Lately, things have been pretty good for Rose. She spends her time behind the wheel of her dead boyfriend Gary, who has managed to put his soul into a sports car (don't ask), and while the relationship is unorthodox, it's good between them. That is, until Rose is somehow summoned out of the twilight and to none other than her mortal enemy, "Diamond" Bobby Cross, the man who killed her in the first place. While Rose is protected from Cross by the Seal of Persephone tattoo on her back, Bobby's got plans and he's not working alone, and before Rose knows it, he has tricked her into what she thought was impossible. Rose is once again alive! And not just the "I borrowed your coat so I can be basically human and alive until sunrise" kind of alive. She is straight up alive again, and vulnerable to Bobby and his deadly plans, but worse yet, pretty much everyone she ever knew is dead since she met her demise some 60 years before and she is in quite the pickle. So Rose reaches out to the only living person she can think of - her ghost friend Tommy's high school girlfriend and the foremost authority on the Phantom Prom Date, Professor Laura Moorhead. Oh, and yes, she is also the woman who blames Rose for her boyfriend Tommy's death when they were teens and she has spent her life plotting Rose's doom, so not the first person she wants to call for help.
Rose realizes that she wants more than anything to be dead again, what with this inconvenient teen-aged body that is aging all the time and has these disgusting physical needs that she hasn't really considered in the last three decades. Plus, if she dies now, there's no guarantee that she'll end up a hitcher again and Gary would never know what happened to her, nor would her dear friend Emma from the Last Dance Diner. So, she's got to reverse this aliveness and fast. Laura agrees to help her, but their truce is volatile. The unlikely pair head to the Ocean Lady to seek assistance from Apple, Queen of the Routewitches, and the best idea they can all come up with is a plane trip to London in the hopes that Hades and Persephone can help. No one ever said it would be easy.
Once again, Seanan McGuire spins an enticing yarn about Rose Marshall and her misadventures. I actually enjoyed The Girl in the Green Silk Gown far more than I did Sparrow Hill Road (although I did enjoy that book quite a lot), but this book focused solely on Rose instead of the need to build Rose's backstory. It's a great adventure and one that I truly hope isn't the last in the Ghost Roads series. It has a great ending, but I can see many more stories being told about the denizens of the twilight and would love to revisit this universe again in the future.
