The Ghost Collector wins 2020 Sunburst Award
The Ghost Collector wins the 2020 Sunburst Award for Excellence in Canadian Literature of the Fantastic in the Young Adult category.
“Allison Mills’ The Ghost Collector is both delightful and haunting. A delicious blend of the supernatural and the very real. Mills has great respect for her audience. Taking great care to keep the narrative moving while never simplifying the novel's ideas and themes of loss. The result is a nuanced study in empathy for both the characters and the readers.”
Interview with CBC Books
“Ghosts to me, represent a liminal space — a space that is not alive and is not dead. Being from a family that is both Cree and settler and living in a bicultural space, that feeling of not being part of either thing was something that I connected to. Haunting as a metaphor is something that has always fascinated me. There's a very literal take on haunting, which is a ghost that follows you around. But there's also things, experiences and feelings that can haunt you and stick with you. That metaphorical take on haunting is something that has always been in the back of my mind when I think about ghosts.”
Interview for Bryn Mawr College
“Allison Mills became Bryn Mawr’s second full-time archivist this summer after working as a researcher at the University of British Columbia's Dialogue Centre. In the below Q&A, Allison talks about her previous work, what she'll be doing at Bryn Mawr, working with students, and her recently released children's novel The Ghost Collector.”
CBC Best Canadian YA and Middle-grade Books of 2019
The Ghost Collector is featured on CBC’s Best YA and Middle-Grade Books of 2019 list!
Interview with School Library Journal
While The Ghost Collector is a story about ghosts and death, at its core it's about a family with deep, loving, and complicated relationships. What moved you to write this touching tale of grief and passing on?
I started writing this story while I was spending five days a week working with records documenting Indigenous trauma. I was trying to find ways to process what I was reading so I didn’t carry it with me outside of work. Part of that meant I spent a lot of time thinking about haunting in a metaphorical sense—things that stick around and stay with you after your initial contact with them is done—and that eventually manifested itself as a story about very literal ghosts.
Reviews of The Ghost Collector
“Mills has created a gentle, understated story about grief and loss through a paranormal lens. This is a necessary book that is sure to have readers. Highly recommended.”
- School Library Journal, *starred review, 08/19
“Perfectly balances suspense and the supernatural . . . [A] powerful and moving story about coming to terms with the death of a loved one. It’s an auspicious debut that is sure to delight middle-grade readers.”
- The Globe and Mail, 08/25/19
“Simple language makes The Ghost Collector accessible to its tween audience while introducing sophisticated concepts. In Shelly, Mills has created a believable, likeable character who learns important life lessons about the future in the rich context of her cultural past.”
- CM Reviews, 09/20/19
“Poignantly haunting.”
- The Bulletin of the Center for Children’s Books, 09/19
“[An] original paranormal tale.”
- Kirkus Reviews, 06/12/19
“Mills explores the confusion and anger loss can bring, as well as the difficulties of being different in middle school. It’s a quiet, contemplative read.”
- Booklist, 09/10/19
Praise for “If a Bird Can Be a Ghost” in Everyday People: The Color of Life
“One of the collection's standouts is Allison Mills’s “If a Bird Can Be a Ghost,” about a young girl who learns more from her grandmother than just her ghost-busting abilities.” — Publisher’s Weekly
“… a lovely mix of delicacy and harsh reality, and like any story dealing with death, the fact that all happiness is fleeting lurks under every line.” — TOR.com
Interview in Apex Magazine
APEX MAGAZINE: “If a Bird Can be a Ghost” is such a beautiful story. What Shelly’s grandmother does has a ritualistic feel to it, but when it comes down to it, she often ends up matter of factly and casually talking with the ghosts and helping them go on their way to wherever they are going. What inspired this story?
ALLISON MILLS: My inspiration came from stories I grew up with about my mom’s grandma, Louisa, and the weird relationship she had with the police in Chapleau, where my family is from. When people went missing, especially when they went missing in the lake or river, the police would ask her for help finding them. To them Louisa was probably this mystical Cree lady from literally the wrong side of the tracks—Chapleau was literally divided into upper and lower town by rail lines back then—but her dad made his living as a fur trader and trail guide. Louisa knew the area well. She knew where people who fell in the water were likely to come up. That was where I started from…