The Ghost Bride, Yangsze Choo

The Ghost Bride
Yangsze Choo
ISBN: 9780062227324
Read March 10, 2014

Historical Malaysian Fantasy, Chinese afterlife.

I've had this book on my pile for at least three months now, probably closer to four months, and while the cover and title drew me in initially, I just never felt like reaching out and grabbing it.  The blurb on the flaps was interesting enough to keep it ON the pile as I purged it and changed it each month, but not enough to get me started on it.  My mind is weird that way sometimes.

I also read a blogposting recently by a fantasy author who was bemoaning the fact that she's burned out on stereotypical fantasy - the vague European setting, the men in billowing cloaks, the assassins and mage apprentices and wealthy disaffected daughters of the nobility.  I was nodding along through the whole rant, because I've been feeling it too.  In fact, I haven't read much fantasy recently, exactly because of that.

So, here's this lovely, sweet, easily-paced, dreamlike gem of a book with a Chinese-afterlife-inspired fantasy world set in Malaysia.  Sitting on my desk for months.  I need to read something.  Perfect timing.

So I finally read it yesterday.

It's really good.

I love the slightly bemused tone set by the narrator (the protagonist, looking back in time and recalling the story) even though usually those sorts of narrators kill the urgency, because you know, of course they aren't dead - they're narrating the book!  However, with this set-up, where hungry ghosts haunt the living and revered ancestors hang out for centuries in the plains of the dead (avoiding their just punishments through donations and bribes to the corrupt gatekeepers) there's no real way to know if our pensive narrator is in fact among the dead.

Even the love triangle (quadrangle?) wasn't bad - it isn't my favorite plot device to have people mooning over each other and being indecisive, but it was actually central to the plot and to how life and marriage arrangements worked in that time and place.

Loved Er Lang, loved Chendana the wooden horse, and loved the final complication set before the protagonist.

I also enjoyed that the protagonist started off sheltered and innocent, but was always willful and ready to take matters into her own hands to decide her fate.  Despite being confused by love and desire and duty (always a tangled mess anyway) she wasn't passive or indifferent, which is a nice precedent to set.

I find myself thinking that this book is what I had hoped 8 Million Gods would be.

I very much hope Choo writes another one, perhaps even a sequel!