I was drawn to this one for the cover and the title. I found myself really feeling for both father and daughter in this troubled relationship. While I appreciated Ghost Forest, I was left slightly underwhelmed with the writing and the overall flow. It felt like a rough draft almost; I liked it but there could have been so much more substance to it.

First and foremost, thank you to Random House and NetGalley for the eARC of <i>Ghost Forest</i> by Pik-Shuen Fung in exchange for an honest review. I think this year I am still feeling the exhaust from 2020 and there’s a mounting sense of existential dread as I realize that 2021 is not much better off regarding the pandemic and the climate crisis. I have been in a reading funk and it has made me reevaluate the number of books I read despite being dazzled by pretty covers. I simply don’t have the same vigor towards reading that I once had and I hope it changes soon.

I sought out this book a while ago because the cover is gorgeous and I have been reading a lot of Asian authors lately. Penguin Random House has a lot of great titles so it was natural for me to seek out <i>Ghost Forest</i>. Once I finally sat down and read it, I was surprised at the poetry and vignettes that make up this book. It’s a non-traditional novel in the way that it’s not heavy-handed on the prose which works excellent for me.

Immediately we are transported into the narrator’s world of Hong Kong immigrants relocating to Vancouver while her father stays behind in Hong Kong to work for the family. It details her family’s life in Vancouver as well as their history before the move. About halfway into the book, the narrator’s father becomes sick and much of the book after that is about forgiveness, grief, and familial love or belonging. I found this profound yet easy to relate to as I dealt with a similar situation this year with the death of my grandmother.

In most cases, death has a way of forcing us to look at our relationships with family members, particularly those we are not on the best terms with. I was able to understand the narrator’s sense of guilt once her father passed away and she asked herself why she only remembered the bad moments instead of the good.

All in all, this is a nice book for those of us who are looking for something that doesn’t require too much thought. I hope that doesn’t come off like a bad thing but with the amount of fatigue in the world right now, I think that being able to sink into a book as easy-going as this one makes for a gratifying experience.

A book of lovely writing and lyrical prose. Heart-breaking and sad, this tale is more a series of vignettes and memories – almost like a journal or diary – than a novel. It felt very real and genuine – not like fiction at all. It’s a huge compliment to this debut author’s skill that she made me forget that I was not reading an actual, factual account, but something created out of whole cloth from the Pik-Shuen Fung’s imagination.

Recommended for lovers of literary fiction and book club fans.

Unsure if Ghost Forest is for you? Listen to a sample at https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/665652/ghost-forest-by-pik-shuen-fung/. And don’t miss the Discussion Questions available at http://www.randomhousebooks.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/FUNG_GhostForest_HC_DG_FINAL.pdf.

A big thank you to Pik-Shuen Fung, Random House’s One World imprint, and NetGalley for providing a complimentary Advanced Reader Copy in exchange for this honest review.

To grab a copy of Ghost Forest for yourself, head on over to www.BookShop.org – the online bookstore that gives 75% of each book’s profit margin back to independent bookshops. Find yours at https://bookshop.org/lists/best-fiction-of-2021.

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A portrait of a woman trying to understand a father who is always at a distance, both physically and emotionally. Really beautiful, deceptively spare novel about family and loss. Moving in a way I didn't expect. The book feels honest and vulnerable.

This was such a great book. Thank you to the publisher for sending me this copy in exchange of an honest review. This was a quick yet powerful read told through short prose sessions that the author recounts memories throgh.

Grieving is a tough process for all, but the author touches on grief from a family that never shares or talks about feelings. The author goes through different memories from her family's time living in Canada as the father stays behind in Hong Kong to continue working. The author shares information about her family, choices in life, and how generations of families, including hers, handled moving away from their fathers for a better life.

The prose was rich, quickly paced, but full of deep emotion and a raw look into a Chinese Canadian astronaut family, as they are called. I felt like I was able to relate to the author even though we have not lived similar lives at all. Maybe grief is different for everyone, but maybe we also have common threads tying us all together.

