She Is a Haunting

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Ultimately, She is a Haunting is a flawed but auspicious debut for Tran, one which they should be very proud of, giving the reader a satisfying yarn that builds its foundation with solid character work and bristles with gross, gooey body horror that is sure to delight anyone looking for a story that’s hard to put down and even harder to escape…

Personally, I felt the ending of this got a little too chaotic and slightly confusing for me to necessarily consider the slow burn worth it.

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She Is a Haunting is exactly the kind of book I love—gorgeous prose, a deliciously terrifying atmosphere, incisive thematic resonance, and a gloriously complex heroine. Jade is an unforgettable character, all tender longings and sharp edges, and readers everywhere will root for her just as hard as I did. Put it on your shelf next to Rebecca and The Haunting of Hill House . An incredible, riveting debut.” — Claire Legrand, New York Times bestselling author of Furyborn and Sawkill Girls Unfortunately, by about the 50% mark, the story becomes unnecessarily repetitive. We know that the two main ghosts continue to haunt Jade in such a gruesome manner, but we are no closer to answers.

The sound punctuated weekends and holiday meals. I know how to call people to the dinner table, the fixture of my memories with my grandparents now that they’ve both passed away. I was never able to really talk to them. But I knew the taste of my grandmother’s ngoh hiang, of the 爱心汤 she made every Chinese New Year or the Teochew porridge dishes I can’t name, the bags of fruits she used to make us take home or the prawns my grandfather would continue to offer me, years after I became vegetarian. You asked me to come. You dangled the money in front of me. I’m an ambitious gremlin, so of course I want it. Iwill take it, but that doesn’t mean I have to respect you.She Is A Haunting is exactly the type of book that I love. It was one of my most anticipated reads of the year, I was fully intrigued by just that hauntingly beautiful cover art alone. When Jade Nguyen arrives in Vietnam for a visit with her estranged father, she has one goal: survive five weeks pretending to be a happy family in the French colonial house Ba is restoring. She’s always lied to fit in, so if she’s straight enough, Vietnamese enough, American enough, she can get out with the college money he promised. At its core, colonialism is the biggest insatiable appetite. It takes and doesn’t care to serve anyone else at the table. And like every other meal in excess, its effects linger long after it’s ended. We’re thrilled to share the cover and preview an excerpt from Trang Thanh Tran’s She Is a Haunting—publishing February 28, 2023 in both the US and UK from Bloomsbury YA. The set up for this book was incredibly promising. The narrative was clearly playing with themes of colonization, race, and Jade’s personal dilemma of whether or not she should come out to her family. Jade was also very relatable right off the bat, with her struggles with the feelings of disconnect from her culture. There was so much in her to love.