Highly recommend! What a wonderful imagination this author has! Whatever you think this book is about, it's full of surprises. This is a book about love, including self-love. It's about accepting all parts of yourself- all of your different selves. This is a great book for dog lovers too- dogs play a wonderful role in this story. This is one of those books which I will never forget. I can't wait to read more of this author's novels.

Jonathan Carroll holds a strange place in my heart. I have to say that none of his books of the last decade have pulled me in the way his early books did, but I still wait for them eagerly, and read them with relish. Somewhere in the middle, they start to leave me cold. He explores similar territory in different ways. There are many elements of his previous books evident, but it has lost a little bit of charm for me. I can't quite put my finger on it. The characters are well developed, and likea...

Didn't like it. Didn't get it. I wish someone would pay me to write a book that seems like I made up as I went along. No plot necessary...things can change midstream with no explanation...nothing has to make sense. I know there's a market for this kind of book but I'm not part of it! I just finished it and yet I couldn't even tell you how it ended. The plot never made sense anyway so I guess I didn't care how it ended. No part of the plot seemed to be resolved. For example, the ghost in love (he...

I'm a fan of Jonathan Carroll's work. I've read and loved several of his novels, but not for a while. Ghost in Love has all the classic Carroll's elements, great writing, small scale but gepic love story and plenty of magic/weirdness. Actually, with this story I think there might have been too much of the latter, possibly overwhelming the formers. Although it all made sense in the way Carroll's books usually do, it was almost a bit too convoluted or overly complicated. The story itself was great...

Some of the things I don't like in other authors such as jerky transitions and sloppy endings I eternally forgive in Jonathan Carroll because I am really taken with his descriptions of things and the relationships of who he is writing about. All of his books have these characters with beautiful attractions to each other for all the tiny little reasons we each have for anybody we've ever cared about, but here they are laid out for us the reader in charming array. Touch, details, funny bits of mem...

I would call this a mind twister. You think your headed down a path toward something and suddenly your brain is twisted around and you're yanked off into some other unknown. Yes, it's weird, but once you stop resisting, you'll be much happier.

Jonathan Carroll’s The Ghost in Love: A Novel is an odd book with a ghost (in love), a talking dog, and the Angel of Death (who can appear in any form he/it/? wants). It is whimsical and charming with a dash of creepiness. However, the book falls apart for me in the last two ridiculous, what-the-fuck-just-happened chapters of glaring “here’s the whole message of the novel so you dumbass readers don’t actually have to think and come to your own conclusions (which might differ from what I, the aut...

I thought this was a lovely book. I would recommend this book with caution, for I can see people either loving or hating this book. Readers may not like it because there is much in the story which is left unexplained, but I suppose I'm a relatively complacent reader, as any mysteries left unexplained to me weren't as important as the feelings and thoughts of the characters, along with the overall message I took from the book.I happen to love The Ghost in Love, and finished the book a little happ...

I love Jonathan Carroll. Here's what happens to me when I read his books. Number 1, reading the book is a roller coaster of delights. There is always the element of the supernatural but I would not call these books fantasy, at least not traditional fantasy. There is always some cool dog in the book that can talk. Carroll has a million interesting complicated plot twists and ideas that unfold as the novel progresses and as my friend, C, put it, the novel crescendos to the very end. Number 2, you

The world is going crazy. Ben Gould was meant to die at a certain time, and yet he didn't. The angels can't figure out what's going to happen next, and neither can Ling, Ben's ghost. Ben, clueless to his own significance, is just trying to figure out what to do now that he and his girlfriend German have broken up. Welcome to The Ghost in Love.Like all of Jonathan Carroll's books, this one begins with a brilliantly strange premise, and goes crazy. Unlike what I've read of Jonathan Carroll thus fa...

