By mapping out the familiar and the strange territories of Gary SnyderĪ beautiful debut, Water Ghosts opens up a page in history that sometimes is forgotten by both cultures that once coexisted in Locke, a Sacramento Chinese farming town. This is potent, deeply felt, magical writing…. Strong men and women see, hear, smell, touch, taste, and dream America.
Ryan's evocative descriptions are poetic, elucidating how these proud, Vivid and surreal imagery of water, fire and air parallels the changing world of Chinese immigrants trying to forge a new world that entices and frightens them by turn. This is a book to seek out and to treasure. Water Ghosts is, simply, exquisite writing-"the startled egrets stretch their wings and lift up like incandescent sheets being shaken to dry"-ethereal and rough, mysterious and earthy. Her elegant female protagonists manage to exercise their own agency even when they're hemmed in by life in Locke. BooklistĪ dreamlike haze shimmers over Ryan's debut. Ryan explores love, desire, loss, and betrayal as she combines history and myth in lyrical prose that is both delicate and sensuous. In Water Ghosts, Ryan has distinguished herself as a writer to watch. The novel pulses, with the past continually surging against the present until the present yields. Ryan's subtle use of water and ghosts as intertwined motifs of the ancestral is drawn from Chinese myths and deftly crafted, while her vignettes from prior years are seamlessly placed. As elegant are the ways in which the past reclaims the present.
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