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