The Ghost Bride

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).

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