While it boasts a grand Parisian build, and impeccably tasteful décor, the naïve occupants remain oblivious to the ghosts that roam its corridors. Tran has managed to brilliantly metaphorize internal colonization and its intergenerational impact through the haunting of Nhà Hoa, a stunning yet tormented home in Vietnam’s colorful countryside. She Is A Haunting (2023) is the debut novel of Vietnamese American author Trang Thanh Tran who writes in her native English. It begins to ingest Jade – body and mind – in this slow-burn, Vietnamese gothic horror. The house, a powerful being in its own right – and wrong – senses an alien intruder on its doorstep. Not straight enough, not Vietnamese enough, and certainly not American enough. A stranger in America, the land of her upbringing, and a stranger in Vietnam, her motherland. Vietnamese American teenager, Jade Nguyen, lands in Vietnam with her younger sister Lily for the heroic purpose of surviving five weeks with her estranged father, with whom she’s struck a deal to help fix his French colonial-era house in the countryside for college tuition money. BOOK REVIEW EDITOR-IN-CHIEF ELLA KELLEHER WRITES – There’s nothing quite like finding out your house is very much alive and wants to consume you.
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