Ropa’s matter-of-factness, combined with her unrepentant disdain for the wealth of her clients, letting them “yak on” about the history of their home, created a wonderfully vivid character.

‘This is quite the racket you’re making here.’ ‘I said, are you done, sir?’ I reach for my backpack and stand up. An ethereal grey figure rushing hither and thither in the dimness, knocking furniture over…” to which Ropa responds wonderfully We are screamed at by a ghoulish poltergeist, we get the whole nine yards: “curtains fluttering, the locked windows rattling, commotion and chaos, small objects flung through the air. What is that even – goth, punk, I don’t know.” – is a full blown exorcism. I did like the addition of Priya and the Zimbabwean roots we see shining through.And we get thrown straight into the supernatural in both novels: here, our first encounter with Ropa – “What is she, twelve? She’s got green dreadlocks and black lipstick, for Christ’s sake. It doesn’t seem like such an awesome place with those grumpy people in there. Instead it is just something that is used in the background. With a title like The Library of the Dead I really thought we would be having more time with the library. Yet there is never a good explanation of that. I did find it annoying that there was a reference to an incident in the past which is what shaped Edinburgh to what it is today. I loved that Ropa had to work a bit for the magic by figuring out what would work for her. I think we got a good idea of what was important to the story but there is still a lot left to be discovered in other books. When it comes to the world building the actual idea of the setting and the magic is really interesting.

I also had a bit of a bone to pick with how some of the magic was explained through Ropa reading passages of books. Everytime I picked it back up I needed to get back into it again and that took some of the flow out of the story for me. But I have to be honest and say that it took me very long to really get into it. Ropa has a very distinct voice which I think is a great thing. But when ghost mother contacts her to find out what happened to her son she gets thrown in all kind of holes of Edinburgh she had no idea about yet. She sends messages between ghosts and their living relatives. We follow Ropa, a ghosttalker who is just trying to make some money to keep paying the rent the place she lives with her grandmother and her sister. The Library of the Dead is not a bad book but expectations and a few other things stopped me from loving this story. I conciously did not look up reviews for this book so I really had no idea the actual library wasn’t quite as big of a part of the story as I thought it would. The Library of the Dead is a very different kind of book than I was expecting.

The library of the dead huchu