This book came me to me as a recommendation by DoveGrey Reader after she met the author, Helen Slavin, at Dartington this year, an event I was forced to miss due to a combination of heat exhaustion, commuting and hay fever.
I picked up a copy of this book in Waterstones and was immediately captivated by the description of the heroine's imaginary friend called Mrs Berry. Annie sees dead people and they are always wearing chocolate brown clothing. Mrs Berry knits hideous chocolate brown bobble hats and scarves at the kitchen table and grumbles that being dead is very inconvenient because she can't 'bottom out the house'. She views Annie's mother with disdain because of her housekeeping abilities or, rather lack of them, and the fact that she cleans the bath out with her dirty laundry (This struck a chord with me I can tell you!).
Do not think this book is just a comic book. It is not. It continues to be witty and delightfully written, but underneath this surface humour, there is sadness and melancholy. Being able to see the dead is a burden to Annie as they are always clamouring for messages to be passed to those left behind. She has very little peace.
Annie falls in love and marries, but then Evan, her husband, disappears. Where has he gone? He does not visit her wearing chocolate brown so she knows he is alive. Annie's journey to finding happiness and coming to terms with her gift makes such good reading that it is very difficult to put this book down. When she, and we, learn what has happened to her husband and why he vanished, we are shocked to the core. In the end she finds a quiet joy and we are happy with her. My only complaint about this book was that I wish it had been longer. I would love to have learned more about Annie.
The Extra Large Medium was selected out of 3,741 entries to be the first novel published by Long Barn Books( www.longbarnbooks.com) a publishing company set up by the author Susan Hill. I am looking forward very much to reading Helen Slavin's second novel and hope we don't have to wait too long.
Another reason for my purchase of this book was the blurb on the front page about the author which ended with the sentence 'she is not very good at being serious'. Well, how can you resist that?
