Review: The Girl with Ghost Eyes

The Girl with Ghost Eyes by M.H. Boroson
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

I honestly don't know if this is 4 stars for awesomeness or 1 star for ableism.
Seriously. It's one of those "I love it but it doesn't love me back" books. I'm erring towards the lower end and giving it a 2 because I don't exactly want to encourage this harmful representation, but at the same time, it was a pretty cool story and I don't want to give it 1 star.

Pros:
-Wow, the Chinese spirit world is wonderfully weird.
-Kickass girl.
-Little eyeball ghost man!
-Talking kitty and seagull spirits!
-Murderous tiger man trying so hard to be a good boy! He's just the sweetest thing and I want to hug him and tell him it's all gonna be okay.

Cons:
-This book feels like it's saying it is bad to be disabled and disabled people are bad, like within the first 3 pages. Good language is not used to describe us and I didn't always feel safe reading it. Like waiting for the other shoe to drop.
-There's something about the way Li-lin talks about Wushi magic wit Mrs. Wei that feels really wrong to me. She calls it brutal and disturbing, says her magic is better because they cleaned up Wushi magic, and Wushi must be inferior because her people were able to defeat it hundreds of years ago. Like, get over yourself. Your culture is not the good one solely on the basis that it's yours. She's the wife of your father's friend and she's trying to help you - for a book that keeps talking about saving face, shrieking at someone to stop doing her magic because you find her rituals ugly is about the most disrespectful thing I can imagine.
-And the whole thing could stand another round of editing for clunky prose but that's just the writer in me.


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