Sunyi Dean’s debut The Book Eaters was a modern fantasy novel that took on classic mythmaking and the idea of storytelling. Her follow up, The Girl with a Thousand Faces also draws on classic mythology, but the basis of her world building in this book comes out of Hong Kong and Asian fantasy traditions.
The Girl With A Thousand Faces is set mainly in the walled city of Kowloon in 1975. The walled city no longer exists but at the time it was a multi-level, overpopulated shanty town on the mainland of Hong Kong. The book opens with Mercy Chan, a middle-aged woman who works for Cobra Lily, one of the local triad bosses. Mercy washed up on the shores of Hong Kong during the Second World War and has no memory of her past. Mercy’s expertise is as a ghost-talker, and she keeps busy (with her ghost cat familiar Bao) helping those ghosts find some sort of resolution and move on as the extremely populous walled city is riddled with ghosts. But Mercy is not at the top of her game – she is having visions, is visited and threatened by some kind of water demon who implies that her unremembered past is catching up with her. All this while her boss is trying to fight the city which has plans to redevelop the walled city.
To say any more about this book would be to reveal some of its many twists and surprises, Suffice to say that nothing is as it seems and when Dean pulls back one layer of her tale another layer emerges. But in doing so she digs into a range of themes of loyalty, family, intergenerational trauma, belief and revenge. As a result, The Girl with a Thousand Faces is a beguiling tale that challenges the reader’s empathy and identification with characters through a fascinating fantasy scenario.
The Girl with a Thousand Faces, as well as delivering a very human fantasy tale, also takes readers deep into the world of Hong Kong during World War II and into the 1970s. The walled city of Kowloon has a long history, although it was eventually torn down and redeveloped in the 1990s. Dean effectively captures the time, the place and the people and brings their belief systems to life.
The Girl with a Thousand Faces shows again the breadth and diversity of modern fantasy. Dean creates a world of gods and spirits and ghosts and plays that world out through the Second World War and the modern history of Hong Kong. But she also firmly roots her fantasy in the human condition and uses her story to explore a range of universal issues centred around a cast of flawed, complex characters.
The Girl with a Thousand Faces by Sunyi Dean
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