Cover Image: Ghost Girl, Banana

Ghost Girl, Banana

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Member Reviews

I found the narration a little tough to get into at first, but then the story really opened up for me. The characters were interesting, not simple people at all, and the dual timeline made the story much more interesting and fulfilling. I found the themes of family, disappointment, love, and searching for belonging really powerful, and I liked that everything had echoes but not replications of the experiences of others in the story world. Finally I thought the historical setting was interesting and could have been developed more; it was really essential motivating background, but didn't end up being more than that really.

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In the year 1966, Hong Kong exiled Sook-Yin from Kowloon to London, burdened with a mission to restore honour to her family. However, as she undergoes training to become a nurse in the cold and damp environs of England, Sook-Yin realizes that, much like many other transplants, she must carve out her destiny to endure.

Fast forward thirty years in London, where biracial outsider Lily, who lost her mother at a young age, relies on the narratives spun by her preternaturally perfect older sister, Maya, about Sook-Yin. Unexpectedly named in the will of a formidable Chinese stranger, Lily embarks on a covert pilgrimage across the globe to unearth the forgotten facets of her identity and claim the promised reward. This tale unfolds as a captivating exploration of the lengths one goes to uncover the truth. While the shifts in time and characters initially posed a challenge, once the narrative gained momentum, anticipation for the next chapter intensified.

In Wiz Wharton's debut novel, a skillful prose style keeps each chapter suspenseful, leaving the reader yearning for more. This engrossing story is a delightful choice for those intrigued by family sagas, historical narratives, and cultural tales, offering a rich and immersive reading experience.

Thanks to Netgalley and the publisher for sending a digital ARC in exchange for an honest review.

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Multi-generational stories are my jam. I love the mystical aspect to this one. It adds such a layer of depth and magic to an already wonderful story. So well done.

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I love a sweeping family narrative as much as the next girl, but... oh, wait. I actually think I have sweeping family narrative fatigue. This is a beautiful book, but I'm going to need to revisit it once I've had some time to cool off from all the other books similar to it. Love the writing, and I blame my own tendency to pick up of-the-moment books for getting tired of the hot new trope! The trope is valid, I'm just getting old lol.

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i loved the premise of the book and how this was about hong kong and a very important and unique period of time. however, i found the writing to drag on a bit and felt like it could have been a little shorter and had a punchier effect. i also felt like there was just such an imbalance of character depth between sook yin and lily where readers are inclined to be far more invested in the former character's story.

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This book just did not click with me. There were parts that I really enjoyed but ultimately I felt like it was way too long.

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While I found it a bit too long and didn't quite click with the characters, I overall enjoyed this one. I will never tire of books looking at immigrants' cultural identity struggles. Thank you so much to HarperVia for the ARC of this one.

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Ghost Girl, Banana is an enlightening, cross-cultural, multi-generational family drama that expands two continents. The novel vacillates between the 1960’s when Sook-Yin arrives in London to study nursing in an attempt to redeem herself for embarrassing the family and the late 1990’s when Britain relinquished governance of Hong Kong. Language barriers thwart her plans and fate finds her married with two children: Mei-Hua (Maya) and Li-Li (Lily).

The deliberate storytelling style alternates chapters that reveal the mother’s experiences decades before with her daughters’ in fairly modern times. Things really get interesting when the sisters receive a letter from attorneys in Hong Kong citing a million pound inheritance (from an unknown person) with the caveat the funds must be collected in person within about a month’s time. The reader anxiously turns pages to close the gap of who/why and to learn more about their family’s secrets, dysfunctions/struggles, and disappointments/shame. The framing of each chapter is nearly perfect because I never felt lost or confused amid the changing venues or eras. She writes with energy, sophisticated humor, and her characters are full of life and personality. I was pulling for Sook-Yin, Maya, and Lily.

It is multi-faceted - layering the immigrant’s (and biracial childrens’) challenges of identity and belonging (via cultural assimilation, and interracial relationships). It then tackles the familiar - racial stereotypes, discrimination, profiling, while adding the traditional dynamics of sibling rivalry (of sorts), birth order dominance, etc. I enjoyed the snippets of historical facts surrounding Britain’s colonization of the Chinese territories and the significance of the 1997 Handover.

Thanks to Harpervia and NetGalley for the opportunity to review.

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Okay, not entire a fan of this one. It was really slow and drawn out. I felt like it could have been like 200 pages shorter. There was so much detail that I feel was just repeated. I really liked the premise of the novel but I just wasn't a huge fan of the execution.

