Shelly Jay Shore's stunning debut novel combines the humour, fraught-but-loving family dynamics, and obsession with death with tenderly drawn depictions of Jewish faith and traditions, queer identity and friendship, community obligation and love.
Twenty-eight-year-old Ezra Friedman is only a little bit clairvoyant. Not quite enough to be chatting with spirits in the great, Jewish beyond at will, but enough to make growing up in a funeral home miserable. It's no wonder that Ezra would want to get as far away as possible from the family business. And he does, at least until the ceiling of his dream job literally caves in and his mother uses the family Seder to tell the family that she is running away with the rabbi's wife.
With his parents' marriage imploding, Ezra finds himself pulled back into the effort to help save the Friedman Family Memorial Chapel from financial ruin. Add in his unfortunate crush on the cute funeral home volunteer who just happens to live downstairs from where Ezra and his ex are now living and the new ghost who keeps breaking every spectral rule he has, and Ezra's more than ready to make another run for the hills.
But more Ezra learns about the tangled web of secrets that haunt the Chapel's halls, the harder it is to maintain the distance that (he thought) kept him sane. As the pressure mounts to figure out how to keep the funeral home from being snapped up by a corporate 'body farm', Ezra is forced to do something that he never thought possible and really open to those around him in order to properly move forward.
