The Extra Large Medium by Helen Slavin

Books Completed: 55
Completion Date: April 5, 2007
Publication Year: 2006
Pages: 240
Received prior to 2007

In this delightful debut novel, Helen Slavin takes the ghost story into a new dimension. Ever since she was a child, Annie Colville has been talking to the dead. She knows they’re dead because for some reason they’re always dressed in chocolate brown. But Annie’s grown up now, and things are getting serious. Especially after she falls for and marries Evan Bees. It’s hard enough to lose someone you love; but what if you know they could come back to you? And they just . . . don’t? During her long wait for her missing husband to come back to her, in chocolate brown or not, Annie searches through her mother’s vast collection of lovers for the other missing man in her life — her father — and struggles with the questions her gift asks of her. Quirky, irreverent, moving and a little bit spooky, The Extra Large Medium will charm you completely — even as it’s raising the hairs on the back of your neck.

I feel bad that it took me so long to read this book. I received it from a fellow blogger last year for Buy a Friend a Book Week and had the best intentions to read it, but other books kept getting in the way. The Spring Reading Thing offered me the chance to move the book up the reading pile. I was glad I did that because it was an interesting read.

Mediums are something that has interest in society over and over again. There are the skeptics that think that they are crazy and then there are the believers who seek them out to help them out of rough points in their life or because they still have need of their loved ones after they are gone. Anne was an interesting character. She was aware of her power, but she did try to ignore it for a while and lead a normal life, but her true character seemed to follow her no matter how hard she tried to ignore it. The Medium ability appeared to run in the family because one of her relatives was The Extra Large Medium that the title mentions. It is him that she follows in the path of.

One of my favourite parts of this book is when Anne points out the fakes. The "mediums" that are not really communicating with afterlife or anyone in the room, but are just picking common names that suggest to people in the room that it is them that they are speaking to. Overall, it was a very different sort of read. I am not sure that I would have bought myself, so I am glad that I received it from another blogger. I had been looking for something different, and it is the first time that I had read a book where a Medium was the main character.

4/5