Mama's Still Dead - Paperback

by Anne Davidson Keller (Author)

★★★★★ Readers' Favorite 5-Star Review: "Mama may be dead, yet her presence gives the household a mischievous form of continuity, where love still speaks loudly enough to rearrange the living. Readers who enjoy paranormal fiction rooted in family will love this."

Some women call their mothers in a crisis. Lily Corcoran calls hers from the dead.

Forty years old, separated, drowning in an unfinished neuroscience PhD, and raising a freaked-out ten-year-old whose father treats their custody schedule like a loose suggestion-Lily's life is in spectacular collapse. Her survival strategy: Overwork, Snickers, and boxed cabernet that isn't going to drink itself.

When Mama materializes, Lily's first thought isn't miracle. It's brain tumor. But Mama is absolutely, inconveniently real. Lily introduces her as long-lost Cousin Trish and wildly hopes for the best. Mama folds laundry. She bakes lasagna. She has opinions. And shoulder pads.

Heartbreak and hilarity ensue: a ghost mother with catastrophic romantic strategies from 1989, a daughter white-knuckling her way through separation, a dissertation committee member who should be reported to HR, and a little girl who takes to her dead grandmother like a magnet to a fridge.

Underneath the chaos is a daughter who lost her mother too young and has never stopped needing her. And a secret about Mama's death that nobody's been brave enough to tell her.

Mama's Still Dead is a witty, fierce, and unexpectedly moving novel about the mothers we lose, the messes we make, and the stubborn, glorious work of becoming the woman we want to be.