Nice to meet you, Florence,” I say, emotionless and pleasant in the same way I greet white people. No handshake though. I drag the suitcase by her, hoping I don’t look as greasy as I feel.

Ignoring the carcasses, I try the window again. When it doesn’t give, I move on to the others. Pull up, push, breath held and unheld; none budge. Iguess I’ll just shrivel right here. The house juts upward, yellow and tangled in vines. Roots crisscross the body, grow into wood and drag it whole into the hill. Hydrangeas climb the crumbling walls beside tall and thin windows, their white blooms kissed with lazy bees. They’re the most loved thing here. Jade, who lives with her Mom and siblings in the United States, is getting ready to start college and is concerned about money. School is expensive and she can't ask her Mom, who has sacrificed so much for them and works so hard, to contribute any more. In this gorgeously written, deeply haunting ghost story, debut author Trang Thanh Tran explores complex family dynamics and exhilarating romance as a teen girl tries to save her family and herself from a deadly haunted house.By the time the bride delivers her warning, we’ve already seen Jade swallow several hungers: Wanting to feel at home in her parents’ country. Wanting to get to college and make her parents’ ocean-crossing worth it. Wanting an unbroken family, even as she can’t wait to leave her father behind for good. Wanting girls–specifically, the delinquent coder she ropes into her quest to prove a haunting, with the perfect mouth that threatens to push Jade into a mistake she’s already blown up one life to bury. (The closet is its own particular hunger.) And now, in the most literal sense, she must decide whether to refuse the taste of home based on the whim of a beautiful ghost in her dreams. Tran is also unafraid to explore issues of identity in She is a Haunting. It’s no spoiler to say that colonialism, specifically the colonialism that Vietnam has historically faced, first by the French and then by the United States, is a key theme running throughout the story, brought to life by Jade’s struggle to reconcile her sense of self and her burgeoning romance with Florence, a too-cool boarding school girl. It brings a welcome sense of history to the story; the evil in the house is not an ancient, primordial evil, it is a product of human malevolence from centuries past, allowed to steep and strengthen its hold on those who dare to enter its abode. At its core, colonialism is the biggest insatiable appetite. It takes and doesn’t care to serve anyone else at the table. And like every other meal in excess, its effects linger long after it’s ended. I light incense at the small altar in the kitchen’s corner, burning three for Quan Âm’s statue and one for my grandma on Ba’sside. Prayer isn’t required in Mom’s house, and we don’t go tothe temple outside of Tet, but it always feels weird to step by the altar and not pay respects. Ba works rice flour batter into the pan, his presence too real, so I close my eyes.

But then one night Jade finds a ghost rooting through the fridge with clammy hands. The dead bride, the Vietnamese wife of a French officer who lived in the house, says Don’t eat. I respected the author allowing her to sort of live in the negative spaces in her mind, without trying to cure her of anything. She's been through things, she's allowed to hold that grudge, particularly against her estranged father. I repainted them,” says Ba, wrapping lettuce around his bánh xèo. “I’ll fix it later.” I imagine the space being perfectly sealed, coated with dry paint, holding in heat. Of course he would paint them as is. He always loved a good shortcut. Even when cities become unrecognisable or when languages, cultures and faiths were plastered over by colonial rule, food persists. More than that, people took and remade and re-owned, even in places where–as Jade notes of her great-grandmother–they were “meaningless except for the production of food”. Bánh mì sprung from French baguettes; Singaporean Hainanese pork chops were created by Hainanese chefs working in European households. Decades after independence, when the Nguyens sit at the table their ancestors could only serve at but are now eating Vietnamese food the same way they made it, it is a small but fierce kind of victory: “this place as ours, this place as healing”. All that insistence on describing the food then feels a bit like drawing a line in the sand. Also, at 60% in, we still don’t know why Jade and her ex best friend Halle are ex best friends, even with her new friend/potential love interest, Florence, in the picture.This house eats and is eaten. Memories mar the wood, pencil in the heights of children, and wear the scuff marks of well-loved feet. There are echoes that do not stop echoing, trapped in nooks and old curtains, until they’re found again—still screaming or laughing, voices dead or gone. What parts are undigested lie waiting. There is no real organ here to rot, only soft wood that termites consider and wasps hollow. But shut the door tight and something can still die.

She is a Haunting is a story about a bisexual Viet-American woman suffering from daddy issues and generational trauma who decides that the answer to her problems is to stay in a haunted house. Which is something I would do. Under the jump scares and horror imagery lies a more cerebral fear: Jade’s feelings about her identity as a queer woman and as a Vietnamese American, and her relationship to her family and their generational trauma from colonialism. Why do you think her story was told through this haunted house narrative? She Is a Haunting is a YA-story following a girl named, Jade Nguyen, and her experiences at her father's historic, and of course, haunted, house in Vietnam. His home is actually a French-style villa left over from the colonial era that he is currently converting into a B&B. The renovation is going strong when they arrive and their Dad actually expects their help. She Is a Haunting is exactly the kind of book I love—gorgeous prose, a deliciously terrifying atmosphere, incisive thematic resonance, and a gloriously complex heroine. Jade is an unforgettable character, all tender longings and sharp edges, and readers everywhere will root for her just as hard as I did. Put it on your shelf next to Rebecca and The Haunting of Hill House . An incredible, riveting debut.” — Claire Legrand, New York Times bestselling author of Furyborn and Sawkill Girls

We’re thrilled to share the cover and preview an excerpt from Trang Thanh Tran’s She Is a Haunting—publishing February 28, 2023 in both the US and UK from Bloomsbury YA. The thing is, Jade is really angry at her Dad, like really, really angry. After he walked out on them, they never dealt with that trauma. They don't even talk about. It's sort of pushed under the rug, the reality of it all.