Mercy Chan sought refuge in Kowloon Walled City in 1942 and never really left. Even though the warren is one of the most dangerous places in Hong Kong, Mercy has the protection of one of the most feared triads and a ghost cat to keep her safe from the living and the dead. The government’s threat to demolish the whole walled city finally draws Mercy out into the open, but she soon learns that there’s something far more destructive afoot. The Girl With a Thousand Faces, Sunyi Dean’s fractured new novel, twists and turns through time, revenge, haunting, and divine compassion that encompasses a lot more than one old woman hiding from the world.
Mercy doesn’t remember anything before she woke up in the water off of one of China’s coastal islands, a day’s journey or so away from Hong Kong. She only knows her name because someone carved it into her arm. After dodging Japanese patrols and refugees, Mercy heads for Kowloon Walled City. The City is a hub of resistance against the Japanese Imperial Army, in part because any force sent to the City would be instantly slaughtered and in part because the City is incredibly haunted. In Mercy’s world, there are ghosts everywhere and few people have the wherewithal to exorcise or persuade them to move on. Mercy discovers a talent for ghost-talking; she’s one of the few who can actually talk to ghosts and uncover their unfinished business. This talent earns her a comfortable place in the Cobra Lily triad, one she holds until her boss summons her for a trip into Hong Kong to try and talk the government out of demolishing Kowloon Walled City.
What begins as a quest to saved the Walled City turns very personal when an old enemy arrives to finally finish their revenge against Mercy. I can’t say too much more without completely giving away this book’s secrets so, instead, I want to heap praise on Dean for what she does with ghosts in The Girl With a Thousand Faces. In Asia, ghosts aren’t immediately exorcised the way they are in the West. If a ghost isn’t causing problems, it seems that most people—especially in Kowloon Walled City—are content to let the ghosts alone. Mercy is only called in when ghosts are causing issues, though her customers aren’t always happy with the way that she lets the ghosts handle their unfinished business. (Some ghosts are adamant about meting out violent justice to the people who killed them.) During the Japanese occupation, ghosts fought with the resistance before fading away or being exorcised. I really wish we’d gotten to see more of this part of the story, which threatened to be more interesting than the parts of the book that followed Mercy in her present.
By necessity, The Girl With a Thousand Faces is told out of chronological order. We have to know who Mercy became after she fled to Kowloon Walled City so that we can understand what the stakes are when people start dying and Mercy’s nightmares resurface. Almost the entire middle third of the novel takes us back to the Japanese capture of Hong Kong in 1941 and follows another character entirely before returning to Mercy’s present in the last third or so of the book. At times I felt like I was being told rather than shown what was going on, but the structure and plot are complicated enough that I can kind of understand why. That said, I wish Dean had trusted us readers enough to dispense with the more obvious explication in the middle.
I received a free copy of this book from the publisher via NetGalley, for review consideration.
