The Ghost Mom's Guide to the Afterlife: A Novel

A helicopter mom comes back as a ghost to parent her children from the beyond and scare off the cute young babysitter moving in with her husband in this hilarious debut novel for fans of The Husbands and Sandwich.

Tess is a professional mother. Not just because she spends her days caring for her teenager and toddler—all organic food! The best school! Constant supervision!—but because she’s made a career of writing parenting books, most recently a defense of helicopter moms that the internet greeted with a giant snort of derision. But when Tess dies in a freak accident, swept away by a rogue wave, she can’t stand to leave her children behind. Instead, Tess remains on earth as a ghost, determined to protect her family from everything, processed sugar to overdue homework.

Together with a support group of other ghost moms, a motley crew that includes an over-sharing succubus, a hollow-eyed water wraith, and their chain-smoking ghost nun sponsor, Tess learns the rules of haunting (writing in the steam of bathroom mirrors: Easy! Possessing the living: Hard!) and begins to hone her spectral powers. But when her husband hires a new babysitter, a pretty twenty-something named Rosie with dangerous secrets of her own, Tess must move heaven and earth to save her family.

An uproarious comedy that bursts with tenderness and yearning, The Ghost Mom's Guide to the Afterlife is a triumphant tale of love, death, and the everlasting bonds of motherhood.