L. Lee Lowe is self-published because she simply wanted to opt out of the publishing industry, full stop. She wants to be a writer — a person who writes and has people read what she writes — rather than a businessperson, and has arranged her writing career thusly. Her novel, Mortal Ghost, is available in a few different formats; one can read it for free on her website here, as blog entries. One can also go here for the book in podcast form, read by a young Welshman who is an acting student; here (direct link) for the whole thing in PDF format; here for various other formats, including HTML and various ereaders, and here for a POD via Lulu (not free).

Jesse Wright is homeless; however, one day, during a ridiculously hot summer in an unidentified part of England, he meets Sarah, who definitely isn’t homeless, and decides to take him on as a reclamation project of sorts. Jesse has issues of all kinds — intimacy, trust, whatnot — and while Sarah’s parents definitely help, it’s not easy. His nightmares — of a burning house and dying people — have always been there, but they’re becoming different. Perhaps it is one of his gifts — an amazing memory, an amazing ability to learn things very quickly, and something that may or may not have to do with fire — that is the key to the mystery that is Jesse?

Ms. Lowe recommends that this book is for readers 16+, even though she still considers it a YA novel, and I think that’s accurate. Although the main characters are sixteen or seventeen, there are many things that happen that are a little heavy for younger readers. There’s a rape; longtime readers of Someone’s Read it Already will know that I always consider it necessary to warn for rape, and although the door does close before everything happens, it’s still pretty graphic. There’s also some violence in the form of beating and fire, at various times, and even some mention of sexual abuse. It’s not a light book, in terms of themes and subject matter, despite Jesse and Sarah’s ages.

That having been said, Ms. Lowe’s definitely got a skill for turning phrases and for crafting plots. I enjoyed her symbolic writing more than perhaps anything else, and probably the best thing I can do is provide an example (from the first chapter):

Jesse watched for a while longer. The kingfishers were chasing each other over the river. Their small, brilliantly-coloured bodies darted and flashed, embroidering the rippling length of greygreen silk. There was a moment in their flight, just before they dived, when they paused, suspended – the wave at cresting, the pendulum at the top of its arc – and then with a shiver, as if time itself had hesitated, resumed their plunge.

The pacing, while a bit slow, is definitely worth the payoff, and certainly enough things happen (despite a relatively small amount of settings) for the book not to be in the least boring. Although a lot of the conflict is internal, there is a surprising amount of things to do in a smallish town in the summer, and Jesse experiences a lot of them.

As a character, I generally liked Sarah; I thought she did some stupid things, but they were mostly out of naivete and having been sheltered. Jesse was an enigma, even though he was the main character of the third-person limited viewpoint; I can’t say I particularly liked him, but I didn’t hate him. I thought perhaps Sarah’s dad was the strongest character in the book, and I liked him quite a bit. He’s a photographer, and has an eye for painful beauty. Overall, I thought this was a great book, on a very high level, and I’d recommend it for anyone who perhaps is interested in reading something that certainly isn’t a happy book; certainly plays mostly in minor keys; but has moments of light and touches of beauty nonetheless. 4.5/5 stars.