PICK UP GHOST FOREST BY PIK-SHUEN FUNG IF YOU WANT:⁣
🌺 Something to finish in one sitting⁣
🌺 A heart-breaking glimpse at one’s honest emotions as she grapples with losing a loved one⁣
🌺 A unique reading experience (in terms of format)⁣
🌺 To cry and feel pain lol⁣
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Ghost Forest is a short book pieced together by poetic memories. As our unnamed narrator reflects on her life growing up far away from her father, we see her struggle with the fact that he, whom she does not have a close relationship with, is dying.⁣
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This felt so much like a memoir, I kept forgetting it’s not a true story. Pik-Shuen Fung captures so well the complicated feelings of grieving a weak relationship and losing someone who is almost like a stranger. There was a lot our main character didn’t know about her dad, due to distance and cultural differences, and it was almost like … feeling sadness for unspoken feelings and time she’ll never get to spend with him.⁣
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Translating my reaction into words is difficult because … well, how do you address the fact that it seems like something is missing from the story, but that’s pretty much the point? My inclination, after finishing this book, was to ask for more between the narrator and her father so I could understand their relationship a little better—but how can I request something that doesn’t exist? I think this is the feeling the author may be communicating. I haven’t lost anyone in this way, fortunately, but my heart responded to this story as if I had.⁣
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If I were to nitpick a bit, it read as if Pik-Shuen Fung was trying to combine multiple stories into one. Some parts captured emotions really well, and I was able to connect with that, but some chapters felt detached from the overall story. While the writing was excellent, I think the story could’ve been better structured. TL;DR — My brain says 3.5 stars, but my heart says 5 🥲

Ghost Forest is a beautifully written debut about grief and loss by Canadian writer Pik-Shuen Fung. As a Chinese American, I gravitated to this book immediately with the word “astronaut” father, where a parent who provides for the family lives and work in another country and sees his own family only once or twice a year.

In this heartfelt and heartbreaking story, I resonated with a family going through loss while not being allowed to express emotions and feelings. The protagonist shares moments of her life through vignettes that were captured through conversations or memories of events – just like our own memories are only a snippet, trying to piece together to create a story, so is this novel’s type of narrative.

A quiet and sparse story about a family going through grief.

DNF at 34%. The short chapters really threw me off and prevented me from getting immersed into the story. The concept of astronaut families is not new to me as I had quite a few friends with this family arrangement while doing my undergrad in Vancouver. Also, choi yung sat ma (Choi Yung lost his horse in Cantonese), where is the second half of this famous Chinese proverb?! 塞翁失馬，焉知非福

Thanks to One World Publishing for an ARC via Netgalley in exchange for an unbiased review.

(cw: death of a parent)

I wasn't expecting to be so moved by Ghost Forest. Fung writes in fragmented chapters, each a separated memory or a continuation of a conversation from the previous chapter. While it seems simplistic on the surface, Ghost Forest didn't read simplistic at all. Rather, this book paints a nuanced portrait of grief and intergenerational relationships for immigrants.

Our narrator is never named, but we find out that she and her family had immigrated to Canada while her father stayed behind in Hong Kong to work—one of many "astronaut" fathers. The reader is moved forward and backwards through time as the narrator begins to weave the story of her complicated relationship with her father and his death, as well as her own subsequent journey to learn from her mother and grandmother questions about her heritage and history before they too disappear.

One particular chapter stood out to me. The narrator says of her father's death: "I was holding his hand, the day he died. It was smooth and bloated, like a glove filled taut with water...After a while, I realized his hand was warm only where I held it. So I held onto his hand with both of my hands, one hand to keep the thumb half warm and one hand to keep the pinky half warm." This scene brings back powerful and painful memories of my mother's death, how my sister, father, and I sat there, rubbing her body to warm it up, feeling her heat dissipate as she left this earth.

I finished Ghost Forest last week and I’m still thinking about it. This book is just under 300 pages and is told in a series of short, reflective vignettes by an unnamed narrator. The prose felt so real and personal that I thought it was a memoir. As it turns out, it’s, uh, actually fictional.

Regardless, it gives a intimate look into a tight-knit, Chinese family who immigrates to Canada in the late 1980s to avoid the political uncertainties of the impending British-to-Chinese handover of Hong Kong. While the narrator and her mom, grandma, and little sister relocate, her dad becomes an “astronaut” parent by staying in Hong Kong and flying to Canada to visit his family once a year.

The author, Pik-Shuen Fung, uses the story to explore themes of love, womanhood, loss and grief, immigration, and generational culture. The writing was wonderful, and the story was emotional, insightful, and thought-provoking. After reading it, I’m highly tempted to grab a copy of my own and I’ll definitely be checking out Fung’s future work.

Thank you to NetGalley and One World Books for the ARC!

