The Ghost Bride

[ DNF, page 50. ]

This book had been recommended to me several times over the years. In my opinion, the hype was ... too much. Two stars for the impeccable, lush lore and for the intriguing concept of ghost brides and being haunted by wandering spirits. However, the prose itself did not take me away into the story. I kept waiting to be incredibly captivated, or feel unease, or connect to our protagonist, Li Lan, and I wanted to keep going to see if it would happen, but, unfortunately, for me, it hasn't. This treads the line between adult novel and YA novel, and doesn't sound like either. It reads like a memoir? And that isn't necessarily a bad thing, but I got tired of being told / reported everything instead of just swept into what was going on. Events were recounted, not encountered. People were described, not seen. I'm not sure if that makes sense, and maybe somewhere down the line, I'll finish it, but it won't be now.

hello i have a new favorite book don't @ me

(actually, @ me, i'd love to talk more about this book but alas responsibility calls)

There's a wonderful concept here. The story itself has potential. The problem for me all comes down to orchestration.

First, the author explains far too much. Authors need to trust the reader to figure some things out.

The bigger issue is that most of the story is replayed through conversation. There's not much actual story here. Li Lan talks to another character, then another, then eavesdrops on two characters, etc. This novel is almost entirely made up of two characters talking, sharing much more than they ever would in reality. Personally, I think that's poor storytelling, and also rather boring.

One of the most intriguing books I've read in a while! The study pulled me in and I loved the characters.

I'm honestly still struggling between a 3.5 and 4.

To be honest, I had never heard of this book before and didn't know that it also had a tv show on Netflix. But when my dear friend Dany suggested that we buddy read it, I was immediately interested and it turned out to be quite a fascinating experience.

The whole idea behind this story is not something I've ever read before and I found it very interesting. The setting of late nineteenth century Malacca (now Malaysia), the diversity of the place as well as the cultural differences between Chinese residents and others who had settled there after coming from various different countries, the mythology behind how the afterlife works and even assigning a bureaucracy to the workings of the land of the dead - it was all so vividly portrayed that I felt transported to the era and kudos to the author for making me feel that way. The mystery which is alluded to is not nearly as compelling, but the journey the main character takes to figure out the truth is fun to follow.

Li Lan is an interesting protagonist to follow. She is sheltered and slightly naive, but has an inner strength that enables her to take on the dangerous path set before her. However, she doesn't always get to make choices that she wants and sometimes, just has to make do with the situation and find creative ways to get out of the obstacles she faces herself with. She also encounters many interesting characters on her journey and I could never decide who can be trusted. There is romance here too but it was totally instalove, and while I'm not opposed to the concept at all, I thought it was not as convincing here as I wanted it to be. And I was particularly both impressed and skeptical about the romantic choices that Li Lan makes towards the end.

In the end, this was a fun fantasy read and I'm glad I decided to pick it up. If you like YA fantasies which have a strong sense of setting and culture, then you will love this book. While romance is a part of the narrative, it's not the main plotline and I definitely enjoyed that the story focused more the main character's own personal journey to discover herself. However, if you hate instalove as an idea like many other readers I know, you might not like this one. Despite its high personal stakes, I think this is an entertaining read that is perfect for these troubling times that we currently find ourselves in. I think it'll be a good distraction for a few hours.

This was a really interesting read. It started slow and I wasn't sure I was really enjoying it, but kept going and I'm glad I did! Delving into the supernatural world of ghosts, spirits, the afterlife and the mystical creatures of Chinese folklore and set in the Late 1800's Malaya, the star of the story is definitely the atmospheric nature of the setting and the strange world our protagonist Li Lan finds herself in. It drew me in, even when I found the characters a bit wanting. Although I didn't dislike the characters, I also didn't really feel a big connection to them either and is the one down side of the book. Is it still worth reading? Absolutely yes! I think that it still manages to take you on an exotic adventure into the haunting realms of a mythical Chinese afterlife and it's a treat to visit it. Enjoyable, even if it's not overly impactful.

I had read The Night Tiger last year and absolutely loved it. This one not so much. I felt it dragged and the conclusion of the mystery was unsatisfying.And the love story made zero sense as it seemed to come from no where. I really like some of the visusals used in the novel and can't wait for Yangsze's next novel. I hope it is more like The Tight Tiger and less like this one.
Kind of feel bad for this review but I finished the book unsatisfied.

I had read The Night Tiger last year and absolutely loved it. This one not so much. I felt it dragged and the conclusion of the mystery was unsatisfying.And the love story made zero sense as it seemed to come from no where. I really like some of the visusals used in the novel and can't wait for Yangsze's next novel. I hope it is more like The Tight Tiger and less like this one.
Kind of feel bad for this review but I finished the book unsatisfied.

I first heard of The Ghost Bride through my book club, though we didn't read it. It would have been interesting to discuss the cultural differences in how we consider death and the afterlife. In The Ghost Bride, spirits walk invisibly among the living, benefit from the generosity and nourishment of their still-living family members, and can invade living people's dreams.

