Note: This book contains a scene of attempted rape.
Title: Ghost Medicine
Author: Andrew Smith
Publication year: 2008
Rating: ★
Synopsis (via Goodreads): The summer before Troy Stotts turns seventeen, his mother dies. Communicating with his father mostly by notes, Troy spends his time with his friends: Tom Buller, brash and fearless; Gabe Benavidez, smart enough to know he’ll never take over the family ranch; and Gabe’s sister, Luz, who Troy has loved since they were children. They want this to be the summer of “ghost medicine,” when time seems to stop, and they can hide from the past and the future, and all the ghosts that come with them. Troy and his friends don’t want trouble, but as the summer fills with dangerous and fateful encounters, can even the most powerful ghost medicine keep them hidden and safe?
I probably purchased my copy of Andrew Smith’s Ghost Medicine sometime around 2011. I imagine that I was intrigued by the concept of a novel about death and grief (and I’m not going to lie, the horse on the cover probably drew me in, too). After all, I had never before read a young adult contemporary before and had no way of knowing that the death of a family member was such a common trope within the genre. I happily picked up the book and bought it at the bargain price of R25 at the Travelling Bookshop that had visited my primary school, tried to read it later that day, and eventually shelved it because it just wasn’t piquing my interest. I tried it again a few years later and couldn’t progress much further than the first twenty pages. Seven years after that original attempt, I can understand why. This book, first and foremost, is horribly boring. To make matters worse, it is deeply problematic in the way that it handles one of its female characters. Ghost Medicine was a nightmare to read.
Ghost Medicine follows a sixteen-year-old boy named Troy Stotts in the summer after his mother’s death. Troy has had a difficult relationship with his father since then, communicating with him mostly through notes, and wants to spend the summer existing outside of the tragedy that has hit his family alongside his two best friends, Tommy Buller and Gabriel Benavidez, and his lifelong crush, Luz Benavidez, all of whom carry burdens and family tensions of their own. Unfortunately for the group, their dreams for the ideal summer face opposition in the form of the mean-spirited son of the local sheriff, Chase Rutledge, and his sidekick, Jack Crutchfield.
There’s not much that can be said about Ghost Medicine because nothing really happens in it. Well, that’s kind of a lie. Technically, there are things that happen: Troy starts a relationship with Luz; he and Tom befriend an old woman who has a lot of wild horses on her property; and Chase causes problems with the group which ends in a fistfight between him and Tom. Gabe also cries. A lot. But nothing that happens until about two hundred pages in feels like it has any narrative weight. While reading, I kept asking myself why certain things were happening. Why have Troy and Tom become friends with Rose? Why did Troy and Luz’s relationship start so quickly? Why is Troy participating in this horse riding competition? For too many of these questions, I found no satisfactory answers, which made me feel apathetic to the events of the book. If a certain scene doesn’t add anything to your woek, it shouldn’t be there at all. You may think that three hundred and fifty-seven pages translates to a short read, but Ghost Medicine is far too long and far too boring.
Additionally, the characters possess very little personality. All Gabe does is cry, and all Tom does is chew tobacco and mock Gabe for crying all the time. Troy is the everyman within the trio who is neither too fearful nor too confident, neither too introspective nor too outgoing—but although we learn who he isn’t, we don’t get a sense of who he actually is. Luz, who hardly appears in this book despite being named as a core member of the main friend group, pops into the story every now and again to kiss Troy, tell him how much she loves him and remind us that her father apparently doesn’t approve of their relationship. And Rose is simply a crazy cat lady, except her animal of choice is horses, instead. There is no complexity to the characters of this story, no sense of development or growth within them, although Andrew Smith’s writing desperately wants you think that there is. He adopts a reflective tone that is meant to reveal how deep this book is, but just made me roll my eyes.
Already a huge disappointment, this book solidified its one star rating with a scene that I can only describe as deeply problematic and harmful. As I said earlier, despite Smith trying to insist that she is a strong woman in her own right, the character Luz is little more than a love interest for Troy. At many points during the story, I wondered why Luz was even in the book at all, let alone named as a major member of the primary group of friends, when she was barely there and added nothing substantial to the narrative when she was. Eventually, I got my answer: Luz is used to further the story’s progression and make our main trio more heroic in the eyes of the audience. She is a plot device, and one that doesn’t even feel necessary when Andrew Smith could have escalated the tension in his story by capitalising on the established recklessness of its teenage boys. Troy, Gabe and Tommy have a contentious relationship with Chase that could have been worsened through their own actions, not those of the female character finally exercising the independence we’ve been teased about for the entire novel but never had the chance to see.
Even without the sexist storytelling, Ghost Medicine would have received a one star rating. The novel is exceptionally dull, with shallow characters and writing that tries way too hard and fails to convince you that it is more profound than it is pointless. The only joy I got out of this book was the sense of accomplishment I felt at finally managing to finish it.
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