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Lily Miller and her dead mother are at the center of Wiz Wharton’s marvelous debut novel, Ghost Girl, Banana. At 25, Lily is an unfulfilled musician and underachieving depressive in late-1990s London. A Cambridge dropout of mixed Chinese-British heritage, she’s also the younger sister of a beautiful Oxford law grad, Maya, who has scored a trophy marriage to an aging millionaire architect.

A sisterly disparity like this is a familiar and often tiresome mass-market/basic-cable trope. But Wharton gracefully depicts these sisters’ skewed relationship — laced with facile assumptions and snappy misunderstandings — with warmth, insight, and humor.

This clever, inspiring book starts — as mystery-driven tales occasionally do — with a puzzling missive. The letter promises an enticing bequest: An unknown Chinese “banking magnate” has left Lily £500,000. The sole condition: She must go to Hong Kong to sign the papers personally. Maya has received the same offer but, oddly, reacts with ho-hum disinterest, sternly discouraging her sister from responding.

Obstinate, Lily sets off, telling no one. She’s intent on finding out why she’s been selected. The passing of her benefactor, Hei Fong Lee, has come at a time of looming change for Hong Kong — the transfer of the city from British to Chinese control. In Wharton’s hands, it also parallels a liminal moment for Lily herself.

The Miller sisters have an ancestral connection to Hong Kong, detailed in the book’s parallel plot, which narrates (in retrospect) the story of Sook Yin Chen, the girls’ mother, in chapters alternating with the unfolding story of Lily’s 1997 pilgrimage. We take up Sook Yin’s tale some 30 years earlier, as she emigrates from Hong Kong to Britain. There, impregnated via date rape, Sook Yin backs into marriage with her aggressor, Englishman Julian Miller, a smarmy, dangerously self-absorbed pretender who might easily have clambered out of Jane Austen’s notebook.

On each narrative axis, Ghost Girl, Banana sets out the story of an exile’s return, one uplifting, the other tragic. After a decade in England, where their family business has collapsed, Sook Yin brings her husband and two young daughters back to Hong Kong. Embraced by her family, they’re there barely a few months when Sook Yin is killed in an accident. Then it’s back to London for the sisters — where, for 20 years, not a word reaches them from their Chinese kin. Still, Lily recalls her mom hazily: “Like a dripping tap or an unpaid bill Mumma was the squatter at the back of my brain, forever waiting for the moment to surprise me.” When the letter arrives, it’s an opportunity for closure.

As you might surmise from this rundown, the plot is packed in so thickly as to seem a throwback to 19th-century models; “crowded with incident,” as Oscar Wilde once put it. It has a raft of affinities to today’s popular romance fiction, too: longings revealed (or discovered) too late; jealously obstructive rivals; betrayals; coincidentally timely encounters; rotten, no-good husbands; surprise reunions; a necklace that links parallel arcs; and deplorable villains (“He used words the way hunters use traps, hiding them beneath flowers and sweet grass waiting for smaller animals to break their necks”).

And yet, this onrush of conventional writerly doodads doesn’t distract. Ingeniously slipped into the current, these commonplaces drove this reader’s interest ever onward, buttressed by bits of wondrously observed social comedy, as in the moment at Maya’s birthday gathering when Lily encounters “a weasel-faced toff in blazer and loafers who had clearly forgotten the purpose of socks.” These flashes of wit abound, especially early in the book, and then fade as the author seems to hunker down for more serious plot-building.

That’s too bad. Though literary commonplaces do stud this novel like raisins a Victorian fruitcake — and, yes, one suspects Wharton is dressing her plot for success in the marketplace — this is a stirring, ultimately heartening tale, honest and true to how things are. A-plus.

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I really enjoyed this story! I found it engaging and kept me guessing what was going to happen. The concept isn’t original but it was executed well.

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First, a thank you to Netgalley and the publisher.

I just… I couldn’t get into this one. I was perfectly primed for reading, sitting on the beach with no plans, but I found myself taking absurdly long breaks between every sentence to just stare into the abyss.

Maybe this is a case of right book/wrong time, but since I’m embracing a Marie Kondu attitude toward DNF’ing this year, it’s time to move on. I only made it 5% in.

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I couldn't get into this book for some reason even with a few attempts. The writing is well done, just wasn't connecting with the story.

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Told in alternating perspectives between a mother and daughter, this book covers multiple generations of strength, endurance, and the struggle to find peace and belonging.

This type of story — a family saga cemented in a specific and meaningful historical period — is right up my alley. I definitely enjoyed Sook-Yin’s story in particular, and uncovering family secrets is always engaging.

