I received a copy of this book from Pansing Distribution in exchange for an honest review

Jessamyn Teoh is in trouble. Newly arrived in Malaysia after living most of her life in America, she's broke, jobless, and being actively haunted by the ghost of her grandmother. Now, she has to deal with moving to another continent, get her life on track, and make sure her grandmother doesn't take her body on a joyride in an effort to appease an angered local deity.

This book was written by our very own Malaysian, Zen Cho, and is set in Penang. When we read, we always want to relate to the characters portrayed on the page. Before reading this book, I certainly felt disconnected from some of the characters and worlds I've read before. With this, there's a unique sense of coming home. It's breath-taking to be able to see all the nuances we take for granted in daily life come alive in prose form. For that, I will forever be grateful to Zen Cho.

Not only is this book very relatable to me because of its setting, but because of Jess herself. Depressed, in the closet, looking for a job... the only thing I don't have in common with her is the whole haunted by Ah Ma thing. But it still might happen, who knows? The relationships highlighted, especially how a Chinese family functions, are spot-on. Zen Cho managed to encapsulate all our local biases and quirks, our melting pot of culture and Manglish, seamlessly into this book.

The book covers a lot of themes, from the contradictions that arise when East meets West, the gentrification of Penang, the exploitation of foreign labour. It packs a punch while telling a tense and well-plotted story. The thing about Zen Cho is how you can never tell how things will escalate and the stakes will be raised higher and higher. What you can tell from the back of the book occurs in the first half of the book, perhaps. The rest of it shows you how life and circumstances can quickly go out of control. At which point, it's up to the characters to decide how to move forward even in times of turmoil.

With how many local deities and beliefs we have, I believe this book will be one of many tapping into our culture for stories. In fact, I have a friend already writing one. Black Water Sister weaves a stunning tale by tweaking what we already have and creating something believable and instantly immersive. Her take blurs the line between reality and fantasy amazingly well.

All in all, I cannot wait to read more from Zen Cho. Hopefully, there will be more of this style, because I will be sure to eat them up. You know one, right? We Malaysians all love to eat.

Disclaimer: This is going to be a haterade-fueled rant from someone who has historically not enjoyed what modern YA fantasy has to offer. I am aware I’m not the target audience — a lot of this will veer more towards venting than constructive criticism. You have been warned.

This book reads like fanfiction written for white teenagers who loved Spirited Away but can’t distinguish Korea from Japan.

Despite being based on a Korean myth, the story and characters follow your cookie-cutter Western YA “feminist” fantasy, including everything I personally find irritating, juvenile, and derivative about the genre. (The tropes are annoyingly YA, but the vocabulary and prose here is closer to middle-grade.) You’ve still got your spunky teenage heroine who everyone inexplicably trusts and admires despite having no beauty and no skill (her words). She also does things like yell at a nobleman while being a literal peasant girl, which you would think would be deeply disrespectful considering the cultural background she’s supposed to have. The love interest is another brooding immortal god inexplicably smitten with a random virginal teenager, as they all are, apparently. All the cultural context is stripped out to push a typical individualistic story about “follow your heart” self-actualization, just in a vaguely Asian flavor. I will cite the below interaction we’ve all seen a thousand times:

[FMC almost dies] [MMC states the obvious, that she is in danger] [FMC mouths off to him in a #girlboss #feminist way] [FMC muses, “there’s something in his eyes… is that… respect?”] 🙄🙄🙄

I found the characters poorly developed, the writing sloppy and amateurish, the overall tone juvenile and melodramatic, and the pacing so insanely fast to the point where plot points blur together from the sheer breakneck speed of events. The constant rush left me unable to process or get attached to anything, and while the fast pace keeps the momentum going, it also sacrifices character, plot development, and even basic coherence. I feel like the only reason you could form any connection to the story is because of general familiarity with genre conventions filling in the gaps.

We’re often moving so fast that the only way things happen is if they’re extremely convenient, and they are. There are plot holes abound, and the book tries to skim by quickly so you don’t notice, but it didn’t escape me how loosely the plot all fit together. Mina appears in the spirit realm, loses her soul, and immediately finds kind people totally willing to drop everything to take her where she needs to go. Mina needs to get into buildings that should be locked up, but are they? Nope, she always conveniently finds the doors cracked open for her. She gets attacked head-on and does she get hurt? Nope, a side character she literally met two days ago will valiantly take the hit for her. Everything always goes accordingly to plan for Mina, our super special chosen one main character.

On that note, there are literally no stakes. Even when Mina gets a minor injury, it’s immediately healed through the power of magic. What kind of magic? Doesn't matter, isn't explained. The story won’t let her risk anything important, and for that reason the narrative feels boring despite the insanely fast pace. The ending especially felt horrible. Far-fetched, melodramatic, and undid all semblance of character motivation that happened in the 300 pages before it. Engineered to get people sobbing with no justification, which I find cheap and tacky.

Mina is 16 but reads closer to 12, or even younger. She’s childish and clumsy and so, so dumb. She’s literally a Bella Swan-esque blank slate on which to self-project because she has no personality or distinguishing features of her own besides the stupidity to jump into the sea in the first place. The other characters are even worse as they are not developed at all, so it was impossible to connect with them. The villains especially made absolutely no sense motivation-wise and seemed to only materialize to drum up more momentum for the plot at strategic points where it was starting to drag. Otherwise, all the characters are interchangeable cardboard cutouts with no distinguishable personalities or motivations.

The romance was like watching paint dry if the paint actually got bored of itself too and occasionally left the room, with the kind of chemistry you have with a coworker you see once every 6 months and have to share adjacent cubicles with. They have nothing in common, know nothing about each other, yet somehow manage to fall for each other in just 4 weeks despite minimal interactions the entire book. Painfully dry and awkward, even for immortal god x teenage virgin standards. The soulmate trope is so often used as a crutch to avoid writing actual relationship development and moments of connection, and it is deployed here to similar effect.

This is rampant in the genre, but there was also an over-reliance on visual imagery as if this were describing a movie (which is what this wants to be) rather than a novel. There are pages on pages of descriptions of this world, every single building and room and furniture item, but almost no exploration of interiority for the characters. You see this in how characters are described too — they are described as very visually different but are written behaviorally very similar, which in text form makes them difficult to differentiate from each other. A lot of the imagery also borrows heavily from Spirited Away as well, especially in the beginning, which made it hard to see it as its own original story rather than Spirited Away fanfic.

Tangential rant: As an Asian-American person, I really love the idea of more Asian-inspired fantasy in theory (plus more Asian authors getting published) but the way it is often executed in commercial YA frustrates me as it makes me realize I am not the target audience, which is a sad thing to realize from a genre you want to love. These stories are still shaped by the cookie-cutter mold of popular Western YA fantasy with just the barest hint of “exotic” Asian flavoring to be easily consumable for white people in the exact shape they already consume all their content in, like throwing matcha into protein shakes and cupcakes. God forbid we have to step outside our comfort zone even a tiny bit when we read stories from other cultures. God forbid we leave behind American individualism as a default story arc and investigate the spirit of collectivism, for example. I’m also becoming increasingly irritated at how “Asian-coded fantasy” is starting to mean the same homogenous style-over-substance, should’ve-been-a-graphic-novel surrealist world with swirly colors, whimsical Ghibli imagery and royal courts that somehow functionally behave exactly the same as European royal courts despite drastically different cultures. It’s horribly unimaginative and limiting. This is obviously more of a complaint about the state of publishing and the current market demands rather than the authors themselves, but disappointing all-around.

TL;DR: She should’ve just drowned tbh