GHOST FOREST

... moving debut... Woven throughout are stories from the narrator's mother and grandmother, whose tales about their family provide both historical context and levity. The bracing fragments and poignant vignettes come together to make a stunning and evocative whole. Read more...

Italian: Il Saggiatore

Like a Chinese ink painting, every line in Pik-Shuen Fung's Ghost Forest is full of movement and spirit, revealing the resilient threads of matrilineal history and the inheritance of stories and silences. With humor, compassion, and clear-eyed prose, Fung reminds us that grief, memory, and history are never linear but always alive. Fung writes about the questions we forget to ask, the stories that are hidden from us, and the complex acts of care at the core of family. She reminds us that what is unspoken is never lost. Ghost Forest is an intimate act of recording and reckoning. It trusts us to listen. It shows us all the languages for love.

A valuable addition to the growing canon of work providing fresh views on the North American immigrant experience.

In this profound tribute to grief and growing up a child of immigrants, Pik-Shuen Fung harnesses the story of an unnamed protagonist who has recently lost her father. While she and her father lived between oceans for most of her life, the main character struggles with the memories she does have. Haunted by a slew of feelings she doesn't know what to do with, the question remains: how does one survive grief in a family that doesn't talk about their feelings?

Pik-Shuen Fung's debut novel is slim but powerful. In scattered fragments and vignettes, our unnamed narrator paints a slow, tender portrait of her father, whose recent death she's still processing. Her family left Hong Kong for Vancouver when she was just 3, but her father stayed behind for fear of not being able to find work, and their relationship grew strained over the course of their few visits each year. Now she's left trying to understand and make peace with a ghost. She turns to her mother and grandmother to fill the gaps, weaving their memories with hers in this elegiac account of familial love.

Several summers ago, I read Zinzi Clemmons' What We Lose in a single afternoon, and reading Pik-Shuen Fung's debut felt like a welcome replica of that day. Grief is complicated enough, but the protagonist is grieving her "astronaut" father (he stayed in Hong Kong to work while his family immigrated to Vancouver) who was often critical of and confused by his westernized daughter. Composed of vignettessome of which span generations, some of which made me laugh out loud, many of which gave me Very Strong FeelsGhost Forest is the tender/funny book we can all appreciate after a hellish year.

There is joy and tenderness in what's missed, and Fung's elegant storytelling accomplishes a lot with deceptively little.

Straddling East and West, this slim, delicate novel peels back the tensions among one Chinese family as they migrate between Hong Kong and Vancouver... Fung's prose is its own calligraphy - blank spaces balanced against terse vignettes, evoking the wisdom of the Cantonese proverb 'Trees want to be still, but the wind won't stop blowing.'

Evocative... expansive and rich... rendered with such grace and clarity. An intimate portrait... of the countries she has lived in and the distances between them, the way absences can accrete into something exerting its own gravity, the power of history and heritage known and unknown, the impact of words spoken and unspoken, and how love and longing can grow entwined from the same roots.

In this profound tribute to grief and growing up a child of immigrants, Pik-Shuen Fung harnesses the story of an unnamed protagonist who has recently lost her father. While she and her father lived between oceans for most of her life, the main character struggles with the memories she does have. Haunted by a slew of feelings she doesn't know what to do with, the question remains: how does one survive grief in a family that doesn't talk about their feelings?

At the center of this intricately plotted debut is a daughter with questions about her father after his death. Her search, both complex and devastating, yields revelations about family, grief, and the durability of love.

With a single line, you can paint the ocean," says an art teacher in Ghost Forest, as apt a description as any for Pik-Shuen Fung's sparse, gorgeous, devastating debut novel. Here, silences speak. Brilliant and pitiless at first, Ghost Forest mutates in the reader's hand, until it shimmers with grace and unexpected humor. A mercurial meditation on love and family.

Seemingly spare yet undeniably dense with so much unsaid, Fung's polyphonic first novel is a magnificent literary triumph.

Made by an artist who angles her mirror to make room for the faces of others, Pik-Shuen Fung's Ghost Forest resembles a xieyi painting, a place where white space and absence are as important as color and life. At once an elegy to all that's been lost between countries, languages, generations, and a quietly urgent call to love what we have. Inventive, funny, and devastating.

In Ghost Forest, Pik-Shuen Fung gives us a family so aching with tenderness, so incandescent with grief and love, that reading about them felt like reading about my own deepest and most secret longings and regrets. This is a book to break your heart and then fill it to bursting again. What an exquisite, glorious debut.

Ghost Forest is a debut certain to turn your heart. With a dexterity and style all her own, Pik-Shuen Fung renders the many voices that make up a family, as well as the mythologies we create for those we know, and those we wish we knew better. I am madly in love with this book, a kaleidoscopic wonder.

Spare, elegiac... Told in shimmering fragments - a beautiful reflection of the way memories surface in the mind - Ghost Forest deals with the sticky stuff that makes up a life: love and loss and frustration and regret. It's never maudlin, and often funny. It is a beautiful reminder of the power of forgiveness and empathy toward those we love.