Mariel Fechik

Seventeen-year-old Jade Nguyen has never forgiven her father for leaving his family in the U.S. and returning to Vietnam. Until this summer, Jade had never visited her parents’ home country, and she isn’t looking forward to the trip. But Ba has made her a deal: If she’ll spend the summer with him in the French colonial villa he’s rehabbing, he’ll give her the money she desperately needs to pay for college in the fall. So she and her younger sister make their way to Da Lat and to Nha Hoa (“Flower House”), nestled in a forest of pines. Trapped in a place that isn’t home with little in the way of companionship, Jade grudgingly works on the future bed-and-breakfast’s website. 

But Nha Hoa soon reveals itself to be more than just a house: It is where Jade’s ancestors worked and toiled for French soldiers, a site of violence done in the name of duty. Jade wakes every night paralyzed and drenched in sweat as figures move on the edge of her vision. Ba works himself to the bone fixing pockmarked walls and rat-infested pipes, but the core of the house remains fetid with rot. Something is eating its way through Nha Hoa and into the minds of its inhabitants, and it refuses to remain in the shadows for much longer.

Trang Thanh Tran’s debut novel, She Is a Haunting, is a welcome addition to the quickly growing canon of culturally diverse, queer horror. Jade’s story is clearly influenced by Shirley Jackson’s iconic gothic novel The Haunting of Hill House, in which self-inflicted psychic damage is as tangible as any physical threat. Like Jackson, Tran mirrors Jade’s claustrophobic paranoia through setting and atmosphere. Just as Jackson’s protagonist suffers from her surreal and isolating surroundings at Hill House, so too is Jade afflicted by the oppressive humidity and unfamiliarity of Vietnam. 

Jade is haunted both by actual ghosts and the specters of colonialism, which take the form of not-so-subtly racist American expats and the crumbling French villas that dot the countryside around Nha Hoa. She is plagued by visions of ruined insects and decay, and she dreams of memories that are not her own, all while attempting to keep a lid on the resentment she feels toward Ba—and herself. 

Jade’s first-person narration is sometimes bogged down as she prevaricates about her feelings, which leaves some of the horror elements to fall a bit flat. Nevertheless, She Is a Haunting successfully combines the alluring aesthetic of gothic ghost stories with the complexity of contemporary immigration narratives. The result is an atmospheric horror novel that teens with a penchant for the grotesque will delight in unfolding, bit by rotting bit.

Nigeria Jones is a teenager. She’s a warrior princess. She’s a sister. She’s a stand-in mother. She’s a queen. She’s a student. Within the Movement, the Black separatist utopian community founded in West Philadelphia by her parents, Kofi Sankofa and Natalie Pierre, Nigeria is all of these things and none of them. Alongside the Movement’s members, whom Nigeria knows as aunties and uncles, sisters and brothers, Nigeria has spent her life being home-schooled and learning about Blackness—its traditions, its histories, its struggles, its triumphs. The Movement isolates itself from the world, divesting from white supremacist systems, all in service of a vision for the future in which Black communities can thrive, independent from oppressive forces.

But Nigeria’s mother has left, disappeared, and without the woman under whose care and attention the Movement thrived, Nigeria is floundering and filled with doubt. She has internalized her father’s teachings, from his loving, community-oriented leadership to his ire toward all systems, including education, corporate capitalism and health care. Then Nigeria discovers that her mother secured a spot for her at a wealthy private school, and she begins attending classes there. As Nigeria embarks on a journey of self-discovery, she also learns about the world outside the Movement and meets other teens, some Black, some not. As Nigeria moves further from everything she’s ever known, she’s forced to ask: Who is Nigeria Jones?

The best word to describe acclaimed author Ibi Zoboi’s Nigeria Jones is heavy. The novel depicts the horrors of generational trauma while also placing the personal traumas of one girl, one family and one community within a national and even global context. All the while, Zoboi (Pride, Punching the Air) strikes a delicate balance with the story’s political topics, never moralizing or seeking to provide answers but also not leaving things so open-ended as to appear ambivalent. Through Nigeria and her peers’ interactions with the complex, nuanced subjects they encounter, Zoboi offers a flawless depiction of Generation Z’s activist relationship to such topics. 

