Rating: 3.5 stars
Monthly Keyword Challenge 26: Sister
Jessamyn "Jess" Teoh is feeling aimless and adrift. Born and raised in the USA, she has just moved to Malaysia with her parents, and they're staying with one of Jess' aunts while her parents are looking for their own place to stay. Jess is unemployed, broke and hiding the fact that she has a girlfriend in Singapore. Her girlfriend wants her to get a job in Singapore, so they can be together, but Jess keeps lying to her about her job searches.
So when she starts hearing a strange voice in her head, Jess puts it down to stress. It takes a while for her to realise that the voice belongs to her dead grandmother, who used to be a spirit medium. Being mediums apparently runs in Jess' family, having skipped Jess' mother for some reason. Jess' Ah Ma was the avatar of a mysterious spirit goddess known as the Black Water Sister, and now a local businessman is threatening the park where the Black Water Sister's shrine lies. Ah Ma needs Jess' body to stop this, and settle a personal score against the magnate as well. Soon, Jess discovers that Ah Ma takes over her body at night, so she wakes up exhausted. She needs to figure out how to make a deal with her dead gran's ghost, before she ends up permanently possessed.
Black Water Sister is a rather unusual urban fantasy. Most urban fantasies are set in the USA or the UK, and the protagonists, often supernatural themselves, tend to solve paranormal mysteries involving all manner of creatures, like vampires, werewolves (or other shapeshifters), demons, angels, druids, witches, fae and the like. Our protagonist here is an aimless twenty-something who has no idea what she wants to do with her life, and the supernatural elements are ghosts and various spirit deities. The setting is Malaysia, a place I know very little about, in a culture I am also mostly unfamiliar with.
While this was an interesting book, I found Jess a difficult protagonist to engage with. She's confused and depressed, and clearly has no idea what she wants with her life. While I understand why she needed to hide her queerness from her family, I also felt Jess was rather mean to her girlfriend, who only seemed to want the best for her. I'm frankly not sure what her girlfriend sees in her.
Obviously, having to share a body with the ghost of your estranged grandmother isn't exactly easy, especially when you're living with relatives you barely know and are struggling to understand the language. One perk of the whole experience is that while her Ah Ma is sharing her head, Jess becomes fluent in Malay very quickly.
I read this back in March, and by now, I don't remember that much about it. The plot went in unexpected directions more than once, and there were both funny and some really rather gory bits. The only other Zen Cho novel I've ever read is Sorcerer to the Crown, a Regency-set story about magic, so if nothing else, this book proves that the author is able to write in different settings and time periods.
Crossposted on Cannonball Read.
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