Description:

Review

On the first day of December, the universe gave to me— A busted knee, a twisted string of garland, and a cat with an attitude problem. B.K. Borison opens Good Spirits with a line that announces its tonal loyalties upfront: a wry, self-deprecating parodic refrain that recasts the Twelve Days of Christmas as a litany of minor disasters, while simultaneously promising that disaster is just the raw material of the story’s magic. The novel that follows is a romance built inside the bones of A Christmas Carol, a paranormal love story that swaps Dickens’s miser for a twenty‑seven‑year‑old antiques‑shop owner who has spent a lifetime making herself smaller to earn a cold mother’s approval, and swaps the ghostly lesson in moral reckoning for a two‑way haunting in which the ghost is the one who most desperately needs to be reclaimed. What makes Good Spirits distinctive is not its premise—the genre shelves are crowded with spectral lovers and holiday hauntings—but the thoroughness with which it inverts the machinery it borrows, so that judgment turns into recognition, reformation into a mutual return to feeling, and the traditional “unfinished business” becomes not a broken compass but a woman who has never been properly seen.

The novel sets itself a quiet, ferocious thesis: broken, bruised, and forgotten things—and people—are not beyond redemption, and being truly seen by another person is itself a form of magic. Harriet York runs the Crow’s Nest, an antiques shop on the Annapolis harbor inherited from her beloved late aunt Matilda, and she lives by a logic her aunt taught her: a crack means it’s special. That logic applies to the gilded‑cage music box she refuses to call broken, to the misfit inventory of “forgotten things” she curates, and, increasingly, to herself. Harriet is a woman who has been taught to equate love with usefulness and accommodation; she calls herself “Helpful Harriet,” folds herself to others’ expectations, and has internalised her mother Donna’s conviction that choosing her own happiness was a betrayal. Enter Nolan Callahan, a century‑dead Irish fisherman who materialises in her living room one December night and announces, with all the dramatic portent of a high‑gothic revenant, “I am a Ghost of Christmas Past, Harriet. Your reclamation awaits.” He has been assigned, through the bureaucratic machinery of the Department of Hauntings and Spirits, to help her mend her ways before Christmas Eve, after which he will move on to his rest and she will forget him entirely. What the Dickensian premise obscures, and what the novel spends its entire length patiently unfolding, is that the reclamation will flow the wrong way, that the ghost, not the haunted, is the one in desperate need of being brought back to life, and that the thing tethering him is not a failure to make amends but a failure to be loved.

The romance unfolds through a structure that alternates strictly between Harriet’s and Nolan’s third‑person‑limited points of view, and Borison exploits the dual perspective to build a thick dramatic irony. Each chapter titled “Harriet” or “Nolan” gives the reader access to private misreadings: Harriet is certain she is too much, too soft, too accommodating; Nolan is certain he is a hollowed‑out wraith unworthy of her warmth. The close‑reading spine of the novel is a series of excursions into Harriet’s past, each marked by sensory immersion and a disorienting “meat‑grinder” transition, and each designed to expose whatever sins the heavenly bureaucracy thinks need correcting. Instead, the memories expose only wounds. The first trip lands them in the lobby of her parents’ law firm, where a young Harriet delights in a train‑garden display before her mother scolds her, and where the girl secretly steals a small wooden boat—an early act of self‑possession that gets buried under years of compliance. Another trip revisits her single‑handedly cutting down her first Christmas tree at twenty‑one, an act that Nolan recognises immediately for what it is: a woman proving to herself that she can want something and deserve it. The pattern holds. The haunting finds no vice, only a person who was never the villain of her own story, and the Dickensian judgment machine begins to look like an engine misapplied.

