Thanks to Random House and NetGalley for the ARC.

When Ezra’s mom drops an absolute bombshell confession during the middle of the seder, Ezra’s life is turned upside down. Ezra is a trans man whose family owns a struggling funeral home, who just lost his job, who has a crush on his new neighbor. Oh yeah, AND he can see ghosts– including the ghost of his crush’s dead husband. This is a little bit of romance, a lot of big Jewish family drama, with a side of the supernatural.

This was a fun ride! I enjoyed getting to know the ins and outs of Ezra’s family and I thought the romance with Jonathan was sweet. I really felt compassion for Ezra throughout the story and the conclusion seemed earned. At times I wish I could have gotten a better understanding of Ezra’s siblings. There was clearly an incredible bond between them all, but I wish I had more understanding of that. The depiction of parentification that Ezra endured as a child was nuanced and impactful.

If you like family drama, carefully drawn main characters, and a little paranormal activity, this is a great one to pick up.

Thank you NetGalley and Random House Publishing for allowing me this opportunity to review this book.

Actual rating: 4.5 out of 5 stars

This debut novel by Shelly Jay Shore deals with love, family, grief, and ghosts. Ezra Friedman, the protagonist, is able to see ghosts. Feeling haunted in more ways than one, he distances himself from his family's business of running a Jewish funeral home. However, unexpected job issues and a secret his mom shares at his family's Passover seder result in Ezra helping keep his family's funeral home afloat. Throughout this, he has a crush on Jonathan, a funeral home volunteer who had lost his husband, Ben. Ben breaks every one of Ezra's rules he has about ghosts. Additionally, Ezra slowly realizes that he might be haunted in other ways.

Even with the presence of ghosts, Rules For Ghosting is ultimately a love story. Readers learn about Ezra's dysfunctional family, the pressures Ezra puts on himself, and Ezra's feelings towards Jonathan. Readers will feel for Ezra's feelings of unworthiness and "not being good enough" that result in him keeping people at arm's length. Even though Ezra's family is dysfunctional, you can see the love each family member has for Ezra and each other. The love story between Ezra and Jonathan is heartwarming, and readers will root for the two to get together. Along with themes of love, death and grief are present throughout this story. Jonathan is still mourning his husband, Ben. Ezra is able to see ghosts, sometimes those of his family. Funeral rituals at the Friedman funeral house are shown. Ezra himself has his own metaphorical ghosts to confront, not necessarily relating to the fact that he is trans. The way that grief plays a role in this story cannot be overstated, and I love how this novel has realistically tackled death and the ghosts left behind.

Overall, this debut is stunning, contemplative, and haunting in all the right ways.

Content warnings: depictions of grief and loss, death care rituals and funeral ceremonies, off-page death of a partner and spouse, off-page adult and child death within a funeral and death care context, discussions of abortion, miscarriage, and stillbirth in the context of a doula, trans and nonbinary pregnancy depictions of birth

Rules for Ghosting by Shelley Jay Shore

I enjoyed this story that is very inclusive of the LGBTQIA+ community. Within the pages you meet Ezra, his family, their funeral home, and his friends. And did I mention ghosts?

The story and the characters were believable to me, and I learned some interesting things about some Jewish funeral customs.

Tentative Publication Date: August 20, 2024
by Dell
An imprint of Random House

#Debut novel
#LGBTQIA+
#Jewish
#Romance
#Funeral Home
#Clairvoyance
#Ghosts/Hauntings
#Brightbookreviews

Check out my profile on Goodreads!

https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/52535590

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About Rules for Ghosting:

To save his family's failing funeral home—and his own chance at a queer love story—a reluctant clairvoyant must embrace the gift he long ignored in this poignant and tender debut.

“Part romance, part ghost story, part Jewish family epic, Rules for Ghosting is a meditation on life, death, and healing that is at turns bitingly funny and deeply moving. Shelly Jay Shore is an immense talent.”—Anita Kelly, author of Love & Other Disasters

Ezra Friedman sees ghosts, which made growing up in a funeral home complicated. It might have been easier if his grandfather’s ghost didn’t give him scathing looks of disapproval as he went through a second, HRT-induced puberty, or if he didn’t have the pressure of all those relatives—living and dead—judging every choice he makes. It’s no wonder that Ezra runs as far away from the family business as humanly possible.

But when the floor of his dream job drops out from under him and his mother uses the family Passover seder to tell everyone she’s running off with the rabbi’s wife, Ezra finds himself back in the thick of it. With his parents’ marriage imploding and the Friedman Family Memorial Chapel on the brink of financial ruin, Ezra agrees to step into his mother’s shoes and help out . . . which means long days surrounded by ghosts that no one else can see.

