Title: Black Water Sister
Author: Zen Cho
Genre: Contemporary Fantasy
Trigger Warnings: Death of parent (mentions), cancer (mentions), injuries, murder (attempted), blood (brief), violence, loss of bodily autonomy
Note: Trigger warnings in DNF books only cover the part I read. There may be triggers further in the book that I did not encounter.
Read To: 68%
Back Cover:
When Jessamyn Teoh starts hearing a voice in her head, she chalks it up to stress. Closeted, broke and jobless, she’s moving back to Malaysia with her parents – a country she last saw when she was a toddler.
She soon learns the new voice isn’t even hers, it’s the ghost of her estranged grandmother. In life, Ah Ma was a spirit medium, avatar of a mysterious deity called the Black Water Sister. Now she’s determined to settle a score against a business magnate who has offended the god—and she’s decided Jess is going to help her do it, whether Jess wants to or not.
Drawn into a world of gods, ghosts, and family secrets, Jess finds that making deals with capricious spirits is a dangerous business, but dealing with her grandmother is just as complicated. Especially when Ah Ma tries to spy on her personal life, threatens to spill her secrets to her family and uses her body to commit felonies. As Jess fights for retribution for Ah Ma, she’ll also need to regain control of her body and destiny – or the Black Water Sister may finish her off for good.
Review:
I read Zen Cho’s The Order of the Pure Moon Reflected in Water and was mostly impressed by how rich it could have been if it had taken more time to explore the characters and setting. So I decided to try a full-length novel and find out if the extra space would provide a better experience.
The good news is that a longer book made for a much better protagonist and a more interesting (although still not as great as I think it could be) setting. The bad news is, I didn’t particularly like everything else.
Jess herself is pretty good. She hasn’t told her parents that she’s gay, let alone that she has a girlfriend. She feels like a failure, she knows her parents are struggling financially (and emotionally, though her mother’s and father’s problems in that regard are different) and she’s determined to do her best to protect them. This is complicated by the spirit of Ah Ma, her mother’s mother, who is the meanest, most entitled character I’ve ever had the displeasure of reading about, especially since she needs Jess’s body to do anything. If having your consciousness shoved to the back of your head while someone else pilots your body is as triggering an idea for you as it is for me, there are several scenes you are not going to like.
I was also frustrated by Jess’s refusal to tell anyone about anything. This may be a personal gripe, as I’m a huge believer in the power of an open and honest conversation to solve a good 90% of problems, but Jess refused to tell anyone what was happening even when they asked. I do get not wanting to tell certain things to your parents, but at least her girlfriend should have been supportive, even if she didn’t really understand. To a point, I understand not wanting to talk about all of the ridiculousness happening, but Jess’s complete refusal to even ask questions that might provide useful information got frustrating. And the only person she ever did ask, Ah Ma, gave reluctant answers that were sometimes complete lies.
There’s also not a whole lot in terms of plot. It starts out with Ah Ma wanting to stop a sacred grove being bulldozed to build condos, But that goes out the window pretty quick, and all of the sudden we’re dealing with assorted deities, mafia wars, how complicated relationships get when you don’t tell people anything, and Ah Ma’s opinion that a little murder solves a lot of problems. I’m still not entirely sure what the main conflict even was, because after it gave up on the “save the sacred grove” ideas, it just seemed to be a hodgepodge of small problems slowing tearing Jess’s life apart.
That’s not to say it was all bad. I’m always down for stories about gods and spirits, especially ones I don’t know much about. The setting – or at least the bits of it that came through – was really interesting. I wish it could have been more vibrant, as it gives the impression that the author is so familiar with Malaysia that she doesn’t consider what foreigners might want to read about it, but what was there was great. I liked Jess herself, for the most part, and the guy who definitely would have been the love interest if Jess wasn’t a lesbian was a pretty cool character. I think I liked him the best.
There were good ideas here. The concept was solid, and I don’t think I’ve read anything set in Malaysia before (unless you count The Order of the Pure Moon Reflected in Water, which I don’t because I thought it was set in fantasy China until I read the author’s website). But Jess’s refusal to communicate anything to anyone and Ah Ma’s hateful disregard for Jess made this story more frustrating than anything.
Bluejay Reads 