Charlotte Kersten's Reviews > The Ghost Bride

“The problem with the dead was that they all wanted someone to listen to them.”

So What’s It About?

Li Lan is the daughter of a poor opium-addicted scholar in the British colony of Malaya. She has woefully limited prospects until a strange offer comes: the wealthy Lim family wants her to be a ghost bride for the family’s son who recently died under mysterious circumstances. Soon Li Lan starts to become haunted by the odious dead son, making nightly trips to the Chinese afterlife. When she becomes trapped there it will take all of her willpower and resourcefulness to survive and return to life.

CW for sexual violence

What I Thought)

I started this year’s Spookening with The Ghost Bride and the first thing that I have to say is that while I’ll probably be complaining a lot in this review I do have to say that I think this is simply a very, very well-written and enjoyable book. It was an absolute pleasure to read and even as I found the critical part of my mind noticing things that could have been different I still appreciated every minute of reading it.

I think the real star of the show is the beautifully written and inventive depiction of the Chinese afterlife. The different spirits are all incredibly interesting and I loved spending snippets of time coming to know their stories as well as seeing the strange qualities and properties of the afterlife. Li Lan has a lot of learning to do when she enters the afterlife and I learned right along with her, coming to understand the fickle rules that ghosts must abide by and the strange and ethereal nature of the world of ghosts. The world of the living is just as well written as I also loved Choo’s attention to historical detail. Colonial Malaya is meticulously realized and beautifully described with rich touches:

“Steamed pomfret, the silvery sides of the fish veiled in soy sauce and shallot oil. Fried pigeons. Tender strips of jellyfish quivered under a sprinkling of sesame seeds; and I was delighted to see my favorite kerabu, a dish of fiddlehead ferns dressed with shallots, chilies, and tiny dried shrimp in coconut milk.“

I will say, however, that I’m not particularly fond of Li Lan as a protagonist, simply because she just doesn’t do much by herself. In the start of the story she learns to take care of herself in the spirit world and I really appreciated how resourceful she was. I wish the story would continue that way but as it progresses she seems o rely more and more on other people to tell her what to do and get her out of scrape after scrape. Er Lang rescues her 5 times by my count at the end of the book and even though she spends the book trying to discover who the murderer is she only ever has a vague suspicion. She simply approaches the person she vaguely suspects and is like “Hey…did you do it?” and then the murderer inexplicably confesses to her.

I think my irritation with Er Lang’s continual rescues also has to do with how generally annoying I found him to be. There’s something of a love triangle in this book and ultimately Li Lan realizes that her feelings for Tian Bai are simply a kind of impetuous puppy love because she doesn’t really know him but my problem with this is that she ends up with Er Lang instead, but I don’t really feel like she knows him any better. It just turns out that he’s stunningly attractive and also we learn that he’s really great with his tongue so #goals. Not to dismiss the importance of tongue action but it’s kind of hard for me to care about that when he’s saying patronizing things like this constantly:

“Self-control is a quality I’ve always admired. Especially in a woman.”

“For a young woman, you seem to have a rare gift for silence.”

“You really are naive. It’s rather sweet, in a way.”

So yeah, it’s one of those romances. Of course Er Lang looks like a straight up woke king in comparison to all the lecherous men in the afterlife who are constantly drooling and pawing after Li Lan and talking about putting her to work in the bedroom, which…yeah. It’d definitely be interesting to explore the story’s backdrop subjection of women a little bit more but as it was I felt like it was kind of just There.

One way that Choo might have done this could have been to flesh out the stories of the other women Li Lan meets but nearly of them beyond her mother and Amah are simply condemned because they’re beautiful women who are largely characterized by that beauty and their sexuality. You have the woman who Li Lan thinks is her mother, the Third Concubine and Fan who all fit this mold. On one hand they’re clearly not good people at all and that’s fine, but I do question the decision to make all of them vapid, nasty and cruel women who also happen to be beautiful and characterized heavily in terms of their sexuality.

I particularly felt for the Third Concubine – this young girl was discarded like trash by the man she loved and forced to be a stranger’s concubine while she watched the man who deserted her fall in love and be blissfully happy with another woman. Nothing could justify what she did to Li Lan’s mother but at the same time I wish that her story had been explored in more detail because it could have been incredibly powerful and interesting.

Even thought I didn't really care for the central romance I'll confess that I thought the ending was perfectly lovely. I know there's a Netflix adaptation of this book and I enjoyed it more than enough to look forward to watching it too!