And then there’s his unfortunate crush on Jonathan, the handsome funeral home volunteer . . . who just happens to live downstairs from Ezra’s new apartment . . . and the appearance of the ghost of Jonathan’s gone-too-soon husband, Ben, who is breaking every spectral rule that Ezra knows.

Because Ben can speak. He can move. And as Ezra tries to keep his family together and his heart from getting broken, he realizes that there’s more than one way to be haunted—and more than one way to become a ghost.

First I’d love to say thank you to both NetGalley and Random House Publishing Group for giving me an eArc of Rules for Ghosting.
This book, wow, it made me feel ALL the feels possible. I laughed, loved, cried, and felt all emotions possible. This story had me from the beginning. I love a good ghost story, and always love queer rep in books. But this book felt like so much more than just that.
Shelly Jay Shore approached the conversation of grief, love, and self acceptance with such grace.

🏚️Haunted Funeral Home
❤️Rom-Com Bones
🥹Hurt/Comfort
🫶🏼Friends to Lovers
🥰Bi • Trans MC
👻Ghosts
🔗Learning To Be Loved

We shall start with this cover! STUNNING and the vibes are outrageous with it. My first Shelly Jay Shore read and I loved it from cover to cover. This book will take you on the ride of your life through basically all of the emotions. This pulled my heartstrings.

Our characters were well fleshed and their dynamics and dialogue was well done as well. I loved the characters in this book and Ezra stole my heart. Perfect read and a top read for me this year. Will definitely be on the look out for more by our author here.

Thank you @netgalley, @randomhousepublishing and author for the e-arc in exchange for my honest review. Pub Date: Aug 20 2024

I happened across this title, and had to read the synopsis, and a queer trans Jewish ghost story was something I didn’t know I needed in my life until that moment. I knew this was going to be full of drama (who announces their affair at Passover Seder?!) but it’s also so full of emotional nuance.

Ezra grew up as the eldest daughter and he had a lot of those tendencies baked in where he is always trying to fix things for his family and be the emotional sounding board for everyone. Even though he moved away from the family work by becoming a birth doula and yoga instructor, when the queer community center closes for renovations just before his mother announces her affair, he takes up the mantle of taking over her job doing business and accounting side of funeral home while the family is working through their anger, hurt, betrayal, and various other emotions. Complicating Ezra’s feelings is his new neighbor is the son-in-law of the woman Ezra’s mom has been with, and his husband passed away suddenly in a car accident about a year prior, and Jonathan still wears his wedding band. Ezra keeps using the wedding band, and realizing the ghost he keeps seeing is Ben, Jonathan’s deceased husband, as a reason to keep his distance, but as they get closer working on taharah and other parts of the funeral services, neither of them is able to deny their attraction and connection.

There is so much emotional work going on, especially Ezra having to learn to let others help him rather than trying to shoulder everything all the time. There’s also a lot of navigation of grief and how ritual can help with processing and moving forward after death. I loved the community elements, the chosen family, and the sibling dynamics between Ezra, Becca, and Aaron. There was so much that just made the whole reading experience a delight and hard to put down.

I also really loved how Jewish this book was and the different practices they follow and how central that is to the rituals and practices Ezra follows. I learned things about Jewish death practices I wasn’t aware of before, and I really liked how loving and caring it all felt.

There was so much love and care throughout this story and I found it hard to put down. It was just the light, fun book I was looking for with lots of emotional stuff to balance it and keep it feeling real, even as so much was dramatic soap opera worthy. I overall really loved this book and look forward to more from Shelly Jay Shore!

This stunning debut is immediate all-time favourite material for me. It's a somewhat unconventional romance for a number of reasons. The main reason being, of course, that our MC's family runs a Jewish funeral home, and he can see ghosts. It also took a little while for the romance to become a main focus, because there's a large space carved out for family drama. And this family has a LOT going on.

There's so much going on in this book, but all of it is talked about gently and thoughtfully, never making anything feel like too much. It's very much a romance, and I absolutely loooved Jonathan. It was amazing seeing Ezra and Jonathan slowly and carefully connect, and I loved how maturely the communicated, which absolutely oozed care for each other. But the book also never loses track of other relationships that are important in life, of friendship, family, and community, and even the joy and love a pet brings us.

Death is a large theme in this book, between Ezra and his family running a funeral home, Ezra seeing ghosts, and Jonathan having lost his husband a year before. I thought this theme was handled with a lot of love and care. Between Alison Cochrun's newest book and this one, I'm very impressed with how I've seen death handled in romance books without feeling too overwhelmingly sad or depressing. I do of course still urge you to treat yourself with care if this is a difficult theme for you to read about.

