She is a Haunting follows the story of seventeen-year-old Jade Nguyen, who is spending the summer in Vietnam with her estranged father while he fixes up the family's old colonial house, in the hopes of gaining income by renting the home out to vacationers in the future. We learn very early on in the book that Jade has somewhat of an exhausting life; she constantly has to pretend to be what she's not depending on where she is and who is around. For example, when it comes to her family, she needs to pretend she's straight; when home in America she needs to be as "Americanized" as possible, and vice versa when she's in Vietnam. Even though she and her father have a strained relationship, Jade keeps reminding herself to "play nice and play house" in order to convince her dad to pay for her college tuition. In midst of Jade playing pretend to satisfy those around her, she begins to experience supernatural things in the house; she suffers from sleep paralysis, finds bug parts all over the house, sees ghosts and endures warnings from her ancestors. This book was interesting, in that the "horror" aspect was creepy enough to keep me reading, but the fleshing out of the main character, and character development in general, wasn't exactly stellar. I think this book would be enjoyable for high school students who are fans of the horror genre, and I do think that a great selling point to this story is Jade's bisexuality and the pressure that her Vietnamese heritage puts on her to be a certain way. ( )

Lyrical and beautifully written! I think I'd enjoy it more as an audio so I could get the cadence of the writing and storytelling more. Will try again later... ( )

WHAT?! Brutally crushing but beautifully written. Will stay with me for quite a while. Unlike anything I’ve read before. ( )

Jade agrees to go to Vietnam to help her estranged Dad open up a new house he is renovating on the promise of some funds for college. But the house is haunted by two ghosts. One Vietnamese woman and one a colonial woman and with the help of Florence, jade is determined to stop her Dad opening the House and its possession of him and her sister. There are creepy insects, visions and twists - is the friendly ghost actually friendly? in this foreboding tale of stifling colonial takeover, racism and haunting in the oppressive heat of Vietnam. A top notch horror read for anyone who has been to Asia and experienced the unfriendly horrors of its past. Great reading. ( )

I didn't realise this was a YA novel before I started reading, or I would have mentally prepared myself for the whiny teenage first person narration and heavy-handed themes. Other than that, She Is A Haunting is the Vietnamese-American baby sister of Mexican Gothic and doesn't come off well in comparison.

Jade Nguyen is nearly eighteen and wants to go to university, but like everything in America, the fees are astronomical, and being the responsible, emotionally-overburdened eldest child, she doesn't want to make her single mother work harder to pay for her tuition. Her father, who abandoned his family and returned to his native Vietnam four years ago, has an alternative offer - if Jade and her younger sister Lily will visit him in Vietnam for five weeks and help to get his French colonial hotel up and running, he will pay for Jade's first year at college. Which sounded funky to me, but Americans gotta do what they can to live the dream.

The hotel in Da Lat, built by a wealthy French family when Vietnam was a European colony (Colonialization being a Big Theme), was also where Jade's paternal family lived, viewed as 'parasites' by the Dumonts. The history of the house continues to haunt the beautiful property, which is surrounded by hydrangeas and decorated in a French theme, yet is decaying from the inside out. But do the 'hungry ghosts' reaching out to Jade mean to help or harm?

The horror elements of the story work well - the spirits of Marion Dumont and her Vietnamese sister-in-law Cam, who offer up memories of the past to Jade, and the house itself, which is hungry for new 'parasites'. I even liked the bugs being fed to the family, and the zombie ants in the woodland beyond the house. However, the take on Vietnam's history was a bit simplistic - 'But who am I to say? I wasn’t colonized. I’m not Vietnamese enough to have an opinion on anything' - and Jade, and the parasitic chip on her shoulder, was a melodramatic, moaning narrator more interested in sniping at her father and snogging the teenage daughter of her father's business partner than surviving five weeks in Vietnam and then moving on with her life. I mean, if you're going to let your own family bribe you to make contact, then at least do it with style. And the narration was like a flashback to Sweet Valley at times: 'For instance: I like girls. I like boys. Still sometimes more girls than boys. I like people who aren’t either' and 'I don’t have much of a sweet tooth, but I do have a penchant for sweet people.' I actively wanted the house to claim her by the final chapters.

I'm clearly not the target demographic, but this would have been a better book with a more mature narrator - and maybe a Vietnamese one at that - and a deeper dive into the history of the country. ( )