Aug 13

Aug 13 Ghost Forest

Author: Pik-Shuen Fung
Publisher: One World
Goodreads | The StoryGraph

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Note: Content and trigger warnings are provided for those who need them at the bottom of this page. If you don’t need them and don’t want to risk spoilers, don’t scroll past the full review.

Cover Description

How do you grieve, if your family doesn't talk about feelings?

This is the question the unnamed protagonist of Ghost Forest considers after her father dies. One of the many Hong Kong "astronaut" fathers, he stays there to work, while the rest of the family immigrated to Canada before the 1997 Handover, when the British returned sovereignty over Hong Kong to China.

As she revisits memories of her father through the years, she struggles with unresolved questions and misunderstandings. Turning to her mother and grandmother for answers, she discovers her own life refracted brightly in theirs.

Buoyant, heartbreaking, and unexpectedly funny, Ghost Forest is a slim novel that envelops the reader in joy and sorrow. Fung writes with a poetic and haunting voice, layering detail and abstraction, weaving memory and oral history to paint a moving portrait of a Chinese-Canadian astronaut family.

TL;DR Review

Ghost Forest is a beautiful, reflective little book on the immigrant experience and the loss of a parent. I thought it was really beautiful.

For you if: You like novels told in vignettes.

Full Review

First, thank you One World for the review copy of this book on NetGalley. One World’s books never let me down, and Ghost Forest was no exception.

Sparsely written and told entirely in vignettes, Ghost Forest almost doesn’t even feel like a novel. It’s written as a reflection on the narrator’s experiences as the daughter of an “astronaut father” (one who lived and worked in Hong Kong while his family emigrated elsewhere) and his later death by cancer. It’s also an homage to the women in her family — most particularly, her mother and grandmother, whose stories she became truly curious about only after her father died.

This is a book that would be easy to inhale but begs to be savored. I did read it in one sitting, but I had to force myself to read the words slowly and give each vignette a moment to sit with me before moving to the next one. It’s worth it — if you rush through this book, you’ll get little from it. Its power is in the quiet moments, the in-between unsaid things.

I was particularly struck by the portion of the novel where she describes her father’s funeral. She and her sister experienced their family’s funeral traditions for the first time, trying so desperately to get them right while also processing the loss they’d just endured. It is hard to hold both of those things in your mind at the same time.

There is no plot here, but it doesn’t need it. Also, the author reads the audiobook, and it was really well done. If you’re a fan of literary fiction or memoir, pick this one up. What an impressive debut.