M. H. Boroson

The Girl with Ghost Eyes: The Daoshi Chronicles, Book One

Colleen

I picked up The Girl with Ghost Eyes because it sounded similar to The Ghost Bride. I enjoyed The Ghost Bride and have been on the lookout for similar books. Indeed, these are both historical fantasy centered around Chinese lore and set in the same decade (1890's). They both have the word Ghost in the title and the main characters have similar names: Li Lan is the star of The Ghost Bride and Li-Lin is the main character in The Girl with Ghost Eyes. But that is where the similarities end. The actual stories and execution are vastly different.

In The Girl with Ghost Eyes, Li-lin is cursed with Yin eyes (the ability to see things from the spirit world). It is up to her to save Chinatown, San Francisco from the evil trying to destroy it. What I enjoyed most about this book was that it focused on Eastern culture and mythology. So much of what is published today focuses on Western culture. The fantasy genre in particular is swamped with clichéd witches and vampires. I love finding new books that branch away from that. And Chinese mythology is rich with underutilized material. While I enjoyed this book overall, there where several things keeping me from rating it higher.

To start with, this book is written in first person. I'm just not wild about first person fiction. Call it a personal quirk. But it wasn't so much the writing perspective that bothered me; The Girl with Ghost Eyes has the uncommon circumstance of having a main character of the opposite gender than the author. It is even more uncommon for an author to write about the opposite gender in the first person. I assume the publishers tried to avert people's attention from this fact by only using the author's first initials (the same way J.K. Rowling's publishers did). Still, I kept getting a nagging feeling of incongruity. It wasn't until I flipped to the back to look at the author's bio that I identified the source of it. The discordant feeling sprouted from the author not quite being able to convincingly make the gender leap. There was not any blatant error. It was just an underlying feeling I experienced throughout the book much like when I read Memoirs of a Geisha. Once again, we have a Western man writing a story about an Asian woman. Not there is anything wrong with that at all. But sometimes even the most detailed research cannot make up for the advantage of being submersed in something all your life.

The story is very fast paced which has both advantages and disadvantages. On the plus side, the non-stop action makes it a page turner - easy to get into and quick to finish. But conversely, the continuous action combined with the short length of story leaves little time for character development. The entire story only covers a couple of days and there is little introspection. So there was little opportunity for the characters to truly develop or for me to foster an emotional attachment to them. Without that emotional connection, Li-Lin seemed like a bit of a goody two shoes. I was interested in the story but not truly captivated. On a side note, the blow-by-blow transcription of the martial arts fights also failed to convey the action or emotional stakes to the full potential.

Another point of contention was that the tone felt strongly modern not historical. Again, this was not due to any blatant anachronism. But something in the language itself, the words, the structure, that felt completely twenty-first century American; not nineteenth century Chinese. It is possible that this was done to have a greater mass appeal. The author does mention at the end that he Americanized certain things such as units of measure. So perhaps it was intentional. But I craved a richer historical experience. It had the framework for it, but did not delve deeper. For example, I was surprised that the story was not set a few years forward to coincide with the 1906 San Francisco earthquake. It would have fit perfectly with the storyline and still allowed the use of the historical facts that were mentioned such as the Chinese Exclusion Act.

I also wanted more of the historical tension that was only alluded to. This goes along with my comments above about not reaching out on an emotional level. It didn't have to be a hard-hitting literary work, but it could have used more depth.

Although this was labeled as adult fiction, it had a distinctive young adult feeling to it. Part of that might be due to this being a coming of age story and following the typical bildungsroman plotline. But beyond that, despite the main character being twenty-three and already a widow, she seemed like a young teenager. And the writing itself had the minimalism so common in YA books. Additionally, she is referred to as a girl (not woman) both in the title and frequently throughout the story. I am not sure why so many modern books feature a title using the word "girl" in reference to adult women, but I would guess it is just to capitalize on the popularity of books like The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, Gone Girl, and The Girl on the Train. Still whether it is intentional or not, the trend is getting tiresome.

Finally, this was a short book (only 288 pages), however the font was very small. It would have been a more pleasant reading experience if the book had added a few more pages and used a bigger font.

I am interested to see what M.H. Boroson writes in the future. I appreciated the author's note at the end of the book encouraging others to learn about different cultures; good fiction should inspire people to seek further knowledge. 

I do wish they would leave this book as a stand-alone, although it looks like they won't. Since I first picked this book up, Goodreads has added (Xian Li-lin, #1) after the title, a sure sign that a sequel is in the works. Oh well.


RATING FACTORS:
Ease of Reading: 4 Stars
Writing Style: 3 Stars
Character Development: 2 Stars
Plot Structure: 3 Stars
Attention to Detail: 4 Stars (referring to the research of the mythology and culture not the overall historical details)
Originality: 5 Stars

RECOMMENDATIONS: If you liked this book, try The Ghost Bride.

Sunyi Dean

I guess there's something wrong with me, because I didn't enjoy this book even though it is extremely popular and well-received. And where other people praised the author for the research they did in writing a book outside of their own culture, I found various things jarring. 

