James “Jamie” Conklin

James “Jamie” Conklin is the main character and first-person narrator of the novel. He shares with his reader that he is telling his story with an emphasis on how he better understood what was happening to him as a child only later in his life. Jamie is unique because he is able to see and communicate with dead people. He was in preschool when he saw the man who had been killed in a bicycle accident standing beside his own dead body. Jamie convinced his mother he was not crazy a year later when Mona, their next-door neighbor, died. Jamie was able to tell his mother where to look for Mona’s lost rings. The rings were right where Jamie told her they would be.

Jamie includes descriptions in his story of a variety of evils that strike his family. For instance, his mother must deal...