GHOST FOREST is such an important book, touching on deep themes in a careful, haunting way. The writer’s masterful use of language artfully crafts a story that will enrich the thinking of anyone who reads it.

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This is a book full of short, beautiful, haunting vignettes into the experiences of three generations. The amount of heart put into each word and thought sticks with you and it never lets go of your attention. This looks like a relationship with her family and a good and bad that comes with each experience and interaction. I absolutely love this and I think it’s a beautiful work of art.

I received a complimentary copy of this book through NetGalley. Opinions expressed in this review are completely my own.

This is a gem of a collection, focusing on a Chinese family with divided lives. The narrator recounts her memories of her father, a hard, unemotional man who remains in Hong Kong to work while sending his family to Canada. After his death, the narrator questions her father's intentions and beliefs, and his treatment of her and the rest of the family. This is a meditation on grief and the loss of a parent, and is poignant and moving in its honesty and depiction of the complexity of emotions an adult child has when a parent dies. I recommend it highly.

Between this and "Crying in H Mart," I feel as if I've unintentionally lined myself up for the best of Sadness in Grief while Asian Literature for 2021. Ghost Forest feels like it was formatted for the pandemic-stressed attention span, with brief but descriptive chapters illustrating the author's relationship with her parents. I thought it was fascinating to learn about funerary rites in Hong Kong, balanced out by learning of wedding traditions. I was particularly affected by the chapters where the author touches upon saying "I love you" to her parents, as well as the concept of forgiving. This would be great for readers who want to know more about the Hong Kong diaspora, relationships with "astronaut" parents, and experiences of grief. (I received an ARC of this book from the publisher in exchange for my honest opinion.)

Told through a series of vignettes from the perspective of the narrator, her mother, and her grandmother, "Ghost Forest" is an emotional story of love and grief in a culture that does not typically express either of those feelings.

In this story, the narrator describes the relationship she has with her "astronaut" father-- a father who lives and works in Hong Kong while the rest of his family is in Canada. We follow the course of her relationship with him as she navigates childhood, school, and a career choice that ultimately seems to disappoint, no matter how successful she is. Your heart will break along with hers as she repeatedly tries to make her father proud of her.

For anyone who has experienced a less-than-ideal relationship with their father or grew up in a culture where saying, "I love you" is taboo, this will resonate deeply. As the narrator documents the emotional loss of her father, she cannot help but remember how much she seemed to let him down. Though he tries until the very end to make amends with his family for his lack of affection, it is human nature to hold onto bad memories; the sharp pain they inflict tends to mask any semblance of happier ones. Fung perfectly captures this phenomenon.

This book was so easy to get hooked on, and I didn't want to put it down. Because of the short, straight-to-the-point chapters, you can sit down and tell yourself, "just one more" until it's over. I highly recommend this and look forward to more from Fung; her writing style is effortlessly poignant, which is hard to pull off.

Many thanks to Netgalley and One World Publishing for the advanced digital copy.

I thought I knew what I was getting into when I began reading “Ghost Forest” by Pik-Shuen Fung, but I fully admit that I had no idea. It started off as a book with curious vignettes that provided glimpses into the lives of many family members within one immigrant family living in Canada from Hong Kong. Instead, “Ghost Forest,” went beyond my wildest expectations and proves to be a beautiful, heartbreaking testament to what it’s like to love and to mourn and to reflect.

There were so many pages here that made me begin to sob and sometimes I knew why and sometimes I didn't.
Growing up Asian is not a universal experience, but the relationship that the author has with her father and grandmother really hit the nail on the head for me. Honestly, I recently read Eat a Peach, which is also about the author's personal experience, and it approached a similar Asian parent-child relationship but lacked the emotional intelligence that this author brought to the subject. This book said everything about having an Asian parent that Eat a Peach did not say. I would definitely recommend this book and really appreciated it, I think it is an important one to have out there in the world.

GHOST FOREST is a beautiful book that I enjoyed very much.

Written in a literary style, GHOST FOREST is composed of vignettes that show various slices of life. These vignettes are tender and genuine and serve to draw the reader in. Because they are quite short, at first, I found the narrative a bit choppy. However, I was very invested in the family and what happened to them. Within time, I settled into the flow and wasn't bothered at all by what I'd previously viewed as choppiness.

Recommended for fans of "quiet" literary fiction.

Well written in short thoughts, Ghost Forest captures the imagination of a Chinese-Canadian family between Hong Kong and Vancouver. Thinking of the "astronaut families" of the late 90s and early 2000s, Ghost Forest captures what it means to be a family and managing cultural expectations from two different continents. An exceptional read for those interested in cultural differences, values, and family drama.

One section in Pik-Shuen Fung's book describes how Chinese ink painting artists would leave areas of the paper blank "because they felt empty space was as important as form, that absence was as important as presence." I felt like that artistic ethos applied to this beautiful debut novel as a whole.

A portrait of grief emerges from a collection of small vignettes and perspectives from the narrator, her mother, and grandmother. The quiet stories mourning her father and musing on complicated inter-family dynamics tugged at my heart. It was a potent but sparing novel, with short phrases set across expanses of blank page and small chapters separating the narration into bite sized packages. This form shaped the story in the reader's mind as we reflected on the spaces in the narration. The absence of her father was felt through the language itself and underscored the narrator's grief in a way much more effective than any words she might have been able to write down. The lack of words itself caught my empathy - how many times do we think there are just no words to express how we feel?

Many thanks to Random House Publishing Group/One World for providing me the ARC through NetGalley.

I absolutely loved this book. Told in little vignettes, some chapters are only a paragraph long, but pack serious punch of emotion. The narrator's father has passed and through stories of her father, mother and grandparent's their lives are told. The emotion is subtle but heartbreaking and the last chapter had me in tears. A truly moving and beautiful story.

Book Review for Ghost Forest by Pik-Shuen Fung
Full review for this title can be found at: @fyebooks on Instagram!