Nigeria’s upbringing and experiences are unique, and her inner world, her thoughts and reactions, feels exceptionally true to life. Zoboi tells a singular story of a singular girl, and Nigeria Jones opens wide and welcoming arms. 

In the collapsed city-nation of Alante, the “other-born” are descendants of long-ago gods who have inherited their ancestors’ powers. They are stigmatized and sometimes feared, and they often live in poverty. Still, the people of Alante rely on other-born like the descendants of the Muses and the Furies to provide guidance and order for society.

Io Ora and her sisters, Thais and Ava, are other-born who trace their lineage to the Fates, whose descendants always come in the form of a trio: one to weave the threads, one to pull them out and one to cut them. With their parents dead and older sister, Thais, living far away, Io and Ava do the best they can to get by. Ava sings at the Fortuna gang’s club, and Io works as a private investigator. But the lives they’ve carefully built are threatened when a string of murders sweeps through the impoverished area of Alante. Unnatural wraiths are targeting other-born, so Io is hired by Fortuna’s leader, the Mob Queen, to investigate alongside a stranger named Edei, who is connected to Io by a thread of fate. Soon, Io and Edei are pulled into a tangle of theories and leads, finding danger at every turn, as well as solace in each other.

Kika Hatzopoulou’s debut novel, Threads That Bind, is a high-concept fantasy mystery filled with political intrigue. Drawing on the pantheons of gods from a variety of cultures, Hatzopoulou puts an enticing spin on the idea of inherited godhood: People with powers are feared rather than revered. The frame of a murder mystery allows for a layered narrative that plays on interpersonal and societal dynamics, and the political commentary is well balanced with Io and Edei’s sleuthing. Fans of Amanda Foody’s Ace of Shades or Leigh Bardugo’s Six of Crows will find a similar atmosphere here.

Despite Threads That Bind’s excellent concept, some clunky moments disrupt the plotting and a few important questions go unanswered. Hatzopoulou has clearly set up the narrative for a sequel, but the story as it stands may leave some readers scratching their heads. Despite these incongruities, fantasy readers who are interested in mythology will likely appreciate this unique take on the genre and enjoy a largely promising start to a new series. 

Vega is a girl with stars on her skin. Her mother created the tattoos when Vega was small, knowing that one day she would take up the mantle of the last Astronomer. Vega has never left their valley and knows only the safety of her mother’s cottage. But her mother is dying from a sickness that has claimed much of the world’s population, and twin stars have appeared in the sky, signifying that Vega must fulfill her duty: to find the Architect and go to the sea.

Vega is unprepared for the dusty, desperate world outside the valley, where branded men called Theorists hunt her mercilessly, believing she holds the key to a cure for the sickness. She is rescued by a girl named Cricket, who leads her to Noah, a mysterious, secretive boy with green eyes. Together, the three of them set off across the desert, guided by ancient stories and starlight. But as the twin stars move along their orbital path, Vega knows that time is running low.

A Wilderness of Stars is an atmospheric adventure romance that pulls from a constellation of genres as author Shea Ernshaw crafts a world that seems both familiar and alien. Full of ghost towns and outlaws, much of the setting feels straight out of a Western, but without the identifiable geography of the American West. Ernshaw employs a similar tactic with the novel’s temporal scope, giving enough clues to place the story in a far-off future where our current technologies are considered ancient myths, but no real specifics about when the story takes place. 

Ernshaw’s narrative relies on intentional ambiguity and the slow unspooling of secrets, which is sometimes effective and other times frustrating. Many characters hold their cards close to their chests, and as a consequence, Ernshaw often writes around plot points rather than through them. Although her writing can be dense, readers who appreciate a focus on romance will enjoy the time she spends lavishing Vega and Noah’s love story with florid prose. 

Overall, A Wilderness of Stars will delight readers who love soft science fiction, measured reveals and romances that are written in the stars.