By MEGHANA MYSORE
Review by MICHELLE DONAHUE

A reader needs to look no further than the title of Let All Our Ghosts Depart for a taste of the lyric mix of dark and light that so characterizes Meghana Mysore’s debut short story collection. These are stories full of ghosts—literal and figurative, haunting and loving. Sometimes these apparitions are unwelcome or violent; for example, in the title story, a grandmother’s dead sister possesses her, “shaking the core of her being,” an experience that is “like an insect swimming around in her depths”. Often these ghosts are welcoming and kind; in “Blood and Bone,” a dead father talks with his daughter via FaceTime and worries about her well-being, asking if she’s “sleeping enough” and telling her to “prioritize yourself.” What I perhaps found most impressive about this collection is Mysore’s ability to compellingly and realistically render a range of contradictory possibilities like this on the page. Here she gives us benevolent ghosts and vicious ghosts, delivering stories with unsettled endings that feel both devastating and optimistic. The result is a collection that feels fresh and wild in its approach to themes of belonging, inheritance, immigration, family, and memory.