She Is a Haunting

Jade, the protagonist, is just about to start college, so the “What I did on my summer vacation” essay assignments are likely far behind her, yet I found myself wondering how she would describe her summer trip to Vietnam to stay with her estranged father in his haunted and haunting French colonial villa restoration project.

Come for the colonialism and generational trauma; stay for the ghosts and the bugs and the excellent world-building around food culture (all of which are intertwined.) What makes this book so visceral for me personally is Jade’s anger at her father, so intense that it… show more.

This remarkable YA haunted house novel, about imperialism, intergenerational trauma, and family legacy, creates a strong sense of unease, which builds towards some frightening and grotesque imagery that stayed with me for a long time. Notably, almost all of the horror occurs after dark.

The descriptions of the narrator’s night terrors are visceral and deeply unsettling, and it is through the murky landscape of dreams that one of the ghost chooses to communicate. In the daytime, the narrator is relatively safe. But at night, in the ethereal space between sleep and wakefulness, the ghosts are more real than the living.… show more.

This YA gothic follows Jade, a Vietnamese American girl spending the summer in Vietnam, aiding her father in restoring his haunted French colonial house.

This book explores many kinds of grief including estranged relationships with family members. But the one that grabbed me the most was the vulnerable exploration of the grief of colonization, and in connection the grief of diaspora.

Throughout, Jade is grieving the distance she feels to Vietnam and her family history as a result of being raised in America and the way colonization impacted Vietnam, and how deeply that shapes how she interacts not only with… show more.

To be fair, when Jade’s estranged father insists that she come to Vietnam to stay with him in the house he is renovating, he might not know that the house intends to devour her.

But when Jade begins to suffer from sleep paralysis and terrifying visions he dismisses her fears and hides the evidence of the house’s evil intent from his business partners.

Jade’s realization that she can’t count on her dad to protect the family, leads her to go on the offensive against her dad, the house, and anything else that might try to keep her from being who… show more.