Bibliographic record
Abstract
Gallant, Gail. Apparition. Toronto: Doubleday Canada, 2013. Print.This Young Adult mystery-ghost story tells the story of seventeen year-old clairvoyant, Amelia MacKenzie. Amelia has seen ghosts since she was a little girl, and after her mother passed away from cancer, Amelia saw her mother’s ghost too. Until recently, Amelia thought she was imagining these visions, but that all changes when her best friend and crush Matthew dies.Amelia lives near the small city of Owen Sound, Ontario, with her grandmother Joyce, and her two brothers Ethan and Jack. Amelia struggled with depression after her mother’s death, but her friendship with Matthew helped her through the hardest time of her life, and leads to burgeoning romantic feelings. After Amelia gathers the strength to express her feelings to him, Matthew is flustered. The next time she meets him, however, Matthew is acting strangely, and while giving Amelia a ride home, begins to talk about a mysterious girl. Amelia finds out the next day that Matthew apparently killed himself in a nearby barn. Although devastated, Amelia feels something is off about Matthew’s death.At Matthew’s funeral, Amelia meets a local journalist named Morris Dyson. Morris investigates paranormal occurrences, as he believes ghosts travel along specific geographic routes, and sometimes become stuck or cause trouble. Morris also believes Amelia can see ghosts, just like he knew her mother could. Morris suspects Matthew’s death is linked to similar deaths that happened in the same barn - all young men who committed suicide after heart-break surrounding a mysterious woman named Dot. Morris theorizes a ghost is in the barn and causing all these problems.With the help of Morris’ handsome and charming son, Kip, Amelia and Morris begin to unravel the mystery of the barn, the ghosts who still haunt it (including Matthew), and the impact for those who come into contact with the barn. At the same time, Amelia learns to come to terms with her gift, her grief, and to explore her own identity.Gail Gallant conveys the stark beauty of the Canadian landscape throughout her novel, and captures the unique and realistic culture of small town Ontario. The setting will strike home with many Canadian youth. Even with its supernatural elements, Gallant’s characters are interesting and realistic, especially for a young adult novel. Amelia makes a notable heroine not because of her clairvoyance, but from how she learns to understand her own feelings as an ordinary teenager. Amelia cares deeply for her brothers, and her stern, no-nonsense grandmother, but can at times find them aggravating. She also navigates realistic issues, such as family, friendship, and integrity in relationships. Gallant presents these themes with sophistication and empathy.Apparition tackles mature issues including depression, grief, death, romance, the afterlife, and murder. Young readers may find some content scary, although the novel is more suspenseful than frightening. The book stands complete on its own, but has a sequel, Absolution.Recommended: 4 out of 4 starsReviewer: Colette LeungColette Leung is a graduate student at the University of Alberta, working in the fields of Library and Information science and Humanities Computing who loves reading, cats, and tea. Her research interests focus around how digital tools can be used to explore fields such as literature, language, and history in new and innovative ways.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.632 | 0.561 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".