White Ghost Girls
Review by Kristin Manger
White Ghost Girls
by Alice Greenway
Black Cat
$13.00
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"Can you give me my father's hand in mine, Frankie's in the other? Then take everything and go away? Because if you can't, it's not enough. And if you can, I might just leave anyhow." From the elegiac opening of her novel to cataclysmic finale, debut novelist Alice Greenway insists that the reader take an active role in her tale of two young American sisters growing up in 1967 Hong Kong. Greenway intertwines loving depictions of the beauty and mystique of the East with threads of devastation and repulsion tied to the Vietnam War and Mao's Cultural Revolution. Through her eleven-year-old narrator, Kate, Greenway submerges you in seething masses at a Red Guard protest, puts your hand in that of a "pudgy pockmarked man" who will use you to enact his own revenge on the government, and, with her chillingly poetic descriptions, holds open your eyes as an all-too-familiar family self-destructs.
White Ghost Girls is a complete portrait of the shattering of a young girl's innocence in a country already imploding with distrust and hatred. Greenway deftly re-creates this tumultuous Hong Kong summer in a refreshingly succinct 180 pages of lyric prose and meticulous detail. Kate, our narrator, lives with her blissfully hermitic mother (who chooses to exist in the idyllic landscapes she paints rather than facing her reality as an American expatriate in Hong Kong) and her megalomaniacal and sexually-charged fourteen-year-old sister Frankie. Kate's father spends weeks at a time in Saigon photographing the war for Time, infinitely more engrossed in his Vietnamese existence than that of his own family. Given the physical and emotional absence of her parents, Kate relies heavily on guidance from Frankie and their Chinese nanny, Ah Bing. Despite, or maybe because of, her isolation, Kate develops an endearing insight and objectivity that brings an element of realism to a sensational plot.
If Judy Blume infused her coming-of-age stories with Freud's psychology, Hemingway's brevity, and Marquez's lyricism, the final product would be Alice Greenway's haunting novel, White Ghost Girls—a mesmerizing collage of history, beauty, and loss crafted from ruins of a young girl's heartbreaking summer.
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