Gotta Find Me an Angel.

Lori A. Dunn is a ESL teacher, instructional designer, and freelance
writer in New Westminster, B.C.

The poetic Gotta Find Me an Angel is part ghost story, part obsession, and part love story in which we listen to our movie-trivia-spouting heroine tell her tale of a rather remarkable year to the ghost currently haunting her life. As she shares what she’s been up to with her first love Madeleine, who died in a drowning accident as a teen, we share in the flashbacks and vivid point of view.

The story is told in the first person by our unnamed narrator, who tells Madeleine the tales of her roommate Billy Smart—a poet with a fetish for “I, Claudius” reruns—and her romantic obsession with the artistic and intriguing Julia Riding. She remains vaguely amused with herself throughout as she shares the “exquisite anticipation of the doomed liaison,” promising Madeleine (and the reader), “I’ll tell you all about it, and I promise I’ll make the experience as vivid as I can for you.” And she delivers on that promise, taking the reader along for the ride until even her preoccupation doesn’t seem so odd.

Despite the presence of ghosts and the interspersed flashbacks throughout the story, the book retains a realistic feel. The narrator is almost brutally honest with herself, detailing her own frailty, betrayals, and failures as she approaches the tale of her own emotional dissolution.

Also sprinkled throughout the book are the film references—another tether to realism—and our heroine’s life includes very real elements that mirror Brenda Brooks’s biography. Readers who are acquainted with Brooks’s poetic stylings will be pleased with her resonant, clean prose.