Reviews with content warning for Vomit - She Is a Haunting

The author did a fantastic job with the actual horror aspects & overall creepiness. The characters were OK but not entirely likable apart from the younger sister IMO. The writing was also just okay with the exception of a couple of great lines sprinkled here and there. The story felt VERY slow yet some of the aspects felt rushed at the end.

I’m honestly having a hard time pinpointing how I feel about this book. I found it somewhat enjoyable but not extremely memorable. I think the potential is there but it didn’t quite reach it.

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the_unquiet_librarian's review against another edition

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dark emotional mysterious reflective tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

3.5

This house isn’t just haunted, it has an appetite for its occupants.

Jade Nguyen leaves her home in Philadelphia with her younger sister to spend the summer with their estranged father. Ba has purchased a 1920’s French Colonial house in Vietnam where Jade’s great grandmother grew up in servitude. Nha Hoa, as the house is called, is to be a bed and breakfast and a home for the Nguyen family. He has also agreed to pay Jade’s college tuition if she stays the summer and creates a website for the B&B with his business partner’s daughter, Florence. Strange nightly occurrences, an abundance of dead insects, and the constant smell of rot plague Jade. Her father is adamant that the house is not haunted and the relationship between father and daughter becomes increasingly strained.

When a ghostly presence warns her, “don’t eat”; she must find a way to protect her family from an unknowable threat and enlists the help of Florence. The longer they stay, the hungrier the house becomes and the seeds of fear bloom into paranoia. The house with its sinister past become a body, representing the parasitic nature of colonialism, creating a dark backdrop for the haunting. Vivid imagery bathed in Vietnamese culture and atmosphere is illuminated through eloquent language. Its verisimilitude is achieved through adolescent prose that capture the insecurities and concerns of a teenager contemplating the cost of college, sexuality, and cultural identity. Despite the narratives’ slow pace, the beguiling setting of this gothic horror is the true star and will leave the reader hungry for more. —Rebekah Palmer

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sknappy1's review against another edition

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dark reflective sad tense

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.5

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kingcrookback's review against another edition

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dark mysterious tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

This book would probably fit into the niche of creeping Gothic horror with generational themes of the likes of Mexican Gothic and What Moves the Dead. When Tran's writing was effective, her imagery was genuinely and viscerally unsettling. Ordinarily, the themes of generational trauma, queerness, colonialism and diaspora, and father-daughter relationships should have kept me hooked from page one.

The problem is, I found that Tran's writing was often not effective. Much of the time the figurative language and syntactical choices lacked the necessary undergirding of substance, which resulted in a murkiness that did not seem intentional and consequently just felt confused or unfocused. I understand that sometimes the intention was slipperiness and disorientation, and while that sometimes came across, its success was inconsistent. In fact, what this book did well - the creepy-crawliness, the imagery, the way it taps into the experiences that many American-born Vietnamese people share - made it even more of a frustrating read in the face of its shortcomings, including the underdeveloped side characters and the (occasionally) less-than-natural dialogue.

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