LibGuides: Book Club: Popular Fiction

These Ghosts Are Family: A Novel, by Maisy Card - Thursday, May 7th, 12 pm to 1 pm

Read for free on Scribd
Stanford Solomon has a shocking, thirty-year-old secret. And it’s about to change the lives of everyone around him. Stanford Solomon is actually Abel Paisley, a man who faked his own death and stole the identity of his best friend.

And now, nearing the end of his life, Stanford is about to meet his firstborn daughter, Irene Paisley, a home health aide who has unwittingly shown up for her first day of work to tend to the father she thought was dead.

These Ghosts Are Family revolves around the consequences of Abel’s decision and tells the story of the Paisley family from colonial Jamaica to present day Harlem. There is Vera, whose widowhood forced her into the role of single mother. There are two daughters and a granddaughter who have never known they are related. And there are others, like the house boy who loved Vera, whose lives might have taken different courses if not for Abel Paisley’s actions.

These Ghosts Are Family explores the ways each character wrestles with their ghosts and struggles to forge independent identities outside of the family and their trauma. The result is an engrossing portrait of a family and individuals caught in the sweep of history, slavery, migration, and the more personal dramas of infidelity, lost love, and regret. This electric and luminous family saga announces the arrival of a new American talent.

About the Author

Maisy Card is a writer and a public librarian. Her writing has appeared in Lenny Letter, School Library Journal, Agni, Sycamore Review, Liars’ League NYC, and Ampersand Review. Her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize.

Maisy was born in St. Catherine, Jamaica, but was raised in Jamaica, New York. Maisy earned an MLIS from Rutgers University and a BA in English and American Studies from Wesleyan University. She is the author of These Ghosts Are Family.

Author's Website

Reviews

Kirkus Review
"This is a wonderfully ambitious novel: It sprawls in time from the uncertain present to the horror of slavery on a Jamaican plantation, examining racism, colorism, and infidelity and how they obscure and fracture a lineage. A gifted storyteller with an eye for detail and compassion for all her flawed characters, Card ends the book with an unsettling ghost story about insatiable hunger. We all hunger for something, she tells us: love, acceptance, freedom, an understanding of the past to know who we are, because our lives are never just our own."
The New York Times
"A more linear family saga might simply explore the impact of Abel’s lie on future generations. But “These Ghosts Are Family,” Maisy Card’s rich, ambitious debut novel, zigzags back and forth in time, between Abel’s relatives in Harlem, Jamaica, Brooklyn and Newark. While his actions affect a daughter, Irene, who grows up without her father, they also preverberate, so to speak, for his great-grandmother Louise, a white-passing child in colonial Jamaica who learns her mother was a slave. Instances of false or fuzzy parentage recur up and down the bloodline, stirring questions of identity and origin that have haunted fictional characters from 'The Winter’s Tale' to 'Billie Jean.'"

A Book Chat with Maisy Card

A Book Chat with Maisy Card | These Ghosts are Family
Interview by Seji, aka The Artisan Geek blogger, with Maisy Card. Posted February 21, 2020. Insight on the book These Ghosts are Family, and the author herself. 40 min.

More Resources

Simon and Schuster: Reading Group Guide (scroll down page)
"This reading group guide for These Ghosts Are Family includes an introduction, discussion questions, ideas for enhancing your book club, and a Q&A with author Maisy Card. The suggested questions are intended to help your reading group find new and interesting angles and topics for your discussion. We hope that these ideas will enrich your conversation and increase your enjoyment of the book."