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Funeral Girl is a YA fantasy horror debut by Emma K. Ohland. The ebook version is 272 pages. I listened to the audiobook, which clocks in at eight hours and is narrated by Jess Nahikian. We follow our main character with a first-person point-of-view.
Georgia Richter is a sixteen year-old whose parents run a funeral home. She has the ability to touch dead bodies to summon their ghosts. To deal with her anxiety over death, she attempts to fulfil the wishes of the recently deceased before she touches the body again to make the spirit disappear. She’s still not sure where they actually go. One day, the body of one of her classmates arrives at the funeral home. He asks her to help with some of his unfinished business. Georgia has some unfinished business of her own, as she’s irrationally afraid of death.
I loved Georgia’s growth arc throughout this book. She grew in multiple ways with her mental health struggles and her relationships with friends and family members. Amy is the best and nobody can change my mind about them. Everyone deserves a friend like Amy.
This book made me cry with its deep exploration of death, mortality, and grieving. I’d highly recommend having a box of tissues near you while you’re reading. It was a lot more emotional than I expected upon first glance.
I liked the beginning and end of this book the best, as the middle drags on a little bit. But it was still an enjoyable read overall. Side note, the audiobook narrator was great! If I was reading this with my eyes, I may have stalled out a bit in the middle section. That being said, I’m excited to see more from this author in the future.
If you were a fan of the tv series Pushing Daisies or Six Feet Under, but with prefer a more YA bent to your narratives, you might like this book!
Tropes in this book include: asexual main character, nonbinary side character
CW: description of corpses, discussion about death, anxiety about death, panic attacks
The publisher provided a audio galley of this book for me to review. Thank you Dreamscape Media, Lerner, Carolrhoda Lab, and NetGalley. All opinions contained herein are my own. Funeral Girl releases on Tuesday, September 6th, 2022.
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