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.