This month we are reading the debut novel by
Yangsze Choo Ghost Bride here is what USA Today had to say about this novel:
By Martha T. Moore, USA TODAY
Like all good literary heroines, Li Lan is motherless,
impoverished, educated beyond the custom of the times, and uninterested in
marriage, especially to someone who's dead.
Since she lives in 19th-century Malacca, the British colony
in what is now Malaysia,
this is a situation whose disadvantages Jane Austen herself would appreciate. Author Yangsze Choo bases her first novel The Ghost Bride (3
stars out of four) on a little-known custom of Chinese immigrants to the Malay
peninsula: marrying young women to recently deceased grooms, sometimes when
romance is tragically cut short by death, sometimes to belatedly elevate a
mistress to a wife.
Li Lan's potential match is for more complicated reasons,
and her disembodied fiancé turns out to be especially importunate. Driven to a
rash decision, Li Lan finds herself making a journey to the underworld to sort
out her increasingly complex, and dangerous, romantic life.
Like the cultural stew of the Malayan peninsula Choo
describes, the book folds in religious traditions from Muslim purdah to the
Buddhist wheel of life. The Chinese underworld is apparently the Cook County
of the afterlife, a flatland full of corrupt officials and scheming plutocrats,
furnished entirely by offerings to the dead made by their survivors. Like Persephone of Greek myth, Li Lan is told to eat nothing
or she will never return to the living world. Her Virgil is a slightly shady
coquette; her protector is part hard-boiled cop putting her in harm's way, and
part Cary Grant, well-dressed and bantering flirtatiously.
There are ox-headed demons, puppet servants, attacking
vultures and bribable Courts of Judgment. No wonder Li Lan thinks the proper
Anglican cemeteries of the British colonials, with their "neat green
swards and tidy gravestones under the frangipani trees,'' seem so restful.
Even as she describes rolling her eyes at her overprotective
amah, her childhood nanny, or plowing through a platter of treats at a fancy
mah-jongg party, Li Lan has a clear and amusing voice. She also proves to be
resourceful, brave, passionate, and spirited enough to trade repartee with a
dragon.
Choo's book is a bit overstuffed: from whodunit to ghost
story to coming-of-age to romance, there is enough plot to fill several more
novels.
But the beguiling tale of Li Lan navigating both the land of
the dead and the territory of her own heart makes you hope Choo is the author
who writes all of them.
