Book #35 (2024 Students’ Summer Reading Book #2): The Girl and the Ghost by Hanna Alkaf.
My second returning middle-school student last year read a (nonfiction) book about Thailand; this year, by coincidence, she’s selected a (fiction) book about Malaysia, drawn from regional folklore. Hopefully it will be a welcome challenge for a student whose roots lie in another part of the world (Ghana) and who is pretty firmly ensconced in American youth culture (video games, TikTok videos, and the like). Me, I love the idea of middle-grade fiction as a way to widen the cultural window a bit, which this book succeeds in admirably (while not, I don’t think, pulling off some of its other goals so successfully).
This tale is a modern updating of a legend about the Malaysian supernatural figure called the pelesit, a ghost that bonds to a human and can perform various manipulations upon the people and world around it, at the behest of its master. The pelesit is a sinister figure: its natural shape is dark, fanged and scaly, and its impositions range from mean-spirited tricks all the way down the nastiness scale to physical, even mortal danger to those who may cross the master’s path.
In this story, the pelesit in question was first summoned by a witch, who’s used the ghost for a kind of protection scheme: she travels from village to village offering her services to help people get out of problems that have suddenly arrived in their lives, when actually it turns out those problems (crop failures, sicknesses) have been thrust upon them by her own malevolence, via her spirit companion. The pelesit gets a monthly feeding from the blood of the host for its services, which doesn’t seem like much of a trade, but it also gets to enjoy the simple pleasures of testing its abilities in various tricky ways: pelesit’s gotta pelesit, yeah?
But now the witch/host has died, and the pelesit needs a new master. Bound by blood to the original host, it seeks out blood relations: the witch’s daughter is an adult, a teacher in a small town who seems pretty beaten down by life, not a great prospect. Ah, but that woman has a daughter, the original witch’s granddaughter, a small child named Suraya, who has verve and energy in abundance. The ghost sneaks in at night, takes a sip of Suraya’s blood, and the binding is done, just like that.
Suraya is too young at first to be a real master, though: the ghost contents itself with keeping young Suraya, who has a cat’s curiosity and little sense of personal risk, from too much danger, until finally, when she is about 6, he reveals himself to her. (In hindsight, maybe waiting a little longer might have been advisable, and I was wondering exactly why it was so impatient, but the plot eventually reveals that the ghost isn’t some long-standing, immortal being with generations of experience at this sort of thing; no, Suraya is its second-ever master, and it doesn’t really enjoy being at loose ends for so long, without getting some external direction; plus, the parental role isn’t a good fit at all.) Suraya takes one look at the gruesome thing (which can appear as a grasshopper, and that’s usually how it blends in unnoticed, but is in full demon form when it reveals itself), and dubs it “Pink,” (which it is not) since that’s her favorite color. And while Pink stays out of everyone else’s notice over the next few years, it does establish itself as Suraya’s best friend.
In point of fact: her only friend. For reasons that are largely plot-driven, Suraya is a social outcast, and her house with her somewhat haunted, exceedingly reserved mother is hardly a place where she’d otherwise get the affection and camaraderie that a child needs: Pink fills the role of confidant and cheerleader until bookish, kind-hearted, slightly suffering Suraya reaches the middle grades and life starts to get more complicated.
First, the bullies start to get more overt (Pink intervenes, unilaterally, using some of the skills he’d honed in the witch’s service; this is the first time he’s cast some of the veil aside and Suraya is horrified with his malevolence and his power, ordering him to knock it off: she doesn’t want to cause another any suffering, knowing full well how it feels on the receiving end). Then, a new classmate named Jing pierces the barrier of solitude and quickly becomes Suraya’s best friend, leaving Pink uncertain, afraid, and angry (and again, he acts out in ways that destabilize and upset Suraya greatly; this section makes for a strong allegory on toxic friendships as their relationship undergoes changes that happen all the time in middle school when one friend may no longer want or need another; it’s the strongest part of the book thematically). And finally, Suraya tells Pink (who has gone after Jing with a vengeance, against strict instructions to leave her alone) that this just isn’t working, at which point the pelesit flips out a bit and starts taking his anger out on the poor host girl, with fairly dramatic results, which presumably would look to most teachers and peers like some of the anxiety- and stress-related difficulties that are all-too-common for tweenage girls.
When Suraya finally tells her mother what’s been going on, this formerly no-nonsense (fairly flat) character surprises the reader by taking the girl’s story seriously: turns out she had some idea of her mother’s supernatural dabblings, one of the reasons why her relationship with the witch was eventually severed (more details on that come in the final, not quite satisfactory, pages), and she knows that they need the help of an expert. As it turns out, the supernatural consultant (officially, Encik Ali is what’s called a “pawang”) she brings in is in fact even worse than the pelesit (Ali turns out to be the big bad of the story, power-hungry, planning to turn Pink to his own uses rather than solve Suraya’s actual problem), so the final quarter of the book transitions to a kind of caper in which Suraya, Pink, and Jing try to find their own solution, which leads them on a journey that’s going to get them in a lot of trouble with their parents, but if it works, can bring some closure for the ghost and the girl, and some answers about the pelesit’s real relationship with this family.
I will say that the plot swerves (and the tonal shifts that they lead to) were somewhat unsatisfactory, and there are a number of plot holes that I couldn’t help but be bothered by. Did I mention that Suraya’s friend Jing is obsessed with Star Wars? And did I mention that the conclusion here leads to a straight-up callback to the absolute weakest moment in the original trilogy, where ol’ Anakin’s ghost gets to smile down approvingly as if redemption were a thing for a mass murderer? Yeah, the analogous part of this story works poorly, too, both in terms of plot and in terms of deserved emotional payoff.
As a fictional representation of some of the emotions around peer relationships and adolescence, I think the middle section holds up pretty well, and as a portrayal of modern Malaysia’s culture (my student will, if nothing else, learn a lot about the food that kids her age eat in Malaysia), it’s loving and revealing. My student chose it because she thought a book about a ghost would be scary; sorry to tell her, there’s very little of that, but I’m not complaining (a few mildly creepy moments, and there’s a hipster coffee bar that’s suddenly infested with cockroaches, but it’s played mostly for laughs).