The mild spook of She is a Haunting

 

Hello. I’m talking about She is a Haunting by Trang Thanh Tran. I picked this up from Gay’s the Word simply because I wanted to read something that wasn’t set in the west, and the blurb told me it was set in Vietnam.

The blurb says that this house eats and is eaten. This summer, Jade Nguyen has one goal: to survive living a lie with her sister and their estranged dad while he fixes up a decaying colonial house in Vietnam. If she can be straight enough, Vietnamese enough, American enough, then college and freedom will be hers. But the house has other plans. Dead bus line its windowsills and its gardens grow monstrous blooms. Then the ghost of a beautiful bride gives Jade a cryptic warning: DON’T EAT. With the help of rebellious local girl Florence, Jade is determined to prove the house in haunted, and that it won’t rest until it consumes her family completely.

On the immediate outset, I appreciated this blurb for not giving too much away. I like making notes on the opening section and certain parts of the books that I read, and sometimes, the blurb will basically just end up being a synopsis for the opening of the book. For this book, Jade has come to spend the summer with her dad in Vietnam – obviously, given the blurb – but it doesn’t tell you why she’s doing it. It just tells you that he’s fixing up this house. He is doing that, turning it into a bed and breakfast, which means that Jade runs into some Very White tourists in the meantime. But the reason as to why is that her dad is offering to pay her first year’s tuition for university. He’s dangling this money over her. It’s very odd, he wants to spend time with her, but at the same time, since he is dangling this over her, he has this very odd aura about him, and also once Jade gets there, reveals that he has to work with Florence to make the website for the bed and breakfast.

In the opening, it was blatantly obvious Jade didn’t want to be there, and in the beginning, time sort of seems to jut around. It didn’t feel like we were in long periods, if that makes sense? Like the scenes didn’t feel overly long. I wonder if maybe because she so blatantly didn’t want to be there, that was done for a reason. Like Jade is really only narrating what she absolutely has to. But as I read on, I felt like the same feeling throughout, that things were just sort of happening, and that Jade was a bystander to it all. In a way, it felt to me as though Jade was telling the reader something that had happened to her in the past, but she just wasn’t a very good storyteller. Yes, things were happening, weird things – and there were literal ghosts in the house – but, I don’t know, I got to halfway through the book and never felt any tension, or fear, from reading. The worst thing that happened was Jade slicing her hand with a knife when trying to pry her window open that had been given the landlord special. As an addendum, as the book went on, there definitely were bits that were gross and bits that ramped the tension up, but they all sat towards the end of the book. I get that’s how things should be, but I feel like the book took far too long to get to them. Like, was Jade seeing ghosts and getting sleep paralysis throughout the book? Yes, but hardly any of that felt like it was of any consequence.

Jade’s sister, Lily, being at the side of everything happening made her very endearing as a character. So, “she is a haunting” is literally talking about Jade, and about how she tries to make it seem like the house is haunted, even though the house literally is haunted by the people who used to live in it. The whole thing is that Jade uses her fake haunting pranks as a means to make people see the real haunting. In all of this, Lily is only thirteen, just turned teenager, knows nothing of the world, and also doesn’t know that Jade is just using their father for the money. Quite often, she takes things as they’re presented to her, as she’s not going to know any other way. She has a purity to her that I think the book definitely benefited from. She finds out that Jade is behind some of these things going awry, and that she’s only using their father for money and ends up really hurt, as she seems to genuinely love their father. She was very sweet, and I really liked her and Jade’s dynamic. To me, it felt very real for two sisters with the way they behaved towards one another.

There’s a bit towards the end, at Jade’s birthday party/bed and breakfast opening where it looks like Jade has set the website to tell the truth of the house, and everyone who died in it. But there’s a part where she’s going around the party, trying to tell people who aren’t listening. And the word “tell” I used there is exactly how it is. It happens in like three lines. I presumed she was meant to be frantic, panicking, in this moment. But because the book was telling us she was doing this, rather than showing, it just didn’t work. And that was this book’s biggest downfall to me. The sheer amount of telling. It didn’t really feel like I was experiencing the book since everything was kind of just happening. And like I mentioned above, even though there were gross and tense bits, I never felt that much (or honestly even cared) about them, simply because the build up to them wasn’t as strong as it could have been. Given all of that, by the time I was in the second half of the book, I was settling down in my bed to read with the thought of, “the more I read, the faster I’ll be done with the book”. I don’t know what happened in this book, but I just wasn’t grabbed by it, and by the end, even though it was dramatic, I think because I wasn’t grabbed and there was so much telling, it just didn’t hit as hard as I know it could have done.

I think more than anything, I was just disappointed in this book. This is one of those where you can see the potential in it, and what it could have been. Because there were parts in it that were really good, it was just the bits around it that let it down.