Like I said, Ezra's family runs a funeral home, and they're a large part of the book. I loved how this book didn't shy way from showing how messy and complicated family can be, all the while never making us doubt they love each other. One of Ezra's major learning curves in the book is how he can accept help and care from people when he's grown up always taking care of others. Jonathan and all of Ezra's new roommates play a huge part in this, which was so lovely to see.

At one point, Ezra, the main character in "Rules For Ghosting" calls the interconnected group of main characters—family, friends, love interests—a "strange web of relationships". It's the truth—the book contains such a slew of main characters surrounding Ezra that there were moments in this book I wondered how every character would feel duly fleshed out, given an arc. Wondered if every plot mentioned even in an offhanded way would be given apt time. Asked "how on earth is this all going to come together in a neat way"?

In Shelly Jay Shore I trust.

"Rules for Ghosting" is about Ezra—a Jewish trans man haunted by his childhood growing up in his family's funeral home. Literally haunted—Ezra sees ghosts, a fact that's perfectly tied into his character in a way that almost makes me reluctant to call the book fully paranormal. It's a part of who he is, though it's a part he struggles with, working hard to put distance between himself and the family business.

Enter the superb group of queer folks Ezra moves in with—a house filled with old friends and new, exes and a potential new flame in Jonathan, a widow who Ezra sees all over the place. The other person Ezra continues to see all around? Ben—Jonathan's husband who died nearly a year earlier.

When a family upheaval drags Ezra back into his family's fold, the story delves into a story of accepting love, understanding your family and their stories and troubles, friendship and siblings, faith and love. When I'd read the synopsis of the book, I came in expecting a romance forward book—but "Rules for Ghosting" wasn't that, though the love is palpable on every page. The main romance between Ezra and Jonathan is utterly lovely, but that story never monopolizes the beautiful "coming of age" story that Ezra works through, learning to love his family again, the business he grew up a part of, and himself.

Shelly Jay Shore's prose is beautiful—not overly flowery but just vivid enough that I could see myself in Ezra's home, the Chapel (the nickname given to the family's funeral home), and Ezra's whole world. I felt the way he ached—for his parents, his siblings, Jonathan, and even Ben.

There was a part of me that feared the inclusion of Ben in the book—so often, when you get books with a character who has lost a love, that character hangs as a ghost over the narrative and romance. In this case, Ben literally did—but somehow, the way the author spelled out grief and moving on only made him the perfect asterisk to Jonathan and Ezra's love story.

I'm so happy to have read this book and cannot recommend it enough—thank you to PRH and Netgalley for the advance copy for my honest review. I can't wait to read what the author puts out next!

When I found out Anita Kelly blurbed this debut, I knew I had to read it. Rules for Ghosting is about the thin line between celebrating life and saying goodbye to loved ones and how grief and love impact us. It’s tender and witty with a pinch of You Should Be So Lucky and a nip of The Prospects, supplemented with caring ghosts.
 
The first page immediately pulled me in, and from that moment, I wanted to read on and on and on. Rules for Ghosting is one of those stories that made me laugh out loud, softly cry, and laugh-cry in between. It’s about seeing ghosts, but please don’t push away this book if you usually don’t like paranormal or ghost stories. This one simply reads as a contemporary romance. It IS a contemporary romance—a hilarious and, at the same time, moving one.

Shelley Jay Shore delivers vibrant writing (in fanfic form, third person-present tense), and the cast of main and secondary characters is just top-notch. I loved Ezra from the moment I met him as a six-year-old, and Jonathan, kind Jonathan, was so, so sweet. And I shouldn’t forget Ben. The way he opened up to Ezra when Ezra and Jonathan kissed for the first time … I wanted to hug him so badly, but you can’t hug ghosts 😂. I liked the first part of the story, but the second part? I fell head over heels in love. That romance was so incredibly …, and Ben, I can’t get over Ben …

Last, but definitely not least, I need to mention that this story is imbued with Jewish customs surrounding death and that these were so beautifully shown and made so inclusive.

Actual rating 4.5 stars.

This book was beautiful, and taught me a lot, actually. I've read quite a few books with Jewish main characters, side characters, all of the above, and I learn little by little, a bit more about Jewish culture each time, but this was the first time I learned about the culture surrounding death and the practices they take. It was really insightful, and wove such a meaningful story around loss and grief, and the element of Ezra being able to see ghosts, of having his rules around what ghosts can and can't do, and how his supernatural ability leads him to choose the path of life instead of death, and how he meets and falls in love with a man whose dead husband haunts him, it's all just so.. surreal. So lovely. So heartbreaking. It's filled with queer joy, and love, but also death, grief, loss, and understanding. Truly a well written, amazing trans, Jewish, bisexual representation book.

