The fantastical meets the personal in Sunyi Dean’s highly anticipated second novel, The Girl With a Thousand Faces. Dean’s worldbuilding remains as rich and vivid as in her debut, The Book Eaters, but this time she takes readers to 20th-century Hong Kong, and into an alternate reality where ghosts walk among the living.
In the wake of World War II, Hong Kong is rife with unhappy spirits. In Kowloon Walled City, Hong Kong’s slum sector, only the control of an organization known as the Snakeskin triad keeps the living safe among the dead. Mercy Chan, a 50-something auntie, works for the triad as a ghost-talker. Alongside her ghost cat, Bao, Mercy is tasked with dispelling the ghastly and gruesome spirits that infest Kowloon.
Unlike other exorcists, Mercy has an uncanny ability to actually communicate with the dead, and her sympathy for them makes her an anomaly—and extremely good at her job. When a mysterious spirit with unprecedented power begins to terrorize her city, she rises to the challenge. However, she soon learns that she isn’t facing a test of ability, but a test of memory and responsibility.
The Girl With a Thousand Faces wears the mask of adventure with a Ghostbusters premise, but hidden behind is a tale of war. For the second section of the novel, Dean jumps back in time and immerses readers in the terror of Japan’s WWII occupation of Hong Kong, and a mother and daughter’s desperate escape from the city. The story is complicated by the integration of ghosts into the wartime landscape—a particular delight of this novel is Dean’s imagination of how ghosts might’ve participated in the war, or been born from it.
Mercy Chan’s story opens the novel, but it is contextualized within a larger story of disaster and familial betrayal. When ghosts can not only speak, but run and swim and kill, Dean puts pressure on the question of how we can possibly lay our ghosts to rest, especially in a world torn open by war. The Girl With a Thousand Faces contains the joys of quintessential fantasy, but, perhaps more importantly, it offers a serious, intimate look at trauma and reconciliation.