Vendor
	Mohrbooks Literary Agency Sebastian Ritscher
Original language
English
Categories
Fiction & Related items

COME IN AND COVER ME

Gin Phillips

COME IN AND COVER ME sets its love story against a background of mystery and loss, where one woman's grief has given her a secret connection to the ghosts of her past.

As a child, her older brother was killed in a car accident, and ever since then, she has kept up a kind of communication with him, mostly through the music that he so loved and was teaching to her. When she grows up and becomes an archaeologist, this connection translates into a talent for seeing her long dead subjects as lives rather than relics. And when she starts to see the actual ghosts of the civilizations she is unearthing, it opens up a whole new world of understanding. Against this backdrop she finds the love of her life, but ultimately realizes she will need to loosen her hold on the past in order to live fully in the present. The ghosts in the book are subtly and movingly done à la The Lovely Bones. There is nothing ghoulish or supernatural here. Primarily, it's a story of how our personal and family histories change us indelibly, how the past is always with us, and how we must sometimes overcome it to fully participate in the present and future. And it's all done with Gin's incredibly warm story-telling style.

Available products
Book Published 2012-01-01 by Riverhead
Book Published 2012-01-01 by Riverhead

Comments

“Moving. . . . Phillips adroitly sidesteps sentiment, enriching Ren’s world with depth and detail. While studying the Mimbres tribes of the Southwest, Ren utilizes her gift of seeing and communicates with ghosts at the sites she excavates to find out where to dig and how the uncovered artifacts were used. Ren’s passion for personalizing her work, attributing artifacts to specific individuals and striving to tell their stories, causes disagreements with Silas, who can’t believe her approach really works. In this and other exchanges, Phillips nicely illustrates the conflict between masculine reason and feminine intuition.”

“As graceful and emotionally true as Phillips’ debut—and, in its thoroughly researched reimagining of the American Southwest’s prehistoric Mimbres culture and its leap into supernatural territory without once losing its credibility or riveting story line, surpasses it. . . . Amid a sensually sketched setting of rock formations, mesquite and juniper, narrow canyons, and night skies, Ren and Silas work side by side and try to bridge the growing distance between them. As the natural and supernatural worlds coalesce, both recent and ancient history become more insistently present, yielding an original and strikingly beautiful ending.”

“A smart, engrossing ghost story . . . Haunting, compelling and lyrical . . . A moving, well-crafted story brought to life through believable characters, vivid details and honest prose. Phillips has provided the reader with a true find—an ending surprising, satisfying and memorable novel that illustrates the power of good storytelling.”