Summer Hauntings

Jessamyn is broke after graduating and decides to move back to Malaysia— a place she hasn’t been since she was small— to live with family and try to figure things out. At her aunt’s house, she tries to be sociable with her aunt’s friends and manage her expectations for what she wants for herself compared to familial expectations (like their expectation for her to be straight compared to her having an actual girlfriend). Welp, all that takes a back seat once her granny low key possess her. Turns out her grandmother was a medium when she was alive and the avatar for the Black Water Sister deity. Now she wants Jessamyn to get involved in a world of gods, ghosts, and gangsters to avenge the Sister’s honor. Mess only begins to describe it.

Twenty-two year old Winnie is working as an English teacher in Saigon and believes herself to be as unremarkable as beige wallpaper (literally! bless). She only hopes her ineptitude in all things, especially English, isn’t found out by her colleagues. Well, one day she suddenly goes missing, and from the circumstances of her disappearance unfurl the history of Vietnam. Kupersmith shows how Winnie is connected to another Vietnamese girl who went missing decades before through ghosts, ancestors, and colonialism. The story weaves in and out of the past and the present, connecting things like French expatriates, kids sent to boarding schools, zoos, colonial mansions, and tales of revenge.

Mr. and Mrs. Cho just started getting more business for their restaurant in Hawai’i and they’re feeling pretty well about things. Until a video of their son, who moved to South Korea to teach English, goes viral. In it, he tries to cross the Korean demilitarized zone into North Korea. Suspicion immediately falls on the Chos and their restaurant sales drop. What no one knows is that their son Jacob has been possessed by the ghost of his grandfather who now desperately wants to get back to the family he left behind. As Jacob is detained, his sister Grace slips more into her drug use, and the Chos don’t know what will become of their family or their business. As serious as all this sounds, I promise the book actually has a good dose of humor.