A Ghostly Shade Of Pale Summary

In this historical fiction piece, A Ghostly Shade of Pale, Merle Temple depicts the life of Michael Parker. At the beginning of the book, Michael is a young man who moved from Washington to Oxford as a student at The University of Mississippi. All throughout the book, Temple does a great job going in chronological order of what happened during Parker’s lifetime. The imagery makes this novel come to life and makes you feel as though you are actually in the drug busts with the narcotics agents. This imagery really comes to life in his use of onomatopoeia and metaphors, and idioms. On page 200, Temple uses onomatopoeia to describe a binder containing Michael’s poems written to Dixie. The binder was hung on a fan blade causing a “thwack,

Also, one example of a metaphor is on page 264 when Temple writes, “Clay had once told him that you can’t kill a committee, but this monster was flesh and blood, Michael thought. Coming from the South, idioms are a part of Temple’s daily conversations that also give the typical Southern charm to this book. From one reader to another, the only weakness in this book is while the chapters are in order, the settings and stories bounce around from one chapter to another. This sometimes makes the story hard to follow if you are not reading intently. There are many strengths to this book though that overcome that problem. For example, the figurative language that was mentioned earlier is the main strength of this book. There are many excerpts from the book, but my favorite one says: Long after Clay had left, and Michael was alone, he saw a card Collins had left on his nightstand. He opened it, and the message was a quote from John Leonard. “He will wonder whether he should have told these young, handsome and clever people the few truths that sing in his bones. These are: 1.) Nobody can ever get too much approval; 2.) No matter how much you want or need, they, whoever they are, don’t want to let you get away with it,