SHE IS A HAUNTING

A French colonial house in Vietnam threatens to devour its modern-day occupants.

If Jade Nguyen can leave her Philadelphia home with her younger sister, Lily, and last five weeks with her estranged father in Đà Lạt, he’ll help pay for UPenn, the dream school her nail salon employee mother cannot afford, even with Jade’s scholarship. Ba is restoring a house from 1920 to be used as a bed-and-breakfast, and he tasks her with creating its website with the help of Florence, his business partner’s niece, who went to boarding school in the U.S. and is just a little too attractive to bisexual Jade. Jade plans to keep her head down and get through the summer until she starts noticing strange, eerie things around the house, to say nothing of the ghosts appearing in her dreams. As she learns more about the house’s dark past, which is entangled with colonialism and her own family’s history and their reverberations in the present day, she finds herself drawn to the ghosts—even as she struggles to protect her family from them. Atmospheric descriptions and sharp plotting combine with slowly escalating danger from both supernatural and terribly real forces. Examinations of Western influences and past atrocities in Vietnam and their effects on the diaspora work in harmony with the novel’s uncanny elements, making for a satisfying blend of traditional horror with modern themes and concerns.

Both the ghosts and the humans in this richly layered work are alluring and deadly.