First published 2023
Jade Nguyen travels to Vietnam with a simple plan: endure five weeks with her estranged father Ba and earn her promised college money. She must play the role of the perfect daughter in the French colonial house Ba is renovating. But the house feeds on its inhabitants. Jade wakes each night unable to move while walls pulse with strange sounds and insects scatter their body parts through rooms. A ghostly bride appears with warnings Jade cannot decode. Her father and sister Lily dismiss these events as imagination. Jade discovers traces of ancestors who once worked the surrounding gardens. With help from a rebellious local girl, she investigates the house that her family sees as their dream home. The building will consume them unless Jade acts. She must uncover the rot within the walls and confront the truth about herself to protect the people she loves.
Genres: literary-fiction, horror, contemporary, ghost-stories, 21st-century, asian-american, family-drama
Vibes: atmospheric, dark, emotional, suspenseful
Tropes: family-drama, haunted-house, unreliable-narrator
Setting: Vietnam
Period: 21st-century
352 pages · Hardcover · Bloomsbury YA