Meanwhile, Nolan’s magic starts to refuse its own premise. He tastes things again—coffee, fig jam, burnt lemon drops. He dreams for the first time in a century, a sexual dream about Harriet in her candy‑cane pajamas that leaves him shaken and painfully aroused. His feelings externalise themselves as uncontrollable weather: indoor snowstorms, mantel lights that dim in time with his heartbeat, eyes that turn an unprecedented gold‑flecked blue at climax. The most emblematic moment comes in Chapter Nineteen, when his magic causes hundreds of sprigs of mistletoe to burst across the tin ceiling of the Crow’s Nest, a deliberate “excuse” to kiss her for the first time. The prose is precise and sensual: “Like a living forest, hundreds of sprigs of green leaves slowly burst to life, growing larger by the second. Heavy bundles with glossy red berries push their way in between the panels. Smaller ones with shiny leaves dance down the lamps.” The supernatural becomes the language of feeling Nolan cannot otherwise speak. A reserved, century‑numb man who has survived by extinguishing hope has his emotions rendered visible and involuntary, and Borison makes the objective correlative the central formal device of the love story. You can argue that the device occasionally tips into preciousness—there are enough twinkling lights and peppermint‑scented kisses to stock a small Hallmark warehouse—but it works because the novel understands its own aesthetic as a deliberate wager: that sweetness, when it acknowledges the bitterness under it, is not sentimentality but conviction.

The emotional architecture of the book rests on two speeches, both in the climactic chapters. The first is Harriet’s self‑declaration at the York Family Christmas Gala, the annual event her mother Donna orchestrates as a display of political‑dynasty control. Donna criticises Harriet’s plum silk gown, her hair, her very presence, and Nolan defends her bluntly: calling Donna foolish to squander the privilege of being loved. That permission is the spark. Harriet delivers a catalogue of everything she has been taught to apologise for and refuses: “I’m sensitive, and I’m softhearted, and I’m emotional, and I’m probably delicate, too. I cry during sad commercials and I say sorry all the time—most of the time for reasons I can’t articulate. I never wanted to be a lawyer. I hate arguing.” The speech is a direct address to the genre of therapeutic self‑worth discourse that runs through the novel like a warm undercurrent; Samantha, Harriet’s sister, will later confess she is “working through it with my therapist,” and the reconciliation between the two sisters unfolds in the vocabulary of boundaries, envy, and the shared wound of conditional love. Borison leans into this language without irony, and the book is stronger for the risk. Where a cooler romance might deflect with banter, Good Spirits insists that saying the thing out loud—naming the hurt and the self—is the act that breaks the spell. Donna remains static, a woman whose fear of having “lost” Harriet to Aunt Matilda curdled into ice, and the novel pointedly refuses her a redemption arc. That refusal is honest. Some parents do not change, and the victory is not reconciliation but the moment a daughter stops twisting herself to earn what was never freely offered.

The second pivotal speech is not a speech at all but a withheld truth. Nolan discovers his own broken compass—a coiled chain, a cracked face, flecked green paint—hidden on a high shelf in the Crow’s Nest’s supply closet, an object he immediately hides in a crate rather than confess. This is the clearest evidence that the haunting has inverted: the ghost is now the one with unfinished business he is terrified to resolve, because resolution means losing her. Borison threads a scavenger‑hunt structure beneath the romance, scattering fragments of Nolan’s past through Harriet’s world—the compass, the orange cat that turns out to belong to him, the lost wooden boat—and the act of concealment is where the novel earns its sharpest dramatic tension. Harriet, unaware, keeps proposing “one last trip” to find his unfinished business and help him move on, because she believes loving him means releasing him to his rest. He, knowing what the compass might mean, stalls by sorting buttons and kissing her until she forgets to ask. The dual perspective lets the reader hold both positions at once: her generosity of letting go and his cowardice of holding on, and neither is simple villainy. The moral knot is that the love that makes Nolan come alive is precisely the love that, by completing his assignment, is supposed to take him away.