Oooof, this book was a total punch in the gut. It is short, and it almost reads as a poem; lyrical and heartbreaking with quick chapters and uniquely short paragraphs. GHOST FOREST is about a family from Hong Kong coming to terms with the impending death of their father, and learning how to grieve within a family that doesn't show emotions or show love to one another in obvious ways. It is a quiet and wrenching depiction of grief, a portrayal of immigration from Hong Kong to Canada, and how discovering stories about your family (particularly the women in your family) can dictate the person who you try to become today.

TL;DR REVIEW:

Ghost Forest is a beautiful, reflective little book on the immigrant experience and the loss of a parent. I thought it was really beautiful.

For you if: You like novels told in vignettes.

FULL REVIEW:

First, thank you One World for the review copy of this book on NetGalley. One World’s books never let me down, and Ghost Forest was no exception.

Sparsely written and told entirely in vignettes, Ghost Forest almost doesn’t even feel like a novel. It’s written as a reflection on the narrator’s experiences as the daughter of an “astronaut father” (one who lived and worked in Hong Kong while his family emigrated elsewhere) and his later death by cancer. It’s also an homage to the women in her family — most particularly, her mother and grandmother, whose stories she became truly curious about only after her father died.

This is a book that would be easy to inhale but begs to be savored. I did read it in one sitting, but I had to force myself to read the words slowly and give each vignette a moment to sit with me before moving to the next one. It’s worth it — if you rush through this book, you’ll get little from it. Its power is in the quiet moments, the in-between unsaid things.

I was particularly struck by the portion of the novel where she describes her father’s funeral. She and her sister experienced their family’s funeral traditions for the first time, trying so desperately to get them right while also processing the loss they’d just endured. It is hard to hold both of those things in your mind at the same time.

There is no plot here, but it doesn’t need it. If you’re a fan of literary fiction or memoir, pick this one up. What an impressive debut.



CONTENT WARNINGS:
Cancer; Death of a parent

The author tells the story of her life, growing up in Canada with her mom and sisters while her father worked in Hong Kong, through short vignettes, a snapshot of a moment in time or a conversation that took place. The writing is simple and straightforward, not flowery or overly analytical. As her father's health deteriorates, the women in the family spend time with him and each other, learning about the past and how it has shaped them into who they are today.

Published on The Book Slut: https://www.thebookslut.com/post/ghost-forest-by-pik-shuen-fung

“And she thinks of a Cantonese saying: Trees want to be still, but the wind won’t stop blowing. When children want to care for their parents, it’s already too late.”

Pik-Shuen Fung’s compelling and mesmerizing debut novel Ghost Forest begins with the narrator saying ‘Hi Dad’ to a bird, twenty-one days after her father has died. The story follows this young woman’s grief journey—vacillating between different time periods, excavating memories, bringing on key witnesses.

The narrator and her family lived in Hong Kong until just before the 1997 Handover, when Britain transferred sovereignty of the region to China. Her family moves to Vancouver, Canada when she is not yet school age, but her father stays in Hong Kong to continue to work. They are an ‘astronaut family,’ as the term came to be known, with the astronaut father flying between countries.

This history, and theme of separation, acts as a backdrop and touchpoint to much of the narrator’s life. The novel spans decades and occasionally switches narration to her mother or grandmother—invoking the generational ties that reach back in the past to inform the future, her present. Fung explores the familial memories of emotional remove, another type of disconnection, though the Handover is the catalyst for the constant feeling of separation the narrator has from her father. The space between them physically and emotionally haunts her personal memories and is evoked in the blank spaces of the novel itself.

“They left large areas of the paper blank because they felt empty space was as important as form, that absence was as important as presence.”

Vignette storytelling can be hit or miss for me; when used most effectively it’s due to prose (and even lyricism) that gives a path to deeper meaning and feeling, which is precisely what Ghost Forest achieves. Indeed the epigraph to Ghost Forest is from one of the form’s best examples, Sandra Cisneros’ The House on Mango Street. Sometimes the empty spaces in vignette novels can feel cold and at a remove, like whiplash wherein the reader is searching for the thread (earlier this year I read Jenny Offill’s Weather). Ghost Forest evokes such deep feelings in the spaces between the narration, echoing the space (and time) between her and her father and her heritage. I felt myself welling with tears at times, and others laughing, when I reached a short chapter’s end, or thinking in those spaces between paragraphs or lines. It’s a remarkably poignant novel.

