HOUSE OF YESTERDAY

Through anguish and grief, a 15-year-old is determined to uncover the secrets haunting her Afghan Uzbek family.

What Sara knew, before everything changed, is now only a memory: “the present and past wrapped up so tight until there’s nothing left.” Bibi jan, her beloved maternal grandmother, has dementia. Madar and Padar, her parents, are separated and living apart. She’s estranged from Sam, her former best friend and neighbor, who is cued White. As a coping mechanism this summer before sophomore year, Sara counts the beads on her bracelet to help remember the past. Madar has roped her into taking photos for the family business, flipping houses. Their latest project is the dilapidated Sumner house, where an apparition of her Bibi jan as a young woman, singing and dancing, appears to Sara. Getting to the truth behind the house, the ghost, and her family’s history becomes her new obsession, alarming her friends and family, including an army of aunts and cousins, with her increasingly risky behavior. Is the house truly haunted, or have the sleepless nights and stress taken a toll? Set on a post-pandemic Long Island, the place the Amani family has called home since fleeing Afghanistan, this debut features rewarding character development and complex family dynamics centered in a revelatory cultural lens. Though Zargarpur depicts Sara’s unraveling with compassion, the stellar prose is hampered by the haunted house mystery, which becomes tedious.

A suspenseful, artfully written paranormal drama exploring the ghosts of intergenerational trauma.