The ghost who is in love is Ling, a companion ghost to still-living Ben Gould; Ben was slated to die earlier but did not, thus throwing the ghost world into a state of confusion and disconcert. Ling is attached to Ben in order to find out what exactly is happening and why those scheduled to die are not dying as the schedule dictates. In the meantime, Ben is having flashes of another person's life and is suddenly able to communicate with his dog, Pilot. As Ben's recently ex-girlfriend, German, he...

Moving from reading the Twilight Saga to The Ghost in Love was a bit like going from Rocks for Jocks to Particle Physics. Even after sleeping on it for a night, I'm not sure I understand all of this book.I do think Carroll writes very creatively about issues central to what it means to be human. In fact, the entire book is a metaphor about the choices we face, the various facets of who we are that drive our decisions and how our relationships can impact those choices. Near the end, he wonderfull...

The first Jonathan Carroll book i read, about eight years ago, was The Wooden Sea, an other-worldly sci-fi fever dream of a novel. I really liked it, and then I finished it, and it made me crazy, because at the end, I had only a vague idea of what the heck had happened.The Ghost in Love is less opaque but similarly fantastical, and I could probably give both books the same capsule review: It starts off making sense, and then things get really weird, and continue to get weirder. Also there is a d...

I love this book. It started when I read the recommendation for the book from one of Nancy Pearl's columns where she quoted from page 171 "A man, a dog, and two understandably disgruntled women were walking down a sidewalk. One woman was a ghost, the man should have been dead, the dog was the reincarnation of the should-have-been-dead's girlfriend, and the last, the tall woman, was an innocent bystander who had the bad fortune of loving two of the others." HOw can you not fall in love with a boo...

The dust jacket features a glowing review of the author by Stephen King, so that was the clincher - without SK's input, I probably would have teetered the othe rway and laid the book back on the library shelf. So I guess I could say it's SK's fault that I had to limp through this book?! :p Seriously, though. The idea is good. Something is happening: people who are supposed to die are NOT dying, thus throwing the folk in charge of the afterlife into disarray. Thing is, the "normal" system that th...

A librarian recommended this book to me when there were no Murakami books on the shelf. She assured me that this would fill that same gap in my heart. It sat around in my room, almost forgotten, for about a month, and when it was time to give it back or incur over-due fines, I decided to read it anyway. I began at eleven and finished at four in the morning.Jonathan Carroll’s Ghost in Love begins as a relatively normal story about a breakup between Ben and his girlfriend, German. Then we find out...

How did I take so damn long to read this?? And by that, I mean that I have owned it for nearly two years, and I kept reading the first three pages then putting it down; I knew I wanted to pay attention, to read every word, to drown myself in the story, and I guess I haven't had the concentration for that until now. Admittedly, I read most of this at work at the library, where I should have been concentrating on work, and it became jarring to have to put it down and actually assist the patrons. I...

One of my very favorites by Jonathan Carroll, I think. I found this one much more hopeful and optimistic than some of his previous novels. His writing style does take some getting used to, as there's a lot of exposition that occurs all the way through the story, and sometimes he'll even disrupt the narrative flow to make a point directly to the reader, and that can be jarring. But in the end, it all comes down to something that's completely magical and strange and even absurd at times, but so th...

The Ghost in Love is a bizarre page-turner that breaks all the rules of death and ghosts as we know them. According to Jonathan Carroll, God decided to create ghosts only because people believed in them anyway and they seemed like a good idea. Their purpose would be to tie up loose ends after a person died. Strangely, the ghost wouldn't have to look like the person they belonged to since they operated on a plane of existence where they could only been seen by other ghosts and by animals.Ling is

The title of this book does not really describe the book....it has a little bit of a plot line about a ghost in love but otherwise it is a book about humans taking charge of their lives and not dying when their time has come.It was actually a very funny book with a bunch of fleeting bizarre characters that were each very quirky and entertaining. Ben and German are very likable characters, and Pilot the dog is wonderful...It is a pretty complex story so you really should pay attention but you wil...