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A review by therivingtonreader
She Is a Haunting by Trang Thanh Tran
2.0
A YA horror novel about a girl trying to save her family from a haunted house that's trying to destroy them sounds incredible, right? Unfortunately, the cover and the premise of this book were far more interesting than the story itself turned out to be.
I appreciated Jade's exploration of her sexuality, and what the book overall had to say about racism and colonialism of Vietnamese culture (I personally felt that I learned some things I hadn't known before), but those were about the only things I got from this story. It was not all that horrifying aside from maybe one or two scenes, and I found myself bored or confused most of the time. I had a hard time going back to it because I just wasn't interested, but I didn't want to DNF because I kept waiting for everything to be explained.
It felt like there was a lot of word-vomit here. I personally had a hard time trying to keep track of what was real and what wasn't, and while that may have been the point to make the reader feel unsettled, it wasn't done particularly well. I love reading from the perspective of someone losing their grip on reality, but the way this played out just left me wondering wtf was going on. I couldn't keep track of what Cam vs. Marion was doing or who's memories Jade was seeing. It was confusing and left me annoyed by the end lol.
I appreciated Jade's exploration of her sexuality, and what the book overall had to say about racism and colonialism of Vietnamese culture (I personally felt that I learned some things I hadn't known before), but those were about the only things I got from this story. It was not all that horrifying aside from maybe one or two scenes, and I found myself bored or confused most of the time. I had a hard time going back to it because I just wasn't interested, but I didn't want to DNF because I kept waiting for everything to be explained.
It felt like there was a lot of word-vomit here. I personally had a hard time trying to keep track of what was real and what wasn't, and while that may have been the point to make the reader feel unsettled, it wasn't done particularly well. I love reading from the perspective of someone losing their grip on reality, but the way this played out just left me wondering wtf was going on. I couldn't keep track of what Cam vs. Marion was doing or who's memories Jade was seeing. It was confusing and left me annoyed by the end lol.