She is a Haunting
By Trang Thanh Tran
Bloomsbury
Like everyone else, Trang Thanh Tran was stuck in her house in 2020 and she realised that the horror genre takes advantage of our fears. Trang grew up in America with refugee parents, her mother had been asking her to go back to Vietnam with her, and she began to think about the concept of belonging for her debut novel.
At the centre of this YA gothic narrative is a hundred year-old house in the French part of the Vietnamese city of Đà Lạt that is being renovated for its next reincarnation. It is a house built to outlast flesh, holding memories of its shameful colonial past and determined not to be abandoned again.
The house had been abandoned for decades and is full of rats and insects and “echoes that do not stop echoing, trapped in nooks and old curtains until they are found again – still screaming or laughing, voices dead or gone.”
Seventeen-year-old Jade Nguyen has agreed to help her estranged father with the renovations and also construct a website for its six bedrooms to be rented out as a bed and breakfast. Flying in from Philadelphia, Jade and her thirteen year-old sister Lily are tourists in the country where their parents were born.
Jade is a high-achieving teenager with many secrets. Her ex-best friend is the only person who knows that she is bisexual and she feels that escaping to college will allow her to figure herself out. She has lied to her mother about getting a scholarship but her father has promised her money for the five weeks of work.
To make things worse, Jade suffers from sleep paralysis – not being able to speak or move while falling asleep or upon waking for a short period of time – as if she’d “been disassembled during the night and put back together”.
The rest of her family don’t believe her encounters with ghosts and so she tries to scare them with some haunting of her own, with the help of Florence who is helping her construct the Little Paris of Vietnam website. Unfortunately the fake haunting and the real haunting become entwined in this creepy tale.
Lezly Herbert
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