White Ghost Girls
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
Two sisters grow together and apart into their emerging selves. Frankie pulses with curiosity and risk; Kate is watchful, all eyes and ears. Immersed in the heat and colors of Hong Kong in the 1960s, theirs is a world of fishermen and insurgents, temple gods and ghosts, of blinding light and dark, dark waters. As Frankie's behavior becomes more and more outrageous in her defiant attempt to win her parents' attention, Kate retreats into a quiet desperation, unable to act to save the soul for whom she would sacrifice everything—Frankie.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
For all its dreamy lyricism, this debut novel about two teenaged American sisters growing up in Hong Kong one summer boasts a satisfyingly complicated plot and a devastating conclusion. While their father is away photographing the war in Vietnam for Time magazine, 13-year-old Kate, the book's now adult narrator, and her big sister, Frances, revel in the simple life of Pok Fu Lam village. They swim in the harbor, dive for sea slugs and urchins, and listen to housekeeper Ah Bing's intense folk wisdom. ("Having babies is hard and sore," she tells them. "If you die, your spirit will sit in a pool of blood.") Their mother, on the other hand, spends her time pining for their absent father and painting watercolors that picture grassy western knolls. As Frances grows wilder that summer, Kate is forced to look more closely at their father's growing addiction to war reporting and their mother's lack of engagement with her surroundings and her family. Meanwhile, Vietnam, the Maoist cultural revolution and Frances's budding adulthood all threaten the "shipwrecked" sisters' intimacy. Along with death and sex, Greenway makes the illicit excitement of war and the sisters' opposing natures inextricably entwined.