But for whatever reason, this one just didn’t quite click for me in a way that would make me rave about it rather than just say that I enjoyed it fine. I felt like the characters themselves fell a bit flat, so I wasn’t particularly emotionally invested. The historical context of the Handover of Hong Kong didn’t quite hit for me, either — I get it, the book is about belonging and “otherness,” but the connection just seemed superficial. It often felt like it was more of a coincidental side note popping up sporadically throughout Lily’s time in the country, rather than a coherent theme.

Lots of 4.5-5 ⭐️ reviews on this one, so don’t let those thoughts deter you! If you’re a fan of reading about mother/daughter relationships, family secrets, and both first- and second-generation immigrant experiences, I’d say give this one a try!

Thanks to the author, HarperVia, and NetGalley for providing an ARC in exchange for an honest review. Ghost Girl, Banana is available TOMORROW!

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2.5. Complicated novel. Parts of it were intriguing, but more parts of it were unnecessarily complex. Story is of two generations of women trying to find their way between chinese and british cultures Story written from perspective of the mother in the 1969;s and from the daughters during the return of Hong Kong to Chinese control. I found the plot complicated and confusing. Still not sure I understood what happened at the end. I would not recommend this book. It left me feeling unsatisfied.

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4.5/5⭐️
This story starts slowly with introductions to our two POV’s. The mother, Sook-Yin, and her experiences from 1966 through 1977 and then her youngest daughter Lily in 1997.

The chapters are fairly short and jump back and forth in time and perspective, which actually made the story fly by. And what a story it was! There’s a mystery at the center of this story that kept my curiosity peaked and I thoroughly enjoyed reading along as Lily investigated each new clue.

I’m not sure I’ve read a book that made me feel so deeply for someone moving to a foreign country and trying to fit in. The writing was powerful and the characters were complex and flawed in the most magnetic ways.

I did struggle a little with some of the nicknames at the beginning, having to reread a few lines to understand who was being referenced. Overall though, it was an incredible story that I found terribly hard to put down!

Thank you HarperVia for the alc on Netgalley in exchange for an honest review!

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I received an ARC from NetGalley and the publisher in exchange for my honest opinion.

Genre: General Fiction, Literary Fiction
Format: Dual POV, Dual Timeline: 1960s & 1990s
Spice Level: Low (This is not a romance, but it has romantic elements. Pretty much closed door.)
Content warnings will be listed at the end because they include some spoilers.

I really enjoy this book. At first I was confused because of the switch back and forth. (But I'd not read the description for a month and had forgotten it was a mother and daughter.)

Sook-Yin is sent to London to restore the family's honor. This is a heavy burden, especially when she's been told that she's stupid and not worthy of notice. As a transplant in the 60's, she is very alone. And she is constantly misinterpreted through her life. Sook-Yin's marriage is not what she expected. But her spirit is strong, and she's a fighter.

Lilly has struggled her entire life to understand who she is and why she's suffering Her sister is her only support system. She believes she has a few memories of their time in Hong Kong, but her sister assures her she was too little to remember. As she sets out on this journey to Hong Kong, she discovers secrets and lies that rock her foundation.

The emotions of not belonging are intense and the writing drives it home. One of my struggles was to understand why Sook- 's brother was so awful. (This is part of the entire novel—delving into relationships, so we weren't supposed to understand. When she figured it out, it was an aha moment for me too. Then I wondered what lens am I seeing people through.

Themes center around belonging, relationships, and the turmoil from finding our place. The handover of Hong Kong to China is an exterior (almost gothic because it's a character) representation of the divide within the lives of Sook-Yin and Lilly.

The prose is amazing! Not that prose stands without a story, but the way Wharton weaves in metaphors is beautiful. I marked so many of them because I want to read them again and again.

I felt satisfied with the ending. This was a big undertaking (I believe for a debut novel). Masterfully crafted. Seriously, I couldn't put it down. The structure is a bit circular, which I also enjoyed.

I highly recommend it.

Happy reading!

Potential Content Issues: racism, self-harm, misuse of power by a person in power, rape (but not graphic and comes off more as giving up)

All of these were handled well, and I'm a sensitive reader and was fine.

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One of the best books I have read in a while! I wasn't real familiar with the Handover so that was an education for me. I did not expect the ending at all. This was GREAT!

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A young woman receives a mysterious inheritance letter. The catch is she must travel to Hong Kong to claim it. She chooses the opportunity to learn more about her mother who was killed in an accident when she was younger and ends up unravelling a compelling mystery that will keep the reader hooked from start to finish.

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"Ghost Girl, Banana" is well-written and intriguing. I think the two timelines was a good idea in theory, but it sometimes felt as though Lily's timeline only existed to understand what happened to Sook-Yin. I found Sook-Yin's story very moving and was often frustrated on her behalf.

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