The Ghost Bride by Yangsze Choo
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
Disclosure: one of Webster's colleagues is friends with the author and they gave me a copy as a gift.
I think the only impact that knowing the author had on me was that I read a book I wouldn't have necessarily otherwise picked up. That said, I LOVED it.
The story is about a young woman who grows up in Malaya, a Chinese colony. Her family is bankrupt, her father addicted to opium, and it seems like her only option may be to become the "ghost bride" of the deceased son of a well-to-do family. She travels into the Chinese afterworld to investigate this man and ends up stumbling into a web of family secrets and wondering if she can ever return.
I could not put this book down. The first section, where she is in Malacca (a town in Malaya), was really interesting, learning about a new culture and surroundings. But the second part of the book, which takes place in the afterworld, was fascinating - I loved reading about the afterworld, how it was organized, its interactions with the living world - and I could picture it so clearly.
Part mystery, part fantasy, part novel, I won't forget this book for a long time.
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