Review: She is a Haunting

 

    So once in a while there will be a detail at the beginning of a book that sort of sets me against it and I can just never get over it, and that happened here. Basically the entire premise of the book is that the main character, Jade, has to go stay with her dad in Vietnam in the French colonial house he’s renovating so that he’ll pay for her tuition at UPenn. She explains that she’s lied to her mom that tuition is fully covered when in fact it’s actually still around $30,000 for her freshman year, but she doesn’t want her mom to have to take out loans, and that she has no money for her own tuition because it all went to school application fees.

    So, I happen to have some quasi-personal experience with this, because my girlfriend actually goes to UPenn and most of her tuition is covered by financial aid. I actually directly asked her how much financial aid a student coming from a family with three children raised by a single mother who works 72 hours a week at a nail salon might expect. She said that that sounds similar to a friend’s background, and this friend gets tuition completely covered, plus a refund sufficient to cover off-campus housing. So, you know. Not $30,000. At some point in the book (long after I was already incredibly irritated by this inaccurate information) Jade mentioned that the problem was that her parents weren’t legally divorced. Which I guess kind of muddies the water? A bit? But she also repeatedly talks about how her dad doesn’t pay any child support. I happen to know that Penn also has specific processes for students in situations like this. At the very least, she could have tried those processes, instead of just immediately jumping on the terrible-idea-lying-to-her-entire-family bandwagon. Or she could have considered not attending Penn?? Like state schools are so inexpensive for in-state students (and can confirm that my personal experience at a state school has been much more supportive, healthy, and enjoyable than my girlfriend’s experience at UPenn). She never actually says any reason that she wants to attend UPenn specifically so badly. And I just happen to find the entire social fixation on and Ivy League education being so superior and more important incredibly frustrating.

    Also, there’s just no way that application fees and a sibling’s club fees would take up two full summers working at Walmart. I think I could have covered a decent chunk of my application fees with the money I made working almost-minimum wage for a month before I got burned out, and I applied to like ten schools. Not to mention that fee waivers are a thing that she apparently didn’t bother requesting. So as you can tell I was just already so irritated by the whole premise of the book and the inaccurate, completely lacking in nuance approach to the college education process. But I did try to give the rest of the book a chance.

    Unfortunately, I didn’t really find anything to recommend the remainder, either. The writing was really confusing at parts, and the horror elements weren’t remotely scary, mostly just weird. Like for instance, a ghost with a long distended stretched neck could potentially be scary visualized (hard maybe), but in writing form it was really hard to take seriously. And the actual supernatural elements of the plot were really difficult to follow. I would go into more detail, but I can’t actually follow any of the threads long enough to put them together into a particular complaint. There were so many pieces that didn’t really fit together in any meaningful way. And the ending was also incredibly unsatisfying in terms of relationships, characterization, and plot. Overall just not a compelling read at all.