An Illustrated History of Ghosts

Adam Allsuch Boardman

Genre: Paranormal

DNF @ 57%

I don’t normally write ‘full’ reviews for books I DNF, but I got to 57% of this very short book and had to give up. This was largely due to the formatting errors, of which there were many, but also partly because the book itself was just extremely basic.

This might be a fun idea for kids, to serve as a kind of ‘Introduction to Ghosts’, but beyond that it’s a really unnecessary edition to books about ghosts. The illustrations are cute, but sometimes felt a bit off? Then again half of them didn’t have the correct caption, and the other half the captions felt weirdly like presenting something they weren’t. This book might have been more effective if it had included actual photos rather than the illustrations the book is named for. Again, the illustrations are cute, but maybe with a mix of photos and illustrations and naming it ‘Introduction to the History of Ghosts’ would have helped it feel like it had more of a focus?

The details are all over the place. I know some arc formatting errors are to be expected, but this had sentences chopped up and scattered all over the page, to the point the last page I tried to read was impossible to actually read.

It’s separated into sections, but a lot of these were so short with very little information, with maybe a couple of sentences per entry. It felt like a very jumpy book, and in most cases missed off details that would have been very useful when talking about specific places, incidents, or people (such as location). The majority of information is stuff you’ll already know if you have even the slightest interest in the paranormal, which it really feels like this author doesn’t.

I like a dose of healthy scepticism with my paranormal reading, but certain parts of this felt full of disdain at the very idea of ghosts. It felt like someone had read the Wikipedia page for ‘History of Ghosts’ and added illustrations.

Any enjoyment I think I would have got out of this book was, unfortunately, ruined by the terrible formatting. Again, some formatting errors with arcs is fine, as they are arcs, but this was horrendous. There are other books in this series, but based on this one, I won’t be picking up any.

Review by Elle Turpitt

Twitter & Instagram: @elleturpitt

www.elleturpitt.com

I received this ebook from Nobrow via NetGalley for review consideration.