Green Glass Ghosts
Author: Rae Spoon
Publisher: Arsenal Pulp Press
From writer and musician Rae Spoon: an introspective young adult adventure about screwing up, finding yourself, and forging a new life on your own.
At age nineteen in the year 2000, the queer narrator of Green Glass Ghosts steps off a bus on Granville Street in downtown Vancouver, a city where the faceless condo towers of the wealthy loom over the streets to of the east side where folks are just trying to get by, against the deceptively beautiful backdrop of snow-capped mountains and sparkling ocean.
Armed with only their guitar and their voice, our hopeful hero arrives on the West Coast at the beginning of the new millennium and on the cusp of adulthood, fleeing a traumatic childhood in an unsafe family plagued by religious extremism, mental health crises, and abuse in a conservative city not known for accepting difference. They’re eager to build a better life among like-minded folks, and before they know it, they’ve got a job, an apartment, openly non-binary friends, and a new queer love, dancing, busking, and making out in bars, parks, art spaces, and apartments. But their search for belonging and stability is disrupted by excessive drinking, jealousy, and painful memories of the past, distracting the protagonist from their ultimate goal of playing live music and spurring them to an emotional crisis. If they can’t learn to care for themselves, how will they ever find true connection and community?
The haunting illustrations by Gem Hall conjure the moody, misty urban landscape and represent a deep collaboration with the author based on their shared experience of seeking safety, authenticity, and acceptance on the West Coast. Green Glass Ghosts is an evocation of that delicate, aching moment between youth and adulthood when we are trying, and often failing, to become the person we dream ourselves to be.
It’s good to see an edgy novel that portrays LGBTQ people authentically. Green Glass Ghosts (referring to downtown towers and the sense of moving through life like a ghost) follows a 19-year-old who has just moved from Calgary to Vancouver in pursuit of a new life. But they carry with them trauma from childhood, a hard-drinking habit and a lack of confidence and experience for navigating a fast crowd.
Still, one roots for the hero throughout, and shares a sense of hope with them at the end, when they begin to accept that perhaps they have to deal with their alcoholism in order to tackle the rest of their challenges.
Does being hurt turn you into the same kind of person as the one who hurt you? I needed to get away from myself. I wanted to shed my body so I could become someone new. But there was nowhere I could go where I wouldn’t still be myself.
The hero experiences love, jealousy, betrayal and the struggle to fit in with a crowd much more street-savvy than them.
The writing is less than stellar (short, choppy sentences), and both the plot and characters lack a strong arc. (There’s little sense of rising stakes, and the hero’s suicidal moment seems to come out of the blue.) Plus, today’s young people may not be able to relate to the 2000 setting.
Also, the back-cover summary feels inaccurate. A rollicking yet introspective young adult adventure about screwing up, finding yourself and forging a new life on your own. The story is intense, not at all rollicking. The hero is not introspective enough. They’re not newly screwing up so much as continuing on a path that involves too much drinking. They don’t find themselves or forge a new life on their own, although they seem to be open to doing so at the end.
The book’s strength is in its numerous vignettes of life on Vancouver’s downtown East Side if you’re young, searching and without much money. There are no explicit sex scenes but some poignant references to family violence and the lasting damage it can cause. Again, this novel fills an underserved niche and many young adults will benefit from a sense of not being alone, while others will feel more informed about, and empathetic toward, damaged people struggling to build a new life in general, and LGBTQ people in particular.
- PW