Kirkus: A novel of unsung voices and alternate World War I history, Ghost Talkers by Mary Robinette Kowal is a wonderful, fraught, and heart-wrenching read. Set against the backdrop of World War I, it reinvents history to allow unheard stories to be told, whilst at the same creating a marvellous piece of romantic speculative fiction.
And then we have the unsung voices: the voices of those who we often don’t talk about when we remember WWI. The voices of women, people of colour, the disabled: the heroes in this novel. Ginger is a heroic, resourceful, determined, and complex character aware of her privileges (intersection feminism is a thing here), just like most of the characters – Helen, the person with the real power here is wonderfulin the novel are. The people in power dismiss them off-hand because of who they are, and the social injustices of the day are hard to read – reality often is and we oughtn’t to just brush them off. The point here is that the reader is satisfyingly rewarded by the examination of those, by the strong implication of their wrongness and by having the unsung heroes becoming the ones to save the day.