The climax arrives when a final trip strands them on Nolan’s fishing boat off the coast of Ireland in 1902, during the storm that killed him. Harriet falls overboard, sinks into the icy depths, and Nolan resuscitates her back in her living room—a scene of genuine physical peril that pulls the paranormal firmly into the bodily. What lands with real force, however, is what Nolan realises afterward: he saw her, in her pink coat, during his own drowning a century before. “Harriet. It was you. I was dying and I saw you.” The loop closes, and the metaphysics the novel has been building in whispers snaps into place. The broken compass, when Harriet finds it and gives it to him, points only at her chest, and it triggers his departure into the afterlife. But at the gate, in the sterile bureaucratic waiting room, Aunt Matilda delivers the revelation that recontextualises the entire book: “The compass was never your unfinished business. Harriet was.” Souls were always meant to find each other across lifetimes, and Nolan’s true task was never to make amends for a life badly lived but to find the one person who could make him want to be alive again. The language here is unapologetically romantic, drawing from the deepest well of the soulmate‑fated‑mates tradition, and it works because the novel has spent three hundred pages earning the right to say it. The choice Nolan is given—two doors, rest and peace, or return to the woman he loves—is not a test of moral worth but a test of desire, and his answer is the first completely willed act of his afterlife.

What the book gets right, it gets exceptionally right. Its understanding of the psychology of the accommodating daughter—the person who says sorry for reasons she cannot articulate, who wants to give people what they want so the feeling in the middle of her chest will go away—is precise and unsentimental even as the prose around it glows with holiday warmth. The cracked‑object ethic, a kind of domestic wabi‑sabi applied to antiques and to people, gives the love story a consistent material texture; the music box, the compass, the missing spoon imagined “nestled together and happy,” the shop full of forgotten things, all cohere into a visual argument that imperfection is the condition of being loved. And the narrative device of having Nolan’s feelings externalise as weather and botany is a genuinely clever solution to the problem of a hero who cannot say what he feels, though it leaves the characterisation a shade lopsided—Nolan’s interiority, for all his dream sequences and guilt, sometimes feels thinner than Harriet’s, his century of solitude gestured at more than inhabited.

Where the novel stumbles is in the machinery it never entirely decides to trust. The Department of Hauntings and Spirits, with its subdivisions for Phantoms, Ghouls, Poltergeists, Reapers, and Guardian Angels, is introduced in a handful of comic scenes featuring the sharp‑tongued supervisor Isabella and the eternally cheerful secretary Betty with her jam tarts. These scenes are fun, but they are also thin; the bureaucratic afterlife is more sketched than built, and when Isabella warns that Nolan’s failure to complete the haunting will impact both him and Harriet, the stakes feel asserted rather than dramatised. The world‑building is in an awkward middle ground between full‑bodied fantasy and lightly comic premise, and the novel sometimes reaches for the latter when the former would have deepened the cost. The missing‑Reaper emergency that keeps Isabella unavailable during a crucial stretch, and the appearance of the ancient Grim Reaper Gideon, suggest a larger mythology the book has no room to explore. The result is that the bureaucratic frame occasionally reads as a narrative convenience rather than an integrated element of the world, and the final resolution in the afterlife waiting room—where Matilda reappears, explains everything, and hands Nolan his choice—can feel a touch too neat, a deus‑ex‑aunt who tidies up the mystery the characters have been fumbling toward.

The novel’s length, at a little over a hundred thousand words, also tests the tensile strength of its middle section. The back‑and‑forth of memory trips, while thematically purposeful, settles into a gentle rhythm that some readers will find deliciously unhurried and others sluggish. Borison’s commitment to sensory immersion—the scent of cloves, sea salt, peppermint sugar, the taste of blueberry Danishes, the chill of the ice rink—is part of the book’s charm, but the sheer volume of domestic coziness can blunt the urgency of a plot that is supposed to be racing against a Christmas Eve deadline. The sex scenes are tender and charged, particularly the morning in bed when Nolan’s magic produces a swirling snow globe of golden‑flecked snowflakes during intimacy, and the scene in which he embarks on a deliberate campaign to teach Harriet to accept compliments is a minor marvel of patient, attentive physicality. Yet the book sometimes mistakes abundance for depth; one more cup of peppermint mocha, one more description of twinkling lights, and the emotional weather can start to feel static. Tightening the middle third by thirty pages would have sharpened the ache of the ending considerably.