First off I loved this book! It was a fresh take on the idea of carrying around others burdens and forgetting who you are. Ezra as a character who I think wanted to allow himself to love and be loved but with how dragged down by others choices he couldn’t. I genuinely don’t know how to articulate how much I loved this book. I personally am non Jewish and while I didn’t understand a lot of the semantics of some of the practices I didn’t feel like it was overly complex or that it was a hinderance to reading it. There were some points where it lagged a little but it’s also how real life is from time to time and getting to the next part was worth it.

Really enjoyed this one!

It’s a great read about finding love and finding yourself the plot of the story was easy to follow and the diversity was great this ghost story was awesome

True 5/5 ⭐️ (or a 6/5 if I could because I truly adored this entire book).
Spiciness: 2/5

Thank you to NetGalley and Random House Publishing Group for the opportunity to review this book!

I am incredibly impressed with Shelly Jay Shore for this being her debut book. This is an incredible story about grief, life and death, finding love, the challenges and expectations of being the oldest daughter, and ghosts. The writing is beautifully done, and is genuinely funny.

This story follows a transgender Jewish man, however I feel that all the subject matter was so approachable and delicately handled. I, as a cis-gendered, non-Jewish woman, found this book to be so relatable and easy to follow.

This book made me both laugh and cry, and just absolutely resonated with me. This is a beautifully done novel, and I would not change a single thing about it.

Ezra Friedman sees ghosts. He's gotten pretty good at ignoring them, but he still stays as far away from his family's funeral home as possible. But when his work situation and his family both fall apart at the same time, he finds himself back in the place he's tried to hard to run from. And if that weren't bad enough, his new apartment comes with a very gorgeous downstairs neighbor, Jonathan--and the ghost of Jonathan's husband, who seems to be breaking all the ghostly rules.

Rules for Ghosting explores so many different kinds of love, and all the joys, sorrows, and complications that come with loving someone deeply. I laughed out loud at multiple points, and I cried more than once. It is genuinely one of my favorite books I have ever read, and I fell in love with it the moment I read an early version and immediately started screaming about it to everyone I know, even though I knew it would be years until they could read it. But that time has finally come, and I am so excited that such a beautiful book is out in the world.
Rules for Ghosting is genuinely in my top five favorite books of all time, and I think everyone should go read it right now.

Thanks, NetGalley for the advance copy.

Not bad but not my favorite thing. I love the diversity but it was very complex for me. I prefer little reading in this aspect. Well well-written and definitely worth reading. I think I went into the book with a different mentality or I guess I wasn’t in my element. But do recommend reading.

Thank you @netgalley and @randomhouse for the eARC of Rules of Ghosting by @shellyjayshore in exchange for an honest review.

📖📖 Book Review 📖📖 I will start this review with the disclosure that I am biased. I love a good story with ghosts. And while I’ve lived in a very haunted house for over thirty years, I have never actually seen my ghost friends (others have) and would be scared out of my mind if I ever did. Ezra sees dead people…everywhere. So much so that he based his selection of an apartment so that he would not have to live with a ghost, and has done his very best to avoid the funeral home his family runs. Rules of Ghosting is a hilariously heartfelt story that reminds us that family is messy, love is love, and it is okay to feel all the feelings no matter how complicated they are. This is a quirky and beautiful book that flawlessly blends the beautiful traditions of Jewish culture with a moving modern-day story of family, love, and everything in-between.

5/⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

Review is posted on Goodreads and will be on Instagram ahead of the publication date!

There's a lot to like about this story. Ezra is a captivating character, even though I sometimes wanted to smack him. I loved the detailed treatment of Jewish death rituals. I wanted to vomit at the birth doula stuff (and the idea that Ezra might want to bear a child), but, as always, I realize I'm in the minority there.

I think, in the end, the birth-y stuff takes this out of a potential reread category for me, which means I'll never go back and reconsider how I feel about the various family relationships explored in the story, which is kind of a shame. Based on a first reading, I'd probably be inclined to throw half of the family members out a window, and I suspect that's not the desired response.

Overall, this is a well-written, complex book, but it isn't as much a book for me as I'd hoped it would be.

My thanks to the publisher/NetGalley for an advance copy.

This book was breathtaking and hauntingly beautiful (no pun intended). The raw emotions that this story managed to invoke in me has easily placed it in my book hall of fame. The characters are flawed, yet so damn loveable and feel so real. The themes on grief, both for the dead and for the living felt like a sucker punch in the loveliest way possible. This is a story I will be coming back to read over and over again and I most definitely will be purchasing a physical copy to have on bookself.