Book Review: The Middle Way

Ruby is sick and tired of being a ghost. All she wants to do is move on like the rest of the ghosts she has to deal with. But being a spiritual guide is not that simple. Passing on her life force doesn’t work for her like it does for regular ghosts and until she figures out how that works, she’s just stuck transporting spirits to the afterlife. Life after death is pretty much the same as always. That is until someone starts stealing souls. And she begins to fall in love with a medium named Michael. Then life gets a little more complicated.

It took me a while (read: four months or so) to get into this book. In fact, the beginning with Ruby helping this sorry excuse for a teenager named Lucy didn’t really interest me and I was easily distracted by other books. Yeah, a teenage girl who overdosed on date rape drugs should interest me, but I’d rather Hell have no rage and Lucy go and try to kill that motherfucker despite being a ghost than feel sorry for her. . by herself because she never got the attention of her parents.

That would have been fun for me. Not so much for Ruby.

Actually, his life is pretty depressing. You have to feel a little for her.

Death was my companion, my reason for being, the whole purpose of my ethereal place on this earth, but I would never call her a friend, nor seek her company.

Okay, she has a tendency to be a bit melodramatic. But what are you supposed to do for a hundred years of being dead except think about things like this? Play Candy Crush? (Please, dear sir, don’t play Candy Crush in the afterlife.)

But even as I started reading the book again, it really only started to get better for me as Ruby started to fall for Michael a little more. As soon as we saw it, I expected something to happen between the two of them. I mean, he himself can see ghosts and spirit guides just as alive to him as anyone else, right? But he wasn’t sure how this would go, not when he had a fiancée and was a little older than Ruby. I mean, Ruby was a hundred years old, but she had died at eighteen. Michael was thirty-something years old. Kind of creepy, you know what I’m saying?

But age is kind of fun once you die. And Michael can be very sexy when he wants to be. At first I wasn’t sure about him. He really didn’t want Ruby to have unrequited love, but Michael wanted all the ghosts to go to hell, including Ruby. He wanted to be normal, even though that wasn’t happening. It was at that moment that I really started to like him, because now I knew that he cared and that he wasn’t just using Ruby because she was a conflicted soul:

After another brief, awkward minute, he said, “It’s not your fault. It was my fault I took advantage of you… You were scared and you needed me,” he said, “and look at the kind of comfort.” I gave you.” Her voice was thick with disgust.

Oh sweet mercy. He is really hot.

My favorite character is probably Henry the curmudgeonly ghost. I would really like to see more of Henry. I mean, I fully understand where he’s coming from. We only see glimpses of him here and there when he was useful, but he was a fully developed character nonetheless.

I also have to seriously admire Wesley. I mean, he seemed crazy to everyone, he knew it, and he didn’t give a flying damn. He was himself and he wasn’t afraid to show it. I think we should all take a page out of Wesley’s book. Michael, especially, because if he was so nonchalant about everything, a lot of that drama with Ruby would have evaporated.

But you know, we can’t all be the eccentric, flamboyant half that Wesley was, I guess.

I would probably give this book around 3.5 out of 5 stars. It’s like the music video for “Can’t Hold Us” by Macklemore and Ryan Lewis. It’s slow at first, but it’s really cool once it gets going.