Donna York, the antagonist, is another place where the novel’s instinct for moral clarity cuts against its intelligence about people‑pleasing. She is drawn as a monolith of cold disapproval, and while the book gestures at an explanatory backstory—she lost Harriet to Matilda before she ever had her—that explanation arrives too late and too glancingly to complicate her. The novel rightly refuses to redeem her, but it also declines to investigate her, and the result is that a story so invested in the complexity of one wounded daughter gives the other side of the wound a caricature quality. The sister, Samantha, by contrast, gets a far more textured arc: her confession that she envied Harriet’s freedom while staying trapped herself is one of the book’s most resonant moments, and her reconciliation with Harriet models the possibility that the rebel and the compliant child were victims of the same demand, not opposites. Donna could have benefited from a similar nuance without betraying Harriet’s liberation.

In the larger landscape of the romance genre, Good Spirits belongs squarely to the tradition of paranormal‑gothic love stories in which a brooding, spectral lover finds his way back to life through a woman’s touch, but it reroutes that tradition through an unusually explicit therapeutic vocabulary and an object‑ethic that owes more to the antiques shop than to the haunted castle. The Dickensian frame is used with a wink but also with genuine affection: Nolan confesses he prefers the Muppet version, and Harriet’s comfort film is White Christmas, so the book nests its own genre awareness without disowning the emotional sincerity of the source material. The maritime folk thread—the candle in the window calling lost sailors home, the Irish fishing‑village memories, the storm at sea—adds a salt‑bleached texture that distinguishes the ghost from the standard drawing‑room wraith. And while the soulmate mythology that resolves the plot is a convention the romance genre has worn smooth, Borison earns it by making the recognition reciprocal and hard‑won, not fated at first sight. The central insight is that love is what tethers a soul, not unfinished duty, and the book commits to that claim so thoroughly that the compass turns out to be a red herring the reader has been holding all along.

The book is also, unmistakably, a product of its cultural moment. It is steeped in the language of boundaries, self‑care, and the long aftermath of a parent who loved conditionally, and it stages emotional healing as a plot event on par with the magical climax. That may rankle readers who prefer their romance more escapist and less overtly therapeutic, but it will likely feel like relief to the audience for whom the “sensitive, softhearted, emotional” heroine is not a cliché but a mirror. The dedication—“For the lost and forgotten ones. And the believers who hold on tight.”—tells you everything about where the novel locates its sympathies. It is a romance written for people who have been told they are too much, and its argument is that being too much is exactly what makes you worth loving.

Read Good Spirits if you want a paranormal romance that takes the Christmas‑ghost machinery seriously enough to subvert it, and that trusts a woman’s declaration of self to be as powerful as any spell. Read it if you have ever apologised for reasons you could not articulate and longed for someone to call your soft heart a gift instead of a liability. Accept, if you do, that its pacing luxuriates in holiday detail past the point of efficiency, that its villain mother is a sculpture of ice the novel declines to melt or inspect, and that its afterlife bureaucracy is more charming conceit than built world. The novel’s final image—Nolan reappearing at Harriet’s door, alive and whole, having chosen her over rest, with her candle blown out not in despair but in release—is a piece of romantic staging so perfectly aligned with its thesis that it earns the tears it asks for. This is a book that believes, with fervour and without apology, that the only thing that can truly tether or release us is love, and that the most radical magic is being seen as you already are.

Notable Quotes

I could spend an eternity studying you and still not know what you might do next. You give so much of yourself, so freely. You're wild with your attentions. Miraculous. I've seen so many lives, Harriet, but I've never seen someone live like you.

Nolan tells Harriet what he truly sees in her, contrasting the contained version of herself she adopted for her ex-boyfriend with her authentic nature — authenticity, being seen, love as recognition

A crack doesn't mean it's broken. A crack means it's done exactly what it's supposed to do for generations. A crack means hundreds of hands have held it. A crack means it's one of a kind. Different from anything else. A crack means it's special.

Harriet reflects on a music box a customer wants to return, seeing beauty in imperfection where others see damage — imperfection, value, resilience

You're the first thing in a hundred years to make me feel anything at all, Harriet York, and I don't think that's an accident.

