(Pier 9, $35.00)The dragon-boat festival in the small Californian town of Locke in 1928 is a colourful affair. The community’s large Chinese population dress in their best and brightest, children wave banners, fireworks are lit and everyone gathers by the riverbank to watch elaborately painted canoes race through the water. But halfway through the traditional festivities, the fun ends.
A mysterious fog and cloying stench of death descend on the town, then out of the mist appears a boat carrying three women who are at first mistaken for prostitutes. “A valuable load,” muses Richard Fong, a regular visitor to the local brothel. Alas for him, one of the women is in fact the wife he left behind in China a decade ago – and she’s not pleased. As the unannounced spouse (who smells alarmingly like a corpse) re-establishes herself as the number-one lady of Richard’s life, her two companions, also from the Far East, entrance the town’s menfolk. And the few women in this isolated agricultural burg are intrigued too.
These unfortunate souls include Corlissa Lee, the preacher’s wife who makes it her mission to civilise the town’s new arrivals, and Chloe Howell, a sexually confused prostitute who strikes up an “unconventional friendship” with Corlissa’s daughter. But most intriguing is bordello owner Poppy See, who can predict the future and has very bad feelings about the three “boat-women”. Are they really ghosts or is it all a silly Chinese superstition?
Water Ghosts is a haunting read. Beautifully written and full of realistic, relatable characters who inhabit a vividly recreated, gritty era of America’s history, Shawna Yang Ryan’s debut novel has something for everyone – romance, religion and lots of spooky stuff.
oy only gripes are the author’s disrespect for useful punctuation – she’s banished the handy speech mark from the pages of her book – and the novel’s rather unsatisfying ending, which left a few threads hanging.
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