A woman sits in a glass sunroom she had built onto the side of an old house, because it is the only room in the building where she can be alone. She watches television all day and calls it her telescope into the world. Her granddaughter, five years old, is desperate to be invited in. When the invitation finally comes, the child arrives with jelly beans in her dress pocket to share, and the grandmother looks at them in her palm as though she has been handed something she has no idea how to carry. Paper Ghosts by Sarah Addison Allen spends four hundred pages on that gesture: a woman who wants to give love correctly and only knows how to do it in pieces.
Three Generations in Paper Ghosts by Sarah Addison Allen
The Wester women arrive in sequence, and the novel is structured so that each one is explained by the one before her.
Alice comes first, in memory. She is the original Witch of Wester House, a woman who could reliably tell you what your dead aunt knew, and who used it to run a town. The novel is careful about what her gift actually was. It was not prophecy. It was knowing what people were hiding, and never once letting them forget she knew.
Willamena is the middle. Raised by Alice to be her successor, denied college, denied a car, handed a husband, and permitted exactly one freedom: choosing her own friends. That single allowance is the hinge the whole book turns on, and the betrayal that comes out of it is the wound that never closes. What she becomes afterwards is a woman who has decided the safest life is a small one, sealed off, with nobody let inside the house.
Bailey is last. She arrives at five, grieving, and finds a grandmother she immediately wants to become. What follows is the most uncomfortable and most honest sequence in Paper Ghosts by Sarah Addison Allen: a child being shaped, gently and without a single explicit instruction, into a person who looks down on other people. Nobody tells her to. She works it out from what is approved of and what is not, which is how it usually happens.
Each of these women swears she will not repeat the last one. Each of them means it. And each of them fails differently, and Allen is unsentimental about why: you can decide not to pass on your grandmother’s cruelty and still pass on her fear, which does the same damage by a slower route.
What Gets Handed Down
There is a second family running in parallel through Paper Ghosts by Sarah Addison Allen, and it is the reason the theme holds rather than merely being stated. Tasha Keller grows up next door to money with a mother whose moods run unmanaged, and she becomes the parent in that house by about the age of six. She smells emotions, a conceit Allen uses with impressive restraint: confusion is hot pavement after a July storm, disappointment is candy corn. Tasha’s inheritance is not power. It is vigilance, the permanent low hum of scanning a room for changes in somebody else’s weather. When she finds herself pregnant, her first coherent thought is not joy. It is a question about whether her mother was ever balanced before motherhood, or whether motherhood did it.
The novel’s third strand belongs to Willamena’s son, and it is the one likeliest to catch a reader off guard. A closeted man who married a woman he could not love properly, whose grief carries a component of guilt he has never said aloud, and who came back to the one house where secrets are safe because it was the only place he could survive. His single long conversation with his mother, late in the book, is the finest thing in it, and it earns a line that reframes half of what came before: she sent him away at eighteen not because she was disappointed, but because she wanted him to be able to live.
The house itself is the fourth character in Paper Ghosts by Sarah Addison Allen, and it is doing quiet argumentative work throughout. Nobody outside the family is permitted through the front door, a rule that has held for fifty years and that everyone in town has a theory about. Repairs go undone because a repairman would have to come inside. A son wanting an office has to negotiate one with its own exterior entrance. What began as one woman’s method of keeping a secret hardens, over three generations, into an inherited instinct about other people: let no one in, and nothing can be taken from you. Bailey absorbs the lesson so early that she cannot separate it from her own personality, and spends her twenties discovering she has no idea how to be known.
Allen has been writing about Southern towns and inherited magic for twenty years. This is the first of her books that reads primarily as a study of intergenerational harm, with the magic doing atmosphere rather than plot work.
Where Paper Ghosts by Sarah Addison Allen Gives Ground
The book is not evenly weighted, and the flaws are all on the same side of the ledger.
- The long middle section drifts. A childhood unfolds across many chapters with very little pressure on the story.
- The antagonist is built to be discarded. He is given no interior life at all, which makes a very serious act cost the person who commits it almost nothing.
- The romantic interest is a device. He appears late, is faultless, delivers the novel’s thesis aloud, and departs.
- The epilogue smooths everything. Marriages, children, forgiveness and a rose garden, arriving four pages after a confession that ought to sit heavier.
Readers who want more of the register Paper Ghosts by Sarah Addison Allen works in should try The Women of Wild Hill by Kirsten Miller, which is angrier about the same subject, or The Seven Miracles of Beatrix Holland by Rachael Herron for family magic handled tenderly. Full Bloom by Francesca Serritella shares the garden-magic instinct, and Gothictown by Emily Carpenter is the darker treatment of a Southern town with rules. On content: attempted rape, a deliberate vehicular assault, a premeditated killing, the accidental death of a child, a parent with an unmanaged mood disorder, sustained bullying and coercive control.
Where It Leaves You
The title comes from a line Alice hands down and Willamena repeats: photographs are the only ghosts everyone can see. It is a good line and the novel keeps earning it. A single Polaroid, taken in spite by a jealous friend outside a school gymnasium in 1976, causes everything that follows across three generations, and it survives as the only proof that a particular young man ever existed at all. Paper Ghosts by Sarah Addison Allen ends by saying plainly what it has been demonstrating throughout: that witches are sometimes only women who were hurt once and resolved never to be hurt again, and that the resolution costs everyone downstream of them. The middle sags and the ending is kinder than the material deserves. The argument, though, is unanswerable, and it is made by three women who each thought she was breaking the pattern.