An intriguing read!

This novel seems to me a pointed examination of young womanhood in singapore. I never attended a girls' school but I have many friends who did and many of the descriptions/ depictions in this book ring true. It’s not easy being 15-16 in this climate, education system, or society. I think the author did a fantastic job capturing that very feeling of being a teenager not blessed with beauty, money, or talents that everyone else seems to have. Her young protagonists live life intensely, feeling everything, and experiencing things to the extreme. They are immature, imperfect, hurtful, but also very fragile. Running parallel to their stories is a 3rd plot, that of a mother's life before she became a mother. Like the female ghost she plays on screen, her image continues to haunt the girls after her death and even after they grow up. As with her daughter's growing eating disorder, her post-natal depression is never explicitly spelled out but its traumatic effects indelibly
mark everyone around her. What I really appreciate are the little affirmations of the supernatural, embedded deeply in woman's experience. Brokenness begets brokenness, but brokenness also /recognises/ brokenness, even across generations. In spite of everything, the future contains hope, reparation, and reconciliation.