Black Water Sister

 Black Water Sister by Zen Cho, 384 pages.

Jessamyn Teoh is a closeted recent college graduate living at home with her parents. When they decide to move back home to Malaysia, a country she left when she was a toddler, she goes with them. After all, what does she have to lose? Once she gets there she is thoroughly haunted by her dead grandmother and pulled into a world of gods and ghosts, where the questions of what she has to lose and what she can bear to give up become more pressing then ever.

This was a solid book, although for some reason (which I suspect is entirely personal taste) it never quite managed to grab me. My only concrete criticism is that there is a lot of Hokkien and it's not always very clear from context what it means. But it was definitely still interesting, and I hadn't previously known very much about Taoism, so it was really cool to see fantasy pulling on some new influences. I'm definitely excited to see what everyone else thought of this book at Orcs and Aliens next week.