Review: Sparrow Hill Road

Sparrow Hill Road by Seanan McGuire
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This new review is for a beautiful special edition of Sparrow Hill Road, a book that was first released in 2014, in advance of a forthcoming Ghost Roads sequel. There is new material in this edition, as mentioned below. This new edition releases on June 5, 2018.

Rose Marshall is the Girl in the Green Silk Gown, the Ghost of Sparrow Hill Road, the Girl at the Diner, and a hitchhiking ghost who, when she drives herself, does so in a deep sea green Ford Crestline Sunliner named Gary. She's a ghost, an urban legend, the girl who will get you home, and she's marvelous and kind. She's been dead much longer than she was alive (d. 1952) and has accrued quite a bit of wisdom in the time since she died.

This book originated as a serial for Jennifer Brozek's online magazine The Edge of Propinquity back in 2010, and was broadened into a book in 2014. Rose's story has slowly merged into McGuire's 2018 Hugo-nominated InCryptid series (particularly the Antimony Price books) but the novel also works as a standalone, without the Price Family component. (Full disclosure, there are no Aeslin mice here.) But if you are reading the InCryptid series you really ought to read Rose's story to fully appreciate the integration of ghosts like Rose Marshall and Mary Dunlavy into the InCryptid world. This book is especially relevant to understanding how Crossroads Ghosts operate and how they can sometimes make serious, Bobby Cross level mistakes out of sheer naiveté.

This was my third reading of the book (first in this new edition) and I continue to enjoy it, perhaps even more so over time, as I gain a further appreciation for McGuire's depth of worldbuilding in the InCryptid series. As mentioned above, Rose is getting a sequel in July 2018, titled The Girl in the Green Silk Gown.

New Material Summary: Along with a new cover that is in keeping with the forthcoming sequel's cover, we also get eleven pages of the lyrics of the McGuire's filk songs that seeded the beginning of Rose Marshall's story, including Pretty Little Dead Girl (as McGuire says, the filthy libel version of Rose's story, a song with which Rose is very dissatisfied), Graveyard Rose (the whitewashed version of Rose's story), Hanging Tree, Waxen Wings and Sparrow Hill Road. If you're a Seanan fan, who also loves her filk music and poetry, this book would be worth a rebuy just for these lyrics!

I received a Digital Review Copy of this book from NetGalley and DAW in exchange for an honest review.

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