Psychics : Colette is the assistant of Al a genuine psychic able to earn her living as one in the U K.

Delightful, weird, beyond black. ( )

like other readers I found the telling of this tale overly long, but nevertheless I wanted to finish. By the end Alison is able to remember what actually happened in her childhood, although there is no comfort to be had. would not recommend. ( )

It was better than "okay" and I finished it, and I admire Mantel's imaginative powers and her writing enormously, so it gets 3 stars. But it was a bit of a slog. Mostly, it was just too... damn... long. This from someone who devoured Wolf Hall, Bring Up the Bodies, and A Place of Greater Safety, barely coming up for air. (Mirror and the Light is next as soon as I can wrench it away from my husband.)

It's a dark, sly, often funny ghost story. It's a clear-eyed, satiric look at the modern "occult" industry, yet with sympathy for the voids and pain of those who practice it and those who consume it. It's a wonderful riff on the afterlife and the souls who exist there, chaotically intruding "earthside" and haunting (literally and figuratively) the mortals trying to get on with their lives. In Alison's case, a good-hearted, earnest, obese psychic is floundering in the wake of an appalling childhood (revealed in fits and starts, and only gets worse as the story proceeds). She is anxious, not very practical, and the cutthroat competition among her peers is killing her. She hires Colette, a skinny, cold-minded, domineering, ambitious young divorcee, to manage her business affairs. It is a predictably stormy relationship, fraught by a team of dead souls who taunt and torment poor Alison - and whom Colette must unwillingly learn to cope with. Business picks up as the partnership crumbles. The ghosts cavort - here Mantel is wonderful in imagining and describing how annoying it is when they slither in through the car's a/c vents, giggle under the living room carpet, and expose themselves in corners. But it all just goes on a bit too long, too often, and finally you begin to skim because you've seen this scene play out already, 20 pages earlier.

Some readers have been troubled by the repeated description of Alison's obesity, as a sort of ongoing joke in poor taste. In her memoir, Giving Up the Ghost, Mantel describes her own harrowing experience with her health - unconscionably ignored, minimized, and dismissed by doctors for years while she suffered. She was subjected to psychiatric treatments, and finally powerful drugs that caused her to go from a stick-thin young woman to an obesity that made her barely able to recognize herself. And let's face it, fat people know they're fat - they are reminded of it every single day, by the mirror, by the media, by the shops, by the world at large. I think Mantel was working to convey something about this issue in a personal and unflinching way, though it may seem cruel in the telling.

I'm a Mantel fan, and will try pretty much anything she has written. But while this has her trademark fizzing imagination, brilliant imagery, biting characters and dialog... it may be too much, too rampant, too unedited to be one to start with. ( )

A contemporary fantasy novel about a psychic and her assistant trying to make a business and general interactions with the spirit world. The psychic can really commune with spirits and has her own spirit guide, who causes more mischief then help. The spirit part of the book is light and consists mostly on her spirit guide. The story is mostly about day to day events and past events that helped shape the psychic. Overall there is no plot, very little story, and not an enjoyable read. The characters are like caricatures and remind me of Confederacy of Dunces, but not in a good way. There is a lot of body shaming in the book, which I expected it to lead somewhere, but it didn't. I wouldn't recommend this book. ( )