Set in a remote Australian town that’s still reeling from a recent murder, The Things She’s Seen takes the reader on an emotional and metaphysical journey to solve a crime that no one could have seen coming—or solved—without help from something beyond this world.
Beth Teller isn’t like most people. She’s a half-aboriginal girl who died in a car accident and still roams this earth. The only person who can see and hear her now is her father, Michael, a police detective who’s drowning in grief from losing his only child. Michael is investigating a suspicious case of arson, and as he keeps unearthing clues and the small town’s dark secrets, Beth keeps reminding him of his humanity while using her supernatural abilities to aid in the investigation however she can.
When Michael begins questioning witnesses, he and Beth meet Isobel Catching at the hospital, and her account of the events leading up to the fire seem too fantastical and otherworldly to be relevant to the case, much less believable. But then Isobel reveals that she, too, can communicate with Beth, and the more she shares, the more her story begins to connect with the developing investigation. Soon, Beth and her father can’t help but begin seeing the world in a whole new light.
In their first joint YA novel, brother and sister authors Ambelin and Ezekiel Kwaymullina—descendants of the aboriginal Palyku people of Western Australia—have crafted a unique, enrapturing and experimental work in The Things She’s Seen. Their combined prose and poetry explore grief, love, violence, racism, marginalization, corruption and justice through a story filled with well-layered symbolism, transcendence and survival.
