The Sad Ghost Club by Lize Meddings

Words cannot begin to describe how much I loved reading this story. The Sad Ghost Club is the story of Sam or SG. They are a ghost that overthinks everything and is constantly anxious over every decision they make. Daily tasks seem really hard to complete and socialising is a struggle at the best of times.

In all the years that I have been reading (and I’ve been reading most of my life) I have never found a book that I have truly connected with. Usually the characters are generic moulds that I’ve never really fit in but I saw myself in SG. The anxious thinking. The over thinking. The struggles to makes friends. They are all something I have struggled with all my life.

Reading the comic styles, you get to see more emotion that if it was just a text based story. Meddings has managed to take the stark realities that many people face when they have mental health issues and instead of shying away from them, pushing them to the forefront of the story telling to highlight how people try to cope. When SG meets another sad ghost at a party, you get to see the other side of mental health where someone isn’t constantly wracked with anxious feeling but is trying to battle their way to be positive.

One of the biggest things I loved about The Sad Ghost Club was how neither of the main characters in the story try to change the other person. In a lot of stories where one of the characters has mental health issues, the other characters often try to make them before like the others but in Sad Ghost Club, the characters give each other space to be themselves, free from judgement. They never try to diminish the other’s experiences but recognise and listen.

If you can’t tell by now, I absolutely adore The Sad Ghost Club and I wish I had found it sooner so I could just spread the message more that mental health doesn’t mean you are damaged or need to be fixed. Mental health issues are you way of coping in a world where sometimes you don’t fit into a box and that’s ok.