Set in pre-independence Malaysia, Li Lan is the daughter of a poor, opium-addicted father, who - in order to settle his debts with the Lim family - considers the Lims' proposal of a ghost marriage for their son, Tien Ching, a spoiled heir who has recently died (... or been MURDERED, as he believes). Being a ghost bride would mean Li Lan gets to live in luxury as a widow in the Lim house, but also she has to put up with Tien Ching visiting her in her dreams and he's not real pleasant. Plus Li Lan kinda has a crush on Tien Ching's cousin, Tien Bai, who Tien Ching thinks MURDERED him, and so it's weird that she still moons over Tien Bai for the whole book.

Anyway, so Tien Ching doesn't wanna take no for an answer, Li Lan must be his bride! and so he shows up in her dreams and really creeps her out like a creepy stalking weirdo. So Li Lan goes to a medium to get this dude to stop bugging her, and then Li Lan's spirit is separated from her still-living body after an accidental overdose of the tea that was supposed to be used to prevent Tien Ching from haunting her sleep.

There's creepy decaying spirits! Corruption in the nine circles of hell! Also having to live in the same house with all your dead relatives in the land of the dead with all your same pettiness and problems that you had on earth until you pass through the circles to get reincarnated! Apparently there are courtrooms in one or more of those circles of hell because Tien Ching is confident he can get the judges of hell to condemn Tien Bai for MURDER??

Anyway, this was a GREAT October pick, and a really interesting and different story than anything I've read before. 3.5 stars.

Please excuse misspelled names, as I listened to the audio (great, read by the author), and haven't read other reviews yet to see how they're spelled.

3.5
Started off soo strong and soo fun. I really enjoyed most of it! However, the last 15% was unsupported and disappointing.

Now, as I have said, under any other circumstance I would have written this book off as a loss and put it aside, because Li Lan is exactly the kind of YA character I do not enjoy reading about. But I kept going anyway because I realised that I actually understood what Li Lan was going through, despite my irritation at her flaws. I recognised her flaws as my own at that particular period in my life: I was just as wishy-washy, as indecisive, and yes, just as obsessed with romance as her when I was seventeen (and well beyond that, if I am being completely honest here). And I found it easier to forgive Li Lan her flaws, to see them as my own, because her setting, her culture, was patently not white. Li Lan is Straits Chinese, yes, and her customs are Straits Chinese, but her experience of colonialism and to some degree misogyny overlap with my own culture, my own history, my own experience. And that makes Li Lan a lot more relatable, a lot more interesting, than some of the protagonists I???ve seen (and dislike) in YA, such as the ???special ordinary??? white girl fighting a Western dystopia while trying to juggle her love interests when she really should be focusing on her survival.

Full review here: https://wp.me/p21txV-FO

I listened the the audiobook version of this book narrated by the author.

The Ghost Bride centers around a young girl named Li Lan. Now 17, she is offered the prospect of marriage to a recently deceased man. She is to be his “ghost bride”. She is both appauled by the idea and driven by a sense of duty to marry and support her aging father and Amah (nurse). As the story progresses, Li Lan suddenly finds herself in the spirit world. Navigating the realms of the dead, the reader gets a glimpse into Malaysian/chinese mythology, particularly the customs of their ghost festival.

Overall I enjoyed this story. It was filled with beautiful imagery and lesser known mythology. It's only recently that I learned of the ghost festival. The trip into the realm of the dead was itself rather fascinating. The author did a wonderful job of narration.

Yet, I can't give it 5 stars. While enjoyable, the pacing began to slow halfway through. We are also presented with a variety of characters and never really receive closure on them. It would be nice to have a sequel to wrap up what happens to everyone.

Still this was a refreshing tale that has sparked further interested in chinese/malaysian/asian mythology/folk tales.

Yangsze Choo's debut novel, The Ghost Bride, is a wonderful novel that particularly excels at setting, both its historical location of Malaya in 1893 and the Chinese afterlife. It's the story of Li Lan, a young woman whose family's finances have been declining since the loss of her mother and her father's resulting grief and seclusion, beginning with her first proposal of marriage. The prosperous Lim family would like her to marry their only son, but there's a rather major drawback to this arrangement: the proposed bridegroom died a few months ago. Li Lan is not interested in this offer, but soon the dead man begins haunting her dreams insisting that she will marry him whether she wants to or not since she's been promised to him as a reward. Her desperate efforts to get some peace when she goes to sleep at night leads to her separating her spirit from her body, and she meets ghosts and travels to the Plains of the Dead to glean more information on what her deceased would-be husband is up to–and ends up learning more about both his family and her own family's past in the process.

The highlight of the novel is the immersive setting as brought to life through Choo's writing. There was quite a bit of telling and exposition, but this didn't bother me all that much since I found all the details interesting; the well-realized setting and the suspense of the novel's mysteries also made up for some slow pacing. Though I felt characterization and dialogue were the weaker aspects of The Ghost Bride, I still enjoyed it immensely and look forward to Yangsze Choo's second novel (The Night Tiger).

