Hungry Bones

Gr 5 Up–Thirteen-year-old Molly Teng is fuming when her mother suddenly moves her from Maine to Texas. But Molly’s mom Dot can’t settle down and is thrilled to explore their new town. Immediately, Molly knows something is off in the house they’re renting when she touches a doorknob and experiences “the zaps,” a brief but frightening Sixth Sense–style encounter she has experienced her entire life, wherein she communicates with the dead. Jade, a young ghost who has inhabited the house for 120 years with sparse interactions with the living, is delighted to have company who not only can see her but looks like her. Jade is a hungry ghost, eating scraps of food to satiate her inner monster—a take on the traditional Buddhist hungry ghost whose hunger has an emotional drive. This novel is taut and heart-rending, touching on a loving but complex mother-daughter relationship, family estrangement, and Jade’s precarious balance between innocent ghost and ravenous monster. Hung’s prose is humorous yet handles its themes seriously and sensitively, particularly the historic and present treatment of Chinese people in the United States. The scare level is on par with most middle grade horror and draws from the inextricable tie Jade’s ghost has to the trauma she and her predecessors experienced. This would be a great recommendation for those who enjoyed Ellen Oh’s Spirit Hunters or Katherine Arden’s “Small Spaces” series.