What would you do if your mother’s ghost got trapped in the company Slack?

That’s the premise of Clare Osongco’s warm, funny, and surprisingly tender adult debut — and I promise it’s every bit as delightful as it sounds.

Ruby Ocampo has never quite lived up to her mother’s vision for her. Adela, a hardworking single mother who poured everything into her daughter’s future, had a very specific picture in mind: ambitious career, upward trajectory, a man who could provide the stability Adela never quite had. Ruby, sensitive and searching, spent years trying to fit herself into that picture — and years feeling like she fell just short. When Adela dies suddenly at her desk one night, alone at the office finishing up a project because she always gave everything to her work, Ruby is left carrying both grief and a kind of unresolvable guilt.

And then she discovers her mother is haunting the workplace Slack app.

In another writer’s hands, this could have felt gimmicky. But Clare Osongco tackles the plot in a way that is inventive and genuinely funny. The supernatural element feels right on pitch, and the dynamic it creates between Ruby and her mother — still bickering, still loving each other imperfectly, still trying to figure each other out — is one of the book’s greatest pleasures.

To free Adela, Ruby must resolve her mother’s unfinished business, which means taking a hard look at her own life. She’s returned to her small hometown, taken a job at the same megacorporation where Adela worked, and found herself navigating what amounts to high school remixed for adults — she’s surrounded by former classmates, including her best friend and Greg, the one who got away. Greg, whom her mother adored like a son but quietly discouraged as a romantic prospect, because Adela had grander plans. And then there’s the charming executive who starts paying Ruby a very particular kind of attention.

I was Team Greg from page one, and I’ll leave it at that.

What I loved most about this book — and Ruby herself — is the way the author captures the quiet exhaustion of being someone who is always trying to be what everyone else needs. Ruby isn’t passive exactly; she’s trying so hard. But she’s trying to be the person her mother envisioned, the person her boss expects, the person her new boyfriend wants to see. In all that effort, she’s lost track of who she actually is and what she actually wants. Watching her find her way back to herself, one messy and often funny step at a time, is deeply satisfying.

There’s a plot twist in the final act — one I never saw coming, but that slides into the story so naturally it feels inevitable in retrospect — that raises the stakes beautifully and gives Ruby’s choices real weight. My one small caveat is that the ending felt slightly abrupt; I turned the last page wanting just a little more. Though I’ll also admit I’m not entirely sure where the story would have gone without overstaying its welcome. Sometimes a book just ends before you’re ready to leave it.

Clare Osongco writes family love in all its complicated, well-meaning, sometimes suffocating truth.

Unfinished Business sits just above “liked it” and just below “loved it” on my personal scale — which is honestly a lovely place to land. Funny, romantic, and unexpectedly moving, it’s the kind of book that makes you want to call your mom when you’re done.