Full Review on My Website

This was an excellent book. I listened to it on audio and cannot recommend that enough because the names to get proper pronunciation. The author reads it and does such a good job at doing all the different characters. The story pulled me very quickly and took a turn about a quarter of the way in that I did not expect. it becomes a ghost story with the main character going through the different levels of ghost planes. Then having to get back to her body just to find out that it is being used by someone else. I need to find out if this is the author's first book because it doesn't not seem like it. It is so well fleshed out that I can see the world Li Lan is a part of.

I had too much left unfinished—my soul was full of unfulfilled desires and yearnings.

 



My heart was too full, my thoughts a storm of paper fragments.




For all who have seen ghosts and spirits are marked with a stain...




Haunted, I chafe at the tight orbit of mahjong parties that I once thought so glamorous, and glance over my shoulder for wind and shadows, yearning for the forbidden.

 



When Er Lang comes for his answer, I will tell him that I've always thought he was a monster. And that I want to be his bride. 

One of the best books I read in 2016. It has everything, and it was an amazing coincidence with my latest post doctoral research on the Japanese ancestor worship. It's a beautiful tale, beautiful.

Mitologia e tradição orientais sobre morte superinteressantes, personagens bons. Gostei em sua maior parte.

2,5!
Inicialmente pensei em dar 3 estrelas representando 2,5 mas daí a coisa desandou mais um pouco e 3 é demais

The ending seemed abrupt.

As a Chinese who was born and raised in South East Asia, I connected to this book on so many levels. Malaysia is very close to my home country and the language is similar for the most part, so I find the usage of Malay terms really interesting. A lot of things in this book feel super familiar to me, ranging from the food, the traditional clothing (specifically kebaya and batik), to Chinese notions about the afterlife. The paper houses, paper servants, paper furniture―I've seen those on my grandparents' funeral. That makes the spirit world section kind of eerie, but in a good way.

The plot of The Ghost Bride moves rather slowly, and there are many times when the book takes side trips to focus on other issues. That distracted me from the main conflict with Lim Tian Ching for more than half of the book, but it surprisingly gave depth to other characters, so I don't really have any complaints regarding this aspect. A part of me wishes for the relationships to be handled better since the thing with Tian Bai dragged on towards the end, but I also found it understandable because marriage was a sensitive issue for Chinese women in that period.

Well, that or I'm just being 100% biased and happy with the end result. Before I knew it, I started wishing for Li Lan to switch to this mysterious stranger with a beautiful voice, and nothing coukd describe my joy upon reading the last two lines in the story. It was so brilliant. :'D

As far as heroines go, I liked Li Lan just fine. She makes mistakes and gets herself into trouble numerous times, but she honestly accepts the fact that she was wrong. Most of the time she's sweet and nice, but she has firm beliefs and always holds onto them. As much as I like how nice Tian Bai is, I think Li Lan's personality shines more when she's with Er Lang, and I really like the chemistry between them.

Thanks to Mitsu for sending this book to me. Without her it'd probably take me ages to wade through my reading backlog and reach this book.

I don't think I was quite expecting what I found between the pages of The Ghost Bride. Perhaps it's because I glazed over the synopsis, rather than reading it carefully, but I wasn't ready for the more fantasy driven part of this book. I was expecting a story about a girl who was fated to be sold off as a ghost bride. A story rich with history. I was given both of these things, but also so much I didn't see coming. Li Lan's story is based around her Chinese culture, but with a paranormal twist stemming from mythology.

I'm not entirely sure when this book is meant to take place, but Li Lan reads as a more modern woman than I was anticipating. She's opinionated and intelligent. Her views on women and society are at odds with the others around her. I was charmed by her fresh, no-nonsense take on the world around her. What really threw me for a loop though is how young she really seems. I've seen this book labeled as adult fiction, but Li Lan's personality really feels like it has more of a young adult feel. Especially once the paranormal aspect comes into play.

However the biggest issue I had with The Ghost Bride was the writing style. Lots of telling, instead of showing. For example, describing an article of clothing. Rather than have the reader infer what it is through the writing, Li Lan will just directly explain what it is for, how it's worn and how she knows. If the protagonist I'm following is of the culture the book is based in, I somewhat assume they know about traditional clothing. I felt like I was being lead of a guided tour, instead of swept up in a mysterious story. That's not to say that the story itself isn't ultimately interesting. The folklore, mystery, and unexpected twists definitely created a need to keep reading. If you can see past the writing style, the story underneath is actually very well done.

My very jumbled feelings are why I ultimately decided on a three star rating for this book. There were aspects of The Ghost Bride that I really enjoyed, and others that took away from the journey. If you are a reader who often reads historical fiction, this might be something you enjoy. Especially since it has the added bonus of a bit of mythology to keep things fresh.