Black Water Sister

Black Water Sister

By Zen Cho

When Jessamyn Teoh starts hearing a voice in her head, she chalks it up to stress. Closeted, broke and jobless, she’s moving back to Malaysia with her parents – a country she last saw when she was a toddler.

She soon learns the new voice isn’t even hers, it’s the ghost of her estranged grandmother. In life, Ah Ma was a spirit medium, avatar of a mysterious deity called the Black Water Sister. Now she’s determined to settle a score against a business magnate who has offended the god—and she's decided Jess is going to help her do it, whether Jess wants to or not.

Drawn into a world of gods, ghosts, and family secrets, Jess finds that making deals with capricious spirits is a dangerous business, but dealing with her grandmother is just as complicated. Especially when Ah Ma tries to spy on her personal life, threatens to spill her secrets to her family and uses her body to commit felonies.  As Jess fights for retribution for Ah Ma, she’ll also need to regain control of her body and destiny – or the Black Water Sister may finish her off for good.

I zipped through this book. First of all, I was excited to read it, since "dead grandmother controlling daughter in the name of a mad god, committing felonies" sounded amazing.  And it felt really fresh when I was reading it.  Sometimes it feels like everything is very much same-old, same-old.  So Back Water Sister, which is set in Malaysia (like The Night Tiger, which I also loved, and which also incorporated a good deal of Malaysian history and ethnography) and involves a lesbian Generation Z graduate just trying to make it while she's being possessed was a delightful change of pace.  

That being said, it did feel a little disparate sometimes.  There's a lot to dig into, like her parents' re-entry into the country and family life after getting sick and losing their jobs, but it didn't really pan out the way it seemed like it might.  There was a weird scene about her mother going to a church group meeting that felt like it was supposed to have undertones, but I couldn't figure out why it mattered at all. 

Although I used Gaudy Night for multiple languages, and although everything in Black Water Sister was in English, it felt more multi-lingual, what with the particular cadences of the languages and the layan, lah, etc which were sprinkled throughout.  

It did feel sufficiently spooky, and Jessamyn (Min) felt wholly realized as a character.  She doesn't gain any superpowers (apart from when she's inhabited by spirits) and isn't much cleverer than other people around her, so she's also really easy to root for.  She seems kind of depressed, but not in a self-pitying way, and her love for her parents is sweet as well.  And she's neatly counterbalanced by her grandmother, who, like my own grandmothers, is somewhat manipulative and determined that she's in the right.  [Side note, I heard this nonsense on the radio recently about some new study that showed the special bond between grandmothers and their grandchildren, and first of all - no study on grandfathers, huh? And the study measured this bond by having the grandmothers look at pictures of random people and then their own grandchildren, like yeah, I too, like my own family and prefer them to random strangers, but how is this newsworthy? Also, some grandmas are buttholes.]  In some ways though, Min and her grandmother and mother and uncle are all more memorable characters than the Black Water Sister, which means maybe she isn't scary enough.  For example, in the Diviners, Naughty John, the antagonist, is WAY memorable, a significant actor in their own right.  The Diviners series was a huge disappointment and I hated it by the end, but that wasn't John's fault, as he was absolutely pants-pooping terrifying in the first book. 

Anyway, the actual plot isn't bad.  Min hears voice, gets dragged to the temple and immediately winds up in some shit, then has to maneuver her way between Malaysian gangsters and mad spirits, both of whom want a piece of her (in different ways).  There's a lot of familial love there, and some twists that you kinda expect, but ultimately she's able to lay her various problems to rest.

12: A Book about the Afterlife

The Night Tiger

The Night Tiger

By  Yangsze Choo

Quick-witted, ambitious Ji Lin is stuck as an apprentice dressmaker in 1930s Mayalsia, moonlighting as a dancehall girl to help pay off her mother's Mahjong debts. But when one of her dance partners accidentally leaves behind a gruesome souvenir, Ji Lin may finally get the adventure she has been longing for.

Eleven-year-old houseboy Ren is also on a mission, racing to fulfill his former master's dying wish: that Ren find the man's finger, lost years ago in an accident, and bury it with his body. Ren has 49 days to do so, or his master's soul will wander the earth forever.

As the days tick relentlessly by, a series of unexplained deaths racks the district, along with whispers of men who turn into tigers. Ji Lin and Ren's increasingly dangerous paths crisscross through lush plantations, hospital storage rooms, and ghostly dreamscapes.

Ooo, another good one, I'm on a roll!  Eminently readable, although definitely not for everyone.  It's very hard to describe, since the tone of the book is not quite magical realism (as many people have pointed to) but more - the interaction of normal life with the mysticism found in dreams.  Everyday Living with Ghosts, so to speak.   We switch off narration from two main characters, Ren, an 11 year old trying to find a finger, Ji Lin , a young woman working for a dressmaker and in a dancehall, who found the finger, much to her disgust, and one secondary character, William Acton, a British doctor with ~secrets~ (mostly about how he's banging a bunch of women).  

I was sucked in very quickly, the book is pretty atmospheric, so if you like it to start, that's pretty much how it continues.  Both the main characters were fun to read about, though I preferred Ji Lin.  That may be a cop out though, since I mostly just wanted good things to happen to her, and for most of the first part of the book, she seemed to be at risk for "bad things happening" than Ren.  

My biggest beef is that it seemed there was a lot of "suggestive" spiritual/fantastical things, like the weretiger, but they were basically dropped.  The mystery had an entirely human explanation, and although the dreams were intriguing, most of it didn't really connect to things in the normal world (like how each of the five had "something slightly wrong" with them - was this ever really addressed? or the dream sequences, the way that Ren's brother seemed to have another agenda going on, but it never really panned out).  

I know some people were weirded out by the step-brother romance thing - it was telegraphed early enough and obviously enough that I was prepared for it, so it didn't upset me in the sense of coming out of nowhere, and I was really rooting for those crazy kids, but I will say that once it was out in the open and her brother was basically like, "I'm going to try to seduce you," that was a little creepy to me.  Like the vibe at the end of that movie, The Graduate, where they run off so happily, but then we stay on them and you can see the smiles just sort of gradually disappear.  Why can't Ji Lin have nice things!

I would however, be more than happy to read about Ji Lin and Ren's continuing adventures in Singapore! I feel like they would make a wacky and entertaining detective team.  One of the most disappointing things was how little time they spent together in this book - although it wouldn't really make sense for them to join forces (this isn't a comic book, after all), I really would have loved to see them interact more, if only because each got very little support from other people in their lives, and it was nice to see their connection.    Man, I could have strangled William for shooting Ren though, that was messed up. Even if it was an accident.  

I'd like to re-read this again, this time with more of an eye towards the non-mystery parts of the story.  I mean, one of the strengths of the book is that even though I was incredibly curious about how it was going to be resolved, the writing really sucked me into the mood and atmosphere, instead of feeling like it was just slowing the plot down (although at roughly 1/3rd of the way in, I was like, "How can this plot fill the rest of the book?" and I'm still not sure how it took so long to wrap up, but I never minded the ride).  Which is good, because that increases the re-readability. I guess what I'm saying is, it felt very immersive and dreamy, which I hope was the intention of the author, almost like being there, and I enjoyed the trip very much.