Sunyi Dean’s The Girl With A Thousand Faces is a ghost story that has haunted its characters for generations. In this story, it’s not only the grief and trauma that linger. The dead stick around, and they have a story to tell.
The walled city of Kowloon sits in the shadow of Hong Kong, home to nefarious dealings and a ton of ghosts. The Snakeskin triad runs the haunted city, and their ghost talker, Mercy Chan, is the only one who can help the unsettled spirits on their way. A woman with no memories of her past, Mercy has found a home among the haphazard Kowloon streets, talking to ghosts, and is happy enough to have steady meals accounted for and a roof over her head. But when a demon begins killing Kowloon citizens, a Hong Kong council member leaps on an opportunity to destroy the disreputable city once and for all. At the behest of the triad, Mercy must find this demon before the city is lost. But her search begins to uncover many secrets, ones that reveal who Mercy really is.
Overall, I found The Girl With a Thousand Faces to be an ambitious tale that gets to the heart of the ravages of war. The paranormal aspect in the story gives Dean a runway to explore the devastation as the living and the dead occupy the same spaces. There are manifestations of ghosts stuck in their death throes in this story, but Dean does so much more to capture the literal and figurative hauntings that the living are dealing with. Throughout it all, Dean showcases how deep the trauma runs, generation after generation, affecting both the dead and living. I like how the ghosts often represent a symbol for violence and trauma. Instead of a character struggling internally with horrors or an entire population “moving on” from a war-torn era, Dean manifests ghosts as a visible, inescapable reminder that bad things happened and that their effects are still evident in the present. You can’t escape your ghosts or past, and it’s no easy thing to confront a haunting. But Dean also shows the healing that comes from acknowledging and addressing the ghosts, so that a new, and hopefully better, cycle can begin.
While I found the story to be a unique, haunting, heartbreaking account of war’s lingering trauma, it had a strange structure and POV shifts that really affected my enjoyment of the book overall. The Girl With a Thousand Faces opens in the present day, 1975, with Mercy Chan. Her chapters are told from a third-person limited POV: “Mercy breathed deeply,” “Mercy talked to,” “Mercy said,” etc. But then the record scratches, and we go back in time to “where it all began.” The book essentially starts over to give you the details of a young woman’s past, which progresses and leads you back to where we met Mercy in the present. However, when the book jumps back in time, the story is not told from the young woman’s perspective. These chapters are told from a goddess who recounts the story from a third-person omniscient POV: “You grow up here,” “You felt this way,” “Your mother said,” etc. Overall, I didn’t love this choice and don’t really understand why the young woman could not have told her own story like Mercy did. The goddess’s perspective is fine when we’re in the throes of the past, but it gets weird when the two stories converge, and you have Mercy being an active agent in her story, and then we switch to another POV that is told from a distant, uninvolved deity.
And while the story structure in itself is not new, its execution didn’t quite land, resulting in the weaker segments drowning under the weight of the more poignant portions. There were many parts of the story near the cusp of the two timelines converging that repeated dialogue and details from the present day that we had already lived through. So the other POV didn’t always add to the story in later chapters, and I would get annoyed going through the same scenes I had already read.
However, there is a portion of this book that was really strong, and it’s the section that I enjoyed the most. This portion occurs right when we first jump back to the past, and the goddess recounts the life of a young girl growing up in Hong Kong during World War II. Her early life and the ghosts haunting her mother were incredibly compelling. We first meet her as a young girl dealing with a cold, distant mother, and how follow them as their lives slowly fall apart as the war threatens their home. This part of the book is where the horror elements really shine. The young woman’s story is a slow build that breeds despair and waterlogged uncomfortability. It culminates so strongly at one horrific point that I physically recoiled from the terrifying reveal Dean eventually delivers. It’s a scene that pops into my head to this day, and I still get chills.
The Girl With a Thousand Faces is certainly the most interesting story I’ve read this year. Its anti-war themes were powerfully resonant, and the ideas and concepts did a lot to enhance the atmosphere of the story, even when the execution sometimes fell a little short. Dean took a big swing with this one, and while the hits were all over the place, I still appreciated and enjoyed having read something totally strange, haunting, and unlike anything else out there.
Rating: The Girl with a Thousand Faces – 6.5/10
-Brandee
I received an ARC of this book in exchange for an unbiased review. The thoughts on this story are my own.
