The Girl and the Ghost
Hanna Alkaf
HarperCollins
Fiction, MG Fantasy
Themes: Diversity, Ghosts, Girl Power, Witches
****
Description
When the old witch died, her servant, the ghostly pelesit, must find another of her blood to stay in the world of the
living... and, when the adult daughter proves too weak in magic, it gravitates to the five-year-old granddaughter Suraya.
Rather than recoil in terror from the scaly, hulking shadow, the little girl names it Pink (her favorite color) and
decides it's her new best friend. Pelesits are made to spread trouble and tricks and darkness wherever they go, not be a
lonely girl's companion, but "Pink" also has to obey its master - and, as time passes, it grows to like being a friend,
until it can't imagine doing anything else. Until the day she starts at a new school in the distant city and makes her
first living human friend, threatening everything.
Suraya can hardly remember a time before Pink was in her life. With her mother wrapped up in work and her own private
griefs and the other kids in the village school treating her strangely for being "weird" (and what's so weird about
wanting to sit alone and read, or drawing dragons and mermaids in her notebook?), the ghost has long been her best, and
only, friend. It's the one who gives her the courage to try the new school Mom wants her to go to, which at first is
even worse than the village. But when she makes a new friend, Jing, another outsider (if one with a strange Star
Wars obsession), Pink starts acting out... and when a ghost made for darkness acts out, the results can be
downright dangerous.
Review
Set in modern Malaysia, The Girl and the Ghost draws on local folk tales and traditions for a story about friendship, family, and the difficulties both can entail. With chapters that switch between the viewpoints of Pink and Suraya, the reader is quickly immersed in the strange friendship that develops between a former witch's familiar and a lonely girl who only wants someone to see her and love her as she feels her overwhelmed single mother does not. Pink technically has no heart and is not supposed to feel things like joy, but becomes quite fond of the little girl whose blood it needs to drink every full moon to stay "alive", and she accepts its inhuman nature as one would any peculiar quirk of a beloved friend. (She even, despite ordering him not to unleash his mischief on others, is notably silent when Pink inflicts little torments on the bullies who make her school life miserable.) Not being used to having a friend at all, Pink can't help lashing out when it seems Suraya prefers the living girl Jing to the ghost who has always been there for her... and Suraya doesn't understand why the ghost can't be happy that she's happy and accept her new friend into their circle. Their feud leads to dire consequences for them both - and worse, when Suraya's mother calls in a priestly "wise man" to deal with the haunting, one who may have ulterior motives. There are some setbacks and struggles, but Suraya manages to find a way to deal with the problems before her, even as they magnify to literal life-and-death stakes. The whole tale is made all the richer by its setting. I liked it.