The setting is cool and the premise appealed to me a lot, and I'm on a bingefest of Chinese ghost fiction at the moment, but despite a strong start, I nearly didn't finish. 

A lot of subtle things bugged me about the interaction. For example, characters were constantly talking about face. I thought about why this bugged me, and talked to some other Asian friends about it, and here's the thing: I don't think I have EVER heard anyone mention 'face' directly in conversation. Yes it is an important concept in Chinese culture and other Asian cultures too, and can shape everything from day to day interactions to large political decisions (governments not wanting to lose face or look weak etc). But we don't tend to reference it directly. 

The characters here are constantly talking about face, though, in a way I find really weird. Li Lin frequently remarks *in dialogue* on whether something will cause her to gain or lose face, to the person whom she's conversing with. This would be the English equivalent of me saying "Oh wow, you didn't find my joke funny. I will have lost social standing with you!" 
Consider how odd this sounds in English, and likewise how odd it would sound for the Asian characters to constantly be remarking "You will gain much face for doing this to me!" (Nota bene: I probably woudlnt' have complained if the MC thought constantly about face in her own internal thoughts; very specifically, what makes me baulk is that it's frequently dropped into out-loud dialogue.)

The naming conventions were quite odd, and I won't say they didn't work so much as they maybe needed more explanation. Why is the gangster named Bok Choy? Someone hangs a lantern on it by saying it's unusual but I think it maybe needed a little more to it. Like Carrot in Terry Pratchett's novel; his name is a thing, a joke, and we get both an explanation for *why* it is his name along with why nobody ever makes fun of him for it. 

Other name things: A surprising amount of Chinese characters have non Chinese names, with not much explanation offered. Li Lin supposedly doesn't have fluent English, but she calls Tom Wong "Tom" and I thought that unusual; I would expect her, in that time period and with her background, to use his Chinese name. Or to at least mention it, or maybe just to highlight the fact that Tom has deliberately chosen a Western name, or... something lol. 

Li Lin's deceased husband is named Rocket, and I spent too long wondering whether that was English, or a Chinese name that for some reason was translated directly when other Chinese names weren't. (Frex, Gene Wolfe wrote a Roman setting where all the names were translated, including cities, so Athens became the City of Thought.) No one seems to find it unusual, either way. 


But ultimately, while these things annoyed me, they're not the key reason for my poor review. As with all things, I'm a structure whore, and in the end it was the narrative structure itself that bothered me. 

In short: Li Lin mostly fails. By which I mean, she does things and they don't work. She makes plans, and they crumble. She fights but usually loses. She tries to avert disaster and either escalates it, causes herself delays, or is wholly ineffectual and it happens regardless. 

Characters shouldn't succeed all the time or they feel overpowered and dull, but the reverse is also true. When a character fails constantly and continuously at almost every hurdle, it starts to feel like they're just spinning their wheels while things happen around them. It got to the point where for every single conflict, I was just tiredly waiting for her to cock it up, which she inevitably seemed to, only to get bailed out in some fashion by the eyeball spirit (which WAS cool, I will grant) or her father, or some other character, or luck.

###

Dean Koontz talks about the difference between delay and complication in narratives, and gives this example (I'm paraphrasing)). Say you're accused of murder, and only one person can clear your name. You go to her house, but she's not at home and has gone to the mall; so you go to the mall, but she's just left and you've missed her, and so on. 

Say instead that you're accused of murder and only one person can clear your name. You go to her house... and find her dead. Now the police are on their way, you're accused of two murders, and NO one can clear your name. 

The first example is DELAY: the solution is in sight, but artificially removed from the MC by the author dossing around. The second example is COMPLICATION: the problems are multiplying. 

A lot of the narrative structure in GHOST EYES (this book) felt like delay. Instead of succeeding in her goals, and then inadvertently creating new problems, she failed in her goals. That failure rarely incurred new consequences for her and instead mostly functioned to move the goal posts further away. The solution to the plot problems are X: she didn't manage it. Now the solution is Y: she chases after that, doesn't manage it. 

In the end, both her failures and successes felt anaemic and without stakes as a result. 

I hope I don't sound like I'm beating a dead horse but I'm wanting to be clear on what is a very subtle structural issue that was bothering me in the book. 

###

I won't say that you shouldn't read this book. Lots of people clearly liked it so I'm probably off base. But it didn't work for me on lots of different levels.

Nickie Mohler

I received a copy of this book from Edelweiss in exchange for an honest review. Li-Lin is the daughter of a Daoshi exorcist. She has also been cursed with yin eyes (she can see spirits). When someone dies, they have 49 days to cross over, or they are stuck in the spirit world in limbo. A friend of her dead husband's comes to seek her help with a man she has never met. The man's friend needs a passport to cross over and he has been dead for 48 days. She wants to wait for her father, but time is short. She decides to take it to him. Her husband's friend wouldn't harm her. Would he? This book was really unique and different from what I usually read, but it was a really good book.

The Girl with Ghost Eyes: The Daoshi Chronicles, Book One

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