Like The House on Mango Street, Fung may be partially pulling from her own history here, with a bio that reads she was born in Hong Kong and raised in Vancouver. Oftentimes I felt like I was reading a memoir, the emotions so intimate, they could only be true. But isn’t that fiction at its best? Presenting us with universal human truths, though the story may not be point for point a chronological telling of ‘How Things Happened’? It also made me want to sit with my parents and talk to them about their histories, a feeling sewn into these words and spaces by Fung as well.

“She said, Lik bat chung sam—do you know what it means? It means, what your heart wants but you cannot do. It is an uncomfortable feeling. It’s the feeling of wanting to do something and not being able to. ”

As a mother to a young daughter, the chapters from the mother and grandmother (“My Mom Says:”, “My Grandmother Says:”) made me wonder what I would impart to my daughter one day and what I might not. I thought of my mother, also an immigrant, and what she might not have disclosed to me from her youth in Panama, or even from my time as an infant. With a father in the military, often away on months-long assignments, I can remember periods of his absence, but what was it like for my mom? If the beating pulse of Ghost Forest is the grief of a father’s loss, there’s a feminist thread questioning what women inherit through the histories of their mothers.

In a similar vein, Ghost Forest also crystallized a feeling I don’t see represented that much in novels—the feeling of not wanting to be attached to a location, the “envy for people who live where they were born and raised.” Growing up in the military, I moved every one to two years, and often as an adult have a rising feeling that it’s time to move on… though now I have a husband, a kid, a house in the suburbs, and a job that would make that difficult. We moved into this house four years ago but damned if I still don’t have some boxes up in my attic office, still not unpacked. I never feel comfortable settling in completely.

“And as I got older, I kept moving and moving—from Vancouver to Providence to London to New York—because whenever I started to feel attached to a place or to people, I wanted, subconsciously, to make sure I would be the first to leave.”

The title comes from a painting the narrator has made while studying for a time in Hangzhou at the China Academy of Art. A visit from her father coincides with the piece being selected as part of an art show; the painting depicts the narrator riding on a bird, over a forest of white and translucent trees. The narrator is anxious about this visit with a father she doesn’t spend much time with, and his reaction to her painting reverberates through the book. Most of their relationship is fraught with what they don’t know about each other, but can that be salvaged when he becomes sick?

Fung writes with grace, melancholy, and humor. Like her narrator, Fung is also an artist, and Ghost Forest paints several portraits that resonate across experiences. The negative spaces are intentional, in order to better understand and engage. Ultimately, Ghost Forest depicts how different love can look depending on your vantage point. It’s a book that won’t leave my mind any time soon, and I look forward to Fung’s next work of art.

Pik-Shuen is a trained painter and visual artist, and you see this in her style of prose - the reader can take each vignette like a painting in a gallery show, standing before it and contemplating what is relatable to them, and what moves them.

The chapters are short, but full of the human experience as the unnamed narrator grapples with feelings of rootlessness, grief, and self-worth as she watches her father’s health decline and mourns him after he dies.

I really liked the style of this book - it was like reading somewhat hesitant journal entries by someone who is not sure how to express feelings but knows that they don’t want to forget the small moments that lit something within them. An excellent debut.

Very sparsely written…. All show, no tell, in the best way. At first I wasn’t sure about the simple prose, but as I slowed my reading a little, and thought more about each small memory, the magnitude of this story of grief, miscommunication and family hit me in the gut. It definitely feels like a memoir, every uncomfortable interaction or sweet story told through memories, felt truthful and real. Melancholy and moving.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for an electronic copy to read and review.

Wow. I mean, really Wow. This was a phenomenal read. I loved the connection the author has to her father and how we learn more about their relationship throughout. I felt a deep emotional connection the entire time.

Wow, this was such a great read. Ghost Forest is about the main character's relationship with her father, from when she is separated from him as a child through a move to Canada with the rest of her family, to her father's illness when she is a young adult.

The writing is poetic, and incredibly emotional. While my experience is incredibly different than the experience of the main character's the themes surrounding family, and specifically relationships with your parents was incredibly moving.

I've seen some comparisons to Goodbye, Vitamin which was one of my favourite books from last year. However, while there are similar themes of complex family relationships and grief, I found the writing style and tone of Ghost Forest to be very different. Goodbye, Vitamin has a strong thread of dark humour, which is not there is Ghost Forest. I really loved Ghost Forest, I just don't think that this is a great comparison.

