Set in San Francisco's Chinatown in 1898, the "girl" of the title is Li-Lin, a young widow whose father is a great exorcist who provides protection for one of the major Tongs. Li-Lin herself has both sorcerous and martial arts training, but her father is a master. One day a man comes to her father's temple and asks her to perform a task in her father's absence, but then he betrays her to set a trap for her father. Once she figures out how to escape from the spirit world, she must protect Chinatown against the planned attack by a sorcerer with a grudge against her father.
I enjoy reading about magic from other traditions, so that appealed to me about this story. Of course, the built-in social assumptions of 1890s immigrant Chinese society greatly differ from what I'm used to, and I appreciate that the author tried to balance explaining taboos, insults, and other assumptions without lecturing, but sometimes it wasn't terribly smooth--I kept thinking about the book's narrative rather than being caught up in it. The author provides some notes at the back about how he condensed various histories and traditions so that he could tell his story.
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