Book Review: ‘She is a Haunting’ by Trang Thanh Tran (sapphic YA horror)
A haunted house novel is what spooky season was made for Trang Thanh Tran’s debut, ‘She is a Haunting’, is a shining example of a YA horror novel surrounding a haunted house.
We read this for our podcast, The Dark Academicals, right after we explored Shirley Jackson’s ‘The Haunting of Hill House’ and the two pair together so very well because of their differences in their approach to this favourite subgenre.
‘She is a Haunting’ takes us to Đà Lạt in Vietnam when Jade and her sister Lily travel from the US to spend the summer with their father in a deal made by Jade to secure some money to fund her first year at university in the coming autumn. They find their father restoring an old, abandoned French colonial house and everyone has to pitch in to get the house opened as a BnB before the summer is over.
When a ghostly figure starts to invade Jade’s dreams and give her cryptic warnings, she enlists Florence - the niece of her dad’s business partner - to help her scare her dad and a sister a little to convince them that what she’s experiencing is real.
Sounds like the perfect mix of Gothic and horror, right? But is it dark academia?
You can find out by listening to the full episode right here:
If you’ve read ‘Mexican Gothic’ then you’ll have an idea of the type of horror that you’re in for with ‘She is a Haunting’. It’s that kind of fungal, body, natural (bugs, parasites etc) horror that seeps into the house and the protagonist’s dreams, eventually consuming her. Jade is already a character with sharp edges and a grudge, so watching that element of the horror start to unravel her was fascinating.
Everything about Jade’s experiences in her father’s new house, Nhà Hoa, are tied up in generational trauma and the ways that the French colonisation of Đà Lạt in the late 1800s and early 1900s have echoed through the generations of her family and even stretched to her life in America. Nhà Hoa frames those memories and that history, unravelling bits and pieces of the Nguyen family history that had been hidden from her, heightening the haunting atmosphere of the novel.
The ghostly aspect of ‘She is a Haunting’ really emphasises the supernatural element of the supernatural vs the psychological aspect of the haunted house trope, and yet there’s always doubt with a good horror novel. Jade spends a portion of the book putting on hauntings to scare her family and it would be so easy to get carried away and conflate her experiences - the unreliability of narration in horror is one of my favourite parts of it and Trang Thanh Tran nailed it in her debut.
I really loved ‘She is a Haunting’. It’s an unsettling horror and a scathing look at post-colonial Vietnam with an explosive ending - it’s a wonderful sapphic YA horror novel that’s perfect for this time of year.
Would this spook you too much? Have you read it?
Written by Sophie
