She Is a Haunting by Trang Thanh Tran: Review

She Is a Haunting

She Is a Haunting tells the story of Jade, a seventeen-year-old Vietnamese-American, staying with her father and sister in Vietnam, helping to turn an old family house into a hotel. She soon discovers this house has teeth in its doorways and ghosts flowing through its veins, and it won’t rest until it devours her and her family. Frustrated and frightened by her family’s refusal to escape, she feels compelled to create her own haunting in an attempt to convince them to leave. 

Jade acts as a ghost, staging a haunting of the house, but this book is as much a story of her un-becoming a ghost as it is of her becoming one. She is haunted by her secrets as much as, if not more than, she is haunted by the ghosts in the house. She is haunted by what really happened with her father, by what she did to her friend, by the lies she told to her mother, and by her sexuality. These are her ghosts. The book is a compelling coming-of-age as well as an enthralling ghost story, and the two aspects compliment each other beautifully. 

The prose is gorgeous, evocative, and unsettling, it wraps around you like vines and traps you in the story as Jade is trapped in the house. The themes of food and eating as metaphors for love, violence, and oppression are masterfully woven throughout the story, and elevate it to a new level, adding layers of meaning and originality, and creating a book bubbling over with depth, colour, and meaning. 

Mae O’Connor, 16