The Extra Large Medium »

In this delightful debut novel, Helen Slavin takes the ghost story into a new dimension. Ever since she was a child, Annie Colville has been talking to the dead. She knows they’re dead because for some reason they’re always dressed in chocolate brown. But Annie’s grown up now, and things are getting serious. Especially after she falls for and marries Evan Bees. It’s hard enough to lose someone you love; but what if you know they could come back to you? And they just . . . don’t? During her long wait for her missing husband to come back to her, in chocolate brown or not, Annie searches through her mother’s vast collection of lovers for the other missing man in her life — her father — and struggles with the questions her gift asks of her. Quirky, irreverent, moving and a little bit spooky, The Extra Large Medium will charm you completely — even as it’s raising the hairs on the back of your neck.

The New York Times - Dawn Drzali

Hardly a month goes by without the publication of another novel featuring communications from the dead, but Helen Slavin's amusingly fraught coming-of-age story is one of the few to ask, "Why won't they just shut up?" …The Extra Large Medium is stuffed to bursting with subplots, and Annie's voice can be irritatingly jokey. The chapters sometimes end on falsely portentous notes, perhaps a legacy of Slavin's years writing for British television. Yet these flaws do little to diminish the novel's pleasures. Ultimately, Slavin has something more subversive up her sleeve than mere entertainment: in conjuring a world of ghosts as likely to bore as to scare her heroine to death, she wickedly skewers a society whose obsession with the afterlife shortchanges life itself.