The Girl With A Thousand Faces, by Sunyi Dean
The Book
Synopsis:
From the USA Today bestselling author of The Book Eaters comes The Girl with a Thousand Faces, a Gothic tale set in a historical Hong Kong that meshes ancient myths and local legends into a haunting story of ghosts, grief, and women who will not forgive.
When Mercy Chan washed up on the shores of Hong Kong with no family, no money, and no memories, she was thrust into the horrors of World War II. She only survived by hiding in Kowloon Walled City, an infamous, ghost-infested slum full of lost and traumatized civilians. Since the end of the war, she has rebuilt her life and found work with the local triad as a ghost-talker, dealing with the angry and bitter spirits who haunt this place. These days, the filthy gutters and cramped alleyways of Kowloon feel like home.
But the past she can’t remember won’t let her go. An unusually powerful ghost has infested Kowloon’s waterways, drowning innocents and threatening the district. Unnervingly, it claims to know Mercy―and her forgotten childhood. As Mercy is drawn into a deadly cat-and-mouse game with this malignant spirit, she begins to realize that the monster she fights within these walls may well be one of her own making.
33 years before, mere days ahead of the Japanese invasion, Sung Siu Yin and her mother flee Hong Kong, intending to hide out on her mother's ancestral island home. It’s beautiful, tranquil, and remote. . . but also inhabited by ghosts ever since the entire village drowned in a storm many years ago. Still, it’s better than living under occupation.
But as the war drags on and isolation sets in, Siu Yin is increasingly drawn into the island's grim past―a past that may still have a hold on the present. There is a darkness lurking beneath that idyllic ocean, and it has been waiting many years for someone to return.
My Review
The Girl With A Thousand Faces is a brilliant genre-blending novel, halfway between Gothic horror and urban fantasy, written by Sunyi Dean, published by Tor. After an astounding debut with The Book Eaters, I had high hopes for her sophomore novel, and it totally exceed my expectations, delivering not only a novel with a heart-pounding story about family bonds, grief and ghosts, but which is also bold with its narrative structure, playing with them to eventually tie all together to make this a memorable book.
Mercy Chan, a woman without memories, washes up on the shores of Hong Kong, finding refuge working as a ghost-talker in the infested streets of Kowloon Walled City; but when one day, a powerful ghost comes to her city and start causing havoc, threatening to be the final nail in the coffin that will allow the council to tear down what has been her world for the last thirty-two years. But behind this ghost there are more things that are also tied to Mercy's past, some secrets that could destroy her life and might need to remain buried.
It's difficult to convey in words why this book is such a brilliant literary piece. While I understand the structure chosen by Sunyi Dean to tell this story (apparently unrelated timelines, different perspectives) might be confusing for some readers, it's part of what makes this a memorable novel; what starts as a ghost story evolves into a family plot whose consequences we are experiencing now, with some revelations that invites us to rethink which role is each character playing. At the end, what we are reading is a story that hides trauma and grief at its core, excellently portrayed by the words of the author.
The setting is another remarkable aspect of this novel: not only by how well Dean has portrayed invaded Hong Kong and the post war situation, but how it is blended together with a ghost theme that is tightly woven with how ordinary people is forced to pay the metaphorical cost of war; it is refreshing to have a historical ESEA location as the setting, especially when the mythology is also imbued into the story.
In terms of pacing, this is a bit of a tricky book to define, mostly due to how it is structured; I didn't find it slow (I kinda devoured it), but there are some sections where I just trusted the author to pull it all together (and honestly, the execution is just chef kiss).
The Girl With A Thousand Faces is simply excellent; I don't think I can really capture in words how good this novel is. A demonstration of Dean's writing skills, a remarkable genre-blending story that is already a candidate to end up being one of my favourite books of the year!
The Author/s
Sunyi Dean
Sunyi Dean (sun-yee deen) is a multi-award-losing author who was born in rural Texas, grew up in Hong Kong, and now resides in North England. Her family is bilingual and dual-heritage, and she still has relatives in both Hong Kong and the USA.
Sunyi writes cross-genre speculative fiction with a weird slant, and her debut novel, THE BOOK EATERS, was an instant #2 Sunday Times Bestseller. Her next novel, THE GIRL WITH A THOUSAND FACES, launches in May 2026. Some of her short fiction has appeared in places like Interzone, Grimdark Magazine, BBC Radio Leeds, and Tor Dot Com.
In her spare time, she likes buying whisky, collecting dumbbells, and dying in jiu-jitsu. Outside of actual writing, she is perhaps best known for founding and cohosting the Publishing Rodeo Podcast with fellow Tor author, Scott Drakeford, in which they talk frankly about the trad pub industry.