This is a multi-layered exemplar of the horror genre, as the terrifying supernatural aspects of this story combine with the equally horrific colonialist history of this home . . . All of that is then topped off with a compelling exploration of the dynamics of estranged families and how culture, identity, and feelings of what is home can vary dramatically from generation to generation.” — BCCB All these dishes, of course, were first brought over centuries ago by the original Teochew and other Chinese migrants who came to Singapore to find work. The history of food is a lineage of people and migration. Food fills in the gaps time and trauma has left in family histories. Food is how we carry on what was left behind. The palates of immigrant nations are made of the dozens of cultures that wove their tastes into the tapestry: there is no conceivable Singapore without East and South Asian migrants meeting the Nusantara flavours; no conceivable United States without the kitchens of Latin America, Chinatowns, Little Saigons. Food is not, perhaps, a mark on Vietnam, but a mark from Vietnam carried over to the new world. Threads hooked across oceans and bodies and time. The novel opens at the mouth of the house and ends at its heart, beating, burning, wanting, waiting.

Special thanks to NetGalley and Bloomsbury USA Children’s Books, Bloomsbury YA for sharing this brilliant digital reviewer copy with me in exchange my honest thoughts. The house juts upward, yellow and tangled in vines. Roots crisscross the body, grow into wood and drag it whole into the hill. Hydrangeas climb the crumbling walls beside tall and thin windows, their white blooms kissed with lazy bees. They’re the most loved thing here. An old, dilapidated, house is always the best setting for a horror story. Always makes for a perfection location to build atmosphere.Unfortunately, the basic writing style translated into every aspect of the book. There were important discussions around colonialism, finding yourself, and broken family relationships. Jade's anxiety about not wanting to disappoint her mom is something that a lot of girls relate to. The author did a good job of weaving these topics into the book, but the conversation around them was stale and bland. There is no passion behind the writing.

Hmm! I think I kind of half-enjoyed this and half-didn't, so it gets some middle ground stars. This was certainly a book with vivid descriptions, and I'm itching at myself hours after finishing the audiobook, convinced creepy-crawlies are places they shouldn't be. This house eats and is eaten,” begins Trang Thanh Tran’s debut gothic horror novel She Is A Haunting. The book opens with Jade, a closeted Vietnamese American girl who reluctantly travels to Vietnam for the first time to spend the summer in the colonial house her estranged father is renovating as a B&B–only to find that the house has other ideas.Unfortunately, Jade feels like she has no other option. She can make this work. It's like 5-weeks. She can suffer through anything for that amount of time, or can she? We eat in silence. The house surrounds us like a cocoon, and I wonder if Ba believed it would birth us as something new andprecious. No, that gives me too much weight.

There’s a tradition in Gothic literature about dramatic climaxes in which the house (or other central setting) is destroyed, often by fire. Did you see the ending coming in this book? Why do you think the author wrote the final act to play it out this way? She is a Haunting is a story about a bisexual Viet-American woman suffering from daddy issues and generational trauma who decides that the answer to her problems is to stay in a haunted house. Which is something I would do. Jade, who lives with her Mom and siblings in the United States, is getting ready to start college and is concerned about money. School is expensive and she can't ask her Mom, who has sacrificed so much for them and works so hard, to contribute any more.

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Such a big part of the colonialist agenda is memory. Legacy. Heritage. Power is being remembered, for your cultural fingerprints to shape history and be seen in the foundations of the future. “I will never be forgotten, but you will be nothing at all,” Marion Dupont tells Jade, who’s self-conscious about her stumbling Vietnamese and feels like a tourist in the place of her parents’ birth. For all their differences, both Jade and her father desperately want to feel like a part of Vietnam, like a survivor crawling out of the blight and screaming I am here. I repainted them,” says Ba, wrapping lettuce around his bánh xèo. “I’ll fix it later.” I imagine the space being perfectly sealed, coated with dry paint, holding in heat. Of course he would paint them as is. He always loved a good shortcut.

By the time the bride delivers her warning, we’ve already seen Jade swallow several hungers: Wanting to feel at home in her parents’ country. Wanting to get to college and make her parents’ ocean-crossing worth it. Wanting an unbroken family, even as she can’t wait to leave her father behind for good. Wanting girls–specifically, the delinquent coder she ropes into her quest to prove a haunting, with the perfect mouth that threatens to push Jade into a mistake she’s already blown up one life to bury. (The closet is its own particular hunger.) And now, in the most literal sense, she must decide whether to refuse the taste of home based on the whim of a beautiful ghost in her dreams. There’s also a tender, tentative, nearly-romance here for Jade with the Vietnam-born, American-educated Florence, left by her parents in the care of her by uncle and his male partner, another victim of divided family. It’s hard not to love Florence and it’s the burgeoning connection between her and Jade—alongside Jade’s imperfect but still loving and protective relationship with her younger sister—that stops the book plunging into irredeemable darkness. Because there is no escaping that this is an incredibly emotionally complicated story and the family dynamics can be pretty damn painful. Especially because part of Jade’s journey as regards her parents, their past, and her own relationship to the history of Vietnam, is learning to live with that pain for better of worse. Some hauntings are, after all, inescapable. So,” I say, swallowing a mouthful. “You and Ông Sáu are making this into a bed-and-breakfast?” A wild concept, honestly. I’d rather dine and sleep at home for zero dollars than listen to some old people do their anniversary boning through the walls. Did you know anything about the French colonization of Vietnam prior to reading this book? What surprised you most about Jade’s family history?

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… Under the jump scares and horror imagery lies a more cerebral fear: Jade’s feelings about her identity as a queer woman and as a Vietnamese American, and her relationship to her family and their generational trauma from colonialism. Why do you think her story was told through this haunted house narrative?