asianamlitfans | A Review of Miranda Sun’s If I Have to be Haunted (HarperTeen, 2023)

Written by Stephen Hong Sohn

Edited by Lizzy Sobiesk

Well, if you’re looking to get into the Halloween spirit, look no further than Miranda Sun’s If I Have to be Haunted (HarperTeen, 2023), which will definitely get you in the mood. Let’s let the official marketing description do some work to get us situated: “Cara Tang doesn’t want to be haunted. Look, the dead have issues, and Cara has enough of her own. Her overbearing mother insists she be the ‘perfect’ Chinese American daughter—which means suppressing her ghost-speaking powers—and she keeps getting into fights with Zacharias Coleson, the local golden boy whose smirk makes her want to set things on fire. Then she stumbles across Zach’s dead body in the woods. He’s even more infuriating as a ghost, but Cara’s the only one who can see him—and save him. Agreeing to resurrect him puts her at odds with her mother, draws her into a dangerous liminal world of monsters and magic—and worse, leaves her stuck with Zach. Yet as she and Zach grow closer, forced to depend on each other to survive, Cara finds the most terrifying thing is that she might not hate him so much after all. Maybe this is why her mother warned her about ghosts.”

This overview is interesting insofar as it sort of codes Cara’s ghost-speaking powers as detrimental to the model minority stereotype. In some sense, it reminds us of why superpowers are sometimes seen as a metaphorical approach to queerness, as Cara is sort of in the ghost-speaking closet. This novel is primarily a low fantasy, portal fantasy quest plot, with Cara and Zach having to team up—at first unwillingly—in order for them to find a solution to Zach’s fate. At first, I thought the novel was going to be much more lighthearted, especially as the banter between Zach and Cara charged up the comedy factor, but this novel gets quite dark. The underworld locations that Sun has created are not for the faint of heart; there are mountain-entities, fog creatures, and spirits that are up to no good, so the ending sequence will be well-earned. If there is a critique of this novel, then it is precisely also a strength (and here, I leave you with a spoiler alert, so look away unless you want to know the ending). As many of you know (and for those that have read my many reviews about paranormal YA), the formula almost requires a romance plot despite the fact that there are so many things that the protagonist must do in order to survive. In this case, I already liked the fact that the two characters didn’t like each other at the beginning. I knew that the formula often necessitates the romance plot, but I frankly didn’t think it was needed here. On some level, I would have thought too that there would have been more resistance to the Zach and Cara’s coupling from the larger high school community. Given that this novel seems to be the first of a series, I do think Sun could have dragged this one out for at least another installment only because there was enough to worry about just on the level of Zach and Cara’s lives to fill the plot and, I think, command enough attention from readers. I do understand the adherence to formula, and there’s also something quite comforting in knowing that your leads will find a way to each other as well, so I obviously show some ambivalence. I mostly enjoyed the world-building aspects, which are flexible here. Indeed, by novel’s end, you begin to realize that there is more elasticity not only to the world of ghosts, but the powers that the living might have, which seem all the more pertinent to whatever is in store for Cara and Zach in the next one.

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