She Is a Haunting

English language

Published May 6, 2023 by Bloomsbury.

ISBN:
978-1-5266-5708-4
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(4 reviews)

Jade Nguyen has always lied to fit in. She's straight enough, Vietnamese enough, American enough – at least for this summer with her estranged father in Vietnam. Just five weeks of ignoring the quietly decaying French colonial house he's fixing up, then college and freedom are hers.

But soon Jade begins waking up every morning certain that something has clawed down her throat. . . from the inside. Then the ghost of a beautiful bride visits her with a cryptic warning: DON'T EAT.

When her father and little sister don't believe her, Jade decides to scare them into leaving by staging some haunting events of her own. She recruits Florence, the daughter of her dad's business associate (and more of a distraction than Jade bargained for) to help.

But the house has other plans. It's hungry. A home, after all, is only as powerful as those who breathe new life …

2 editions

Really Great Until It's Not

I really love what this book is trying to do, and I really enjoyed so much of the story up to the very end of it because... it was just meh?

Not sure what the editing process was for this book or what conversations took place during it, but it feels very much like Alma was going to play a much stronger role than she did. There was so much choreography in the beginning about Alma being the colonialist monster, trying to revitalise and support colonialism within Vietnam, and trying to exploit Vietnamese people, and trying to rewrite that colonial history to support European histories...

... and then that ball was just kind of dropped for the focus on the house being parasitic. Sometimes the 'Alma' ball was picked back up, but I don't think it was used very well. And I have to wonder if parts of that were …

Fun Horror that Seems Caught Between Categories

Overall a very solid, spooky read. It was enjoyable to have a slightly prickly protagonist, and her struggles with family and the legacy of colonialism were well presented and thematically resonant.

I think it was a mistake to market this as a YA book. It's a coming of age story about a teenager coping with her family, but I think it's too challenging and slow burn to really connect with teenage audiences.

The motifs were obvious (food, insects) but well used throughout the book.

I would rate this solidly four stars until about 85% of the way through, but the ending was a bit of a letdown and put in on the three/four star border for me. Horror endings are hard to get right, and I think the secondary antagonist muddled things.

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