The hunger we pass down

This lush and eerie exploration of intergenerational trauma from Lee (Superfan) finds Chinese Canadian Alice Chow attempting to juggle running a business out of her home, having primary custody of her two kids, and developing a relationship with a handsome bartender, all while increasingly drinking too much from the stress. So when she starts waking up to find her home cleaned, her products packed for shipping, and food already waiting for her children, it feels like a miracle, though her theory that she herself is doing all this work while drunk or sleeping and then forgetting about it is thin, even in her own mind. She also can't remember conversations that her boyfriend swears they had; her daughter's night terrors worsen; and her ex-nanny sees Alice transform into something monstrous. Whoever--or whatever--has been helping Alice has its own agenda, and it's not satisfied living only half her life. Lee effortlessly shifts between dual timelines, twining the little agonies of modern-day motherhood with flashbacks to the struggles of Alice's ancestors. After the subtle creeping dread built through the bulk of the novel, an abrupt late-narrative shift into more traditional supernatural action feels jarring. Still, Lee's exploration of the love--and misery--of family is nuanced and emotional. It's a haunting excursion. (Sept.)

The legacy of one house in Hong Kong haunts a woman in Vancouver, British Columbia, and her teenage daughter. In 1938, when kidnappers steal 13-year-old Gigi off the street in Hong Kong and lock her inside Nam Koo Terrace, she finds that the ghosts of several young women--a daughter, a mistress, and a maid--already haunt the halls. The palatial estate turned brothel is a prison for the living and the dead. Decades later, in Vancouver, Gigi's great-granddaughter Alice begins losing time. A single mother of two who owns and operates her own cloth-diaper business, Alice has a lot of irons in the fire. She turns to alcohol to self-medicate, a symptom even her bartender situationship, Jas, notices. Maybe, she thinks, the booze is why she can't remember packing orders for shipping, or completing her neglected housework, or telling Jas she's ready to take things to the next level the way he wants. Unbeknownst to Alice, her 14-year-old daughter, Luna, who has always suffered from night terrors, is having dreams of Nam Koo Terrace. Meanwhile, Luna's former nanny, Pinky, who still lives downstairs, notices a change in Alice--a change that could mean a monster from Pinky's past has finally caught up to her. Lee's novel is a claustrophobic tale told on an epic scale. Sections detailing the realities of Gigi's life as a comfort woman are handled gracefully, without being either lurid or vague. Alice's mother and grandmother step in as point-of-view characters late in the novel, completing the chain of women whose lives the ghosts of Nam Koo Terrace forever altered. Each woman's story is as captivating--and each character as rounded--as the next. Lee has written a genuinely frightening story of rape, abuse, and neglect. A bold story of intergenerational trauma that creates spooky scares out of real-life atrocities. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.