05 Feb Review: She is a Haunting
She is a Haunting
By Trang Thanh Tran
Bloomsbury, 2023
ISBN: 9781547610815 (hardcover)
341 pages
14 to 18 years old
Review by Alexander Slack
Eerie but full of teenage anger, She is a Haunting is a teen horror novel with an interesting twist on the classic haunted house story. In order to secure tuition for university, Jade Nguyen agrees to stay with her estranged father in the French colonial house he is restoring over the summer in Vietnam. However, as the nights pass by and Jade encounters the ghosts of her ancestors and their colonizers, family tensions rise and Jade is forced to choose between complicity with the house’s dark past or making peace with her father. This novel approaches the intergenerational impact of French colonial settlement in Vietnam and integrates it well with the format of a haunted house. Well-paced, the tension builds naturally as the plot develops. Older teen readers would find this a compelling, thrilling, and enlightening read, but younger readers might find some scenes outright gross, as rot and parasites play a prominent role.