Tuesday Mooney Talks to Ghosts

by Kate Racculia

I wonder if it is because books take slightly more effort than TV that they often come saddled with an expectation to “get something out of them.” There is a hierarchy with TV, now, too: shows during which you can scroll, shows you have on without paying much attention while you occasionally chitchat with your friends or partner—and then prestige TV that demands full attention or else it doesn’t make a lot of sense and you quickly loose interest. Just me?

I would call Tuesday Mooney Talks to Ghosts the best kind of soft pop:

“That’s Galahad.” Bert pointed to the man in the cloak. He was speaking quietly, which had to be for show because they were the only two in the room. “Do you know his grail story?”

“If it doesn’t involve Harrison Ford and Nazis,” said Dex, “or a castle full of lady virgins into spanking and oral sex, then no.”

Bert just looked at him.

We’re Bert. Or Dex. It doesn’t matter, you can know Le Morte D’arthur en français or Indiana Jones and Monty Python from their Comedy Central broadcast edits, you’ll end up at the same place in Tuesday Mooney Talks to Ghosts. I appreciate the lack of judgement. Honestly, you really don’t even need to know more than their titles: Last Crusade, Holy Grail, bing bang boom you’re good to go.

Speaking of titular, Tuesday is a lady, and the type of protagonist we all love: misanthropic but actually super thoughtful; clever in a way people usually can only be when they’re going over what they should have said on the way home:

“Is he your boyfriend now?” Dorry asked, leaning closer.

“He’s my cat sitter,” said Tuesday.

Dorry took that in. She sat back in her seat for a second and then hunched forward again.

“So,” she said, “I think I have a cat sitter too?”

“It wasn’t a euphemism,” said Tuesday. “But anyway. You mean Ned?”

 In conclusion, Tuesday Mooney is a land of contrasts. The book itself is so tight, it’s basically an origami rose. [Hmm, that’s an odd metaphor. Are origami roses known for their tightness? Have I actually ever seen an origami rose? I wonder what me from c. mid-February 2020 was doing that “origami rose” seemed apt?] The dialogue and the plot and the references merge together in high gloss—lockstep and immaculate, it’s a runway show of clothing so structured that they are never meant to be worn by real humans on real streets. [Oh, this incredibly fashion-focused metaphor might be a clue to the whole “origami rose” mystery: I was definitely watching Project Runway back in when I wrote these notes. Maybe there was an origami rose challenge?]

Ah, the mystery of the two-month old fashion-centric origami rose reference has been solved. And that is the type of sleuthing you’re gonna get from Tuesday Mooney Talks to Ghosts, so buckle up, babycakes.

It is Ready Player One by way of Gilmore Girls: Romancing the Stone meets Muppets Take Manhattan. If you’ve never lost at bar trivia to a team named “Adama Is a Cylon”—and that name is a direct pull from the book, and a team that I almost guarantee the author was up against at some point—then you are not pop-cultured enough to run with this crowd. If you’ll indulge me, momentarily, in another aside: to my knowledge, Adama is not a Cylon, but this is the exact type of in-joke that led me to believe Rick Deckard was a replicant for my whole life. It certainly made watching Blade Runner very odd for me a few years ago, as I spent the entire movie waiting for a reveal that never came. Yeah, you know Blade Runner references, right? Because it involves Harrison Ford? Now this would be a great line to end on—callback to an excerpt and everything!—but I haven’t really talked about the book much.

So: it is set in Boston, which is fun because I did live there for a bit, but not long enough or recently enough to remember things or feel included in the magic the way I do with NYC. It is an adventure-mystery. I covered that already, I suppose. It’s really pop-culture forward. Covered that, too. Honestly, when does “pop” culture just become “culture”? No time for yet another aside though, sorry, I have four other finished books that still need tangentially related essays written.

What I did not cover, however, is how unfairly strong the writing is. These types of romps are usually just page-turners, and I mean that pejoratively; you’re blasting through the text because the text doesn’t matter. There’s nothing to linger on, it’s just a vehicle for plot. But Tuesday has some chops, some fundamental understanding of how the world functions, even in an idealized pulp narrative:

She was having trouble. Not with walking, necessarily—at least, nothing worse than the kind of trouble you’d expect when you have to relearn how to walk on a shattered leg—but with accepting. Accepting that her right leg, the only one she was ever going to get, had changed. It had been altered forever by a careless, violent man[.]

I wrote about being jumped by muggers before, but this captures the aftermath of physical trauma perfectly. It is how you feel. Mine is my eye—my vision—but it’s the same. It sucks. But I’m not about to grow another eye.

And it’s unfair to have such profundity in the middle of fun fluff. There are usually no stakes in this genre, just adventure that you know ends with the star getting everything she wants. There certainly weren’t repercussions in Indiana Jones or Monty Python.

There you go. A callback, the perfect time to wrap it up. You’ll get more than you expect out of Tuesday, even if you already expect much more than is standard for the genre.