If you enjoy stories that are told in vignettes, and moving stories about complex but loving family relationships, I would highly recommend picking up Ghost Forest. Likely one of my top fiction reads of the year so far.

This book was just ok for me. I thought the issues with the father and daughter relating to each other is something that a lot of people can relate to. I found this book to be a bit sparse and simplistic in the writing, yet had powerful undertones at times as well. The culture was interesting to learn about, yet over time this just ended up feeling repetitive and frustrating because it is just so slow in parts. Thanks for the ARC, NetGalley. I would be interested in reading more from this author in the future.

𝑻𝒉𝒆 𝒅𝒂𝒚 𝒂𝒇𝒕𝒆𝒓 𝒎𝒚 𝒅𝒂𝒅 𝒅𝒊𝒆𝒅, 𝒎𝒚 𝒎𝒐𝒎 𝒕𝒐𝒍𝒅 𝒎𝒆, 𝑻𝒉𝒆 𝒔𝒐𝒖𝒍 𝒓𝒆𝒕𝒖𝒓𝒏𝒔 𝒉𝒐𝒎𝒆 𝒔𝒆𝒗𝒆𝒏 𝒅𝒂𝒚𝒔 𝒂𝒇𝒕𝒆𝒓 𝒑𝒂𝒔𝒔𝒊𝒏𝒈.

𝑺𝒐 𝑫𝒂𝒅 𝒊𝒔 𝒄𝒐𝒎𝒊𝒏𝒈 𝒃𝒂𝒄𝒌? 𝑰 𝒂𝒔𝒌𝒆𝒅:

This book truly is full of grace, tenderness, beauty and pain. As an Astronaut family that immigrated to Vancouver, Canada our narrator spills her family’s story and her guts in snippets. With a father who works in Hong Kong, she lives with her mother and grandparents with both feet planted firmly in the Western World. She tells us, this was never an unusual existence, as there were so many other families just like hers, with father’s that came and went, working hard to support their families and give them a better, more secure future. But this too has created, in her own relationship with her father, distance further than the miles between them. He did not want to leave his manufacturing job behind, but it costs him family bonds.

Early in the telling, when she was just a little girl, she learns her father was sad to lose her baby brother. He is a traditional Chinese father, who most revere sons. She promises to be better than a son but as time passes, it’s not an easy promise to keep. Once she starts school, the glaring differences between east and west become more apparent. It is in the stories, memories that we watch her grow and become more Canadian than Chinese, a fact that is hard for her father to digest. When he does have time with her, she isn’t the respectful daughter she would have been had she grown roots in her homeland. When they are together, there seems to be a coldness, his face reads disappointment in his children and he never speaks of love. When they are in the same space, every moment seems wasted, still just as separate as they are when apart. The longed for connections never seem to be born. The differences between them becomes a wall, and when her father is seriously ill, there is much to confront. Without understanding the past how can she understand the present, or the future? With cultural clashes, misunderstandings and assumptions abound. Eastern parents love just as deeply as Western parents, but it is the expressions that differ. How do you comprehend what the heart feels when so much is lost in translation? How can we forgive our parent’s failures if we don’t understand them?

Her father owes much to women in his life, and if anything it is their stories that really drive the novel and engage the reader. Three generations under one roof with her grandmother lending a playfully wise spirit to the telling. She carries much of their history, her own a heavy one, and is trying to keep their Chinese traditions alive. Her presence feels even stronger than the narrator’s mother, but throughout her father’s absence is the one constant. It is also the hole in her heart that she struggles to fill. With his dying days, she finally has the chance to meet him, in a sense. When he is gone she is able to, maybe, forgive him for not being the sort of father who said I love you.

It’s a difficult review to write because there isn’t one particular meaning to pin down. It’s more the poetry of the past, floating by, family stories that are often heartbreaking but attempt to lend clarity to behaviors, choices. I think it’s a gorgeous read. Particularly, the hunger to reach her father on an intimate level is an ache so many children, of all ages and ethnicity, have. With an immigrant’s background you are measuring your loved ones against a country whose traditions and expressions are sometimes wildly foreign. They’re doomed to failure. It is an interesting exploration about the meaning of love, how we weigh it, what we require from others to feel it. Yes, read it.

Published July 13, 2021

One World

Random House Publishing