Review by Booklist Review
In exchange for help with her college tuition, Jade Nguyen is reluctantly staying with her estranged father in Vietnam as he transforms an old French colonial home into a bed and breakfast. Heavy feelings of guilt and anger about her family, her closeted identity, and a recent fight with her best friend have Jade's head spinning when she moves into the house, and it soon becomes clear that the house itself has a dark agenda for its residents. Real hauntings, fake hauntings, infestations, dreams that might be visions, and visions that might be real swirl together in Tran's dreamlike debut about complicated families, generational trauma, the long-fingered effects of colonialism. Jade's hazy narration fits the dizzying hold the house has on people, but it might leave readers unsure as to whether they missed some details along the way. Clarity ultimately comes in the sweet and sure-handed romance between Jade and a local girl. An opaque and delicate ghost story for strong readers.
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
In Tran's hair-raising supernatural horror debut, Vietnamese American 17-year-old Jade Nguyen travels to Vietnam with her younger sister Lily to visit their father, Ba. Jade and Ba haven't been close since he left their family four years prior. Though she's initially opposed to the trip, she agrees to go after Ba promises to pay her university tuition. In Vietnam, the sisters stay with Ba in an old French colonial house called Nhà Hoa, which he has been renovating with plans to open a bed-and-breakfast. There, Jade experiences sleep paralysis and is plagued by nightmares featuring the Vietnamese wife of the white colonist who originally owned Nhà Hoa. When attempting to persuade her family to leave doesn't work, Jade enlists Florence, the niece of Ba's business partner, to set up a fake haunting to drive them out. As Jade endeavors to protect her family and uncover Nhà Hoa's secrets, she struggles to hide her growing feelings for Florence from Ba, whom she believes will rescind his offer of tuition help if he learns she's bisexual. Tran smartly weaves Vietnamese culture and real horrors of French imperialism to deliver an eerie tale overflowing with deeply unsettling atmosphere. Ages 13--up. Agent: Katelyn Detweiler, Jill Grinberg Literary. (Feb.)
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Review by Kirkus Book Review
A French colonial house in Vietnam threatens to devour its modern-day occupants. If Jade Nguyen can leave her Philadelphia home with her younger sister, Lily, and last five weeks with her estranged father in Đà Lạt, he'll help pay for UPenn, the dream school her nail salon employee mother cannot afford, even with Jade's scholarship. Ba is restoring a house from 1920 to be used as a bed-and-breakfast, and he tasks her with creating its website with the help of Florence, his business partner's niece, who went to boarding school in the U.S. and is just a little too attractive to bisexual Jade. Jade plans to keep her head down and get through the summer until she starts noticing strange, eerie things around the house, to say nothing of the ghosts appearing in her dreams. As she learns more about the house's dark past, which is entangled with colonialism and her own family's history and their reverberations in the present day, she finds herself drawn to the ghosts--even as she struggles to protect her family from them. Atmospheric descriptions and sharp plotting combine with slowly escalating danger from both supernatural and terribly real forces. Examinations of Western influences and past atrocities in Vietnam and their effects on the diaspora work in harmony with the novel's uncanny elements, making for a satisfying blend of traditional horror with modern themes and concerns. Both the ghosts and the humans in this richly layered work are alluring and deadly. (Horror. 13-18) Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