Nolan confesses to Harriet that his senses are returning — taste, temperature, dreams — and that she is the cause — connection, awakening, purpose

I've always been better on paper.

Harriet reflects on her law school feedback — too timid, gives in to pressure — acknowledging the gap between how others see her and how she navigates the world — self-perception, expectations, people-pleasing

Christmas has always been my favorite time of year. It's the only time of year when it feels like magic might be real, hovering somewhere close to the surface. Like you can reach out and touch it.

Harriet settles into her evening routine on December first, before Nolan appears — hope, magic, Christmas

You can't avoid your fate.

Nolan attempts to be authoritative with Harriet, having heard another Ghost of Christmas Past use the line. It does not have the intended effect. — humor, authority, subverted expectations

Then you can afford to be kind.

Harriet tells Nolan that since he's already dead, being kind costs him nothing — a disarming response to his claim that nothing can kill him — kindness, vulnerability, connection

Your heart. This foolish, beautiful thing. It's been bruised, hasn't it? But you still let it tug you forward, yeah? What a gift that is. To still wish and dream and want. To find the good. To wear it on your sleeve.

During an intimate scene, Nolan reframes Harriet's vulnerability as her greatest strength while teaching her to accept compliments — vulnerability as strength, emotional courage, intimacy

I'm sensitive, and I'm soft-hearted, and I'm emotional, and I'm probably delicate, too. I cry during sad commercials and I say sorry all the time. I never wanted to be a lawyer. I hate arguing. This conversation right now is killing me because I just want to give you what you want from me until this feeling in the middle of my chest goes away.

Harriet finally confronts her mother at the gala, refusing to apologize for who she is — self-acceptance, standing your ground, mother-daughter conflict

You're not the villain of your story.

Nolan tells Harriet what she has been unable to tell herself — that leaving law to follow her heart was not a betrayal — self-forgiveness, narrative, identity

I was always a solitary man, and books make good company. I don't remember much of my mortal life, but I do — I remember that. Being alone.

Nolan opens up about his existence as a ghost, admitting that loneliness has been his constant companion across both his mortal and immortal lives — loneliness, memory, solitude

Maybe I was always supposed to find you.

After Nolan realizes he saw Harriet's face during his own death in 1902, he begins to understand they were connected across time — fate, soulmates, transcendence

I think about you all day long. I fall into a sleep I don't need and I dream of you. Of your smile, and your laugh, and the way your mouth tastes. You make me hope, Harriet. You make me want. I am haunted by you.

Nolan declares himself to Harriet at her front door, inverting the haunting dynamic — the ghost is the one who has been haunted — desire, hope, role reversal

She said she was foolish to have the incredible privilege of being loved by you, only to ignore it in favor of criticism.

Nolan tells Harriet what he said to her mother at the gala, defending Harriet's worth — defense, love, family dysfunction

If I don't get to keep you, I want to at least make sure you're happy. Wherever you are. And that means resolving your unfinished business and sending you on your way.

Harriet insists on helping Nolan move on to his afterlife, even though it means losing him, because his happiness matters more to her than keeping him — selflessness, sacrifice, letting go

I don't want to say goodbye to you. I need more time.

Nolan resists his magic pulling him away as the compass activates, desperate for more time with Harriet — loss, desperation, impermanence

I'll see you tomorrow, Harriet. I'll see you the tomorrow after that, and the one after that, and the one after that.

Nolan returns from the afterlife as a mortal, choosing Harriet over eternal rest, echoing their earliest exchange — return, commitment, chosen love

The unfinished business I have is with you, Harriet York. You better get used to having me around.

Nolan's final declaration — his unfinished business was never the compass, it was Harriet herself — belonging, destiny, resolution

She's a mess. Color everywhere. A laugh that's just a shade too loud. As lovely on the inside as she is on the outside.

Nolan describes Harriet to her deceased Aunt Matilda in the afterlife waiting room — love, recognition, legacy

I've been holding on to things too tight. What's that saying about if you love something, let it go?

Harriet tells her mailman Darryl she's learning to release her grip on impossible hopes, just before blowing out the candle in her window — letting go, grief, hope