bailey herself may be living --- and keeps Wester House off-limits for townsfolk, limiting Bailey to a lonely, hollow life. When history repeats itself, leading to a night of tragedy, betrayal and the expulsion of Bailey, it seems that the Wester curse may be over. But there’s that lineage again.

Never has there been a writer so gifted at infusing real, heartrending stories of love and grief with the spellbinding possibilities of magical realism as Sarah Addison Allen. Often credited with bringing “Southern magical realism” to the mainstream canon, she has a knack for creating magic all her own. She sets it against real, heartbreaking grief; populates it with raw, memorable characters; and blends it all into something that feels at once universal and timeless and at the same time unique. In PAPER GHOSTS, all of these talents and more are on full display as Allen introduces readers to the witchy Wester women and renders a world that feels so real as to be visitable. 

But what truly sets this book apart is its lessons in love, life and legacy. Remarking on her grandmother’s tenuous relationship with the truth, Bailey notes that “[r]eal life could be turned into fiction. But fiction couldn’t be turned into real life, no matter how hard you tried.” While that may be true for Alice, Wills and even Bailey, the opposite is true for PAPER GHOSTS. Sarah Addison Allen proves the power of fiction to invent real worlds, characters and stories so poignant and touching that they’ll haunt you forever. And that’s a good thing.