Ordinary life is touched by the supernatural, and supernatural creatures have surprisingly ordinary concerns, in this expanded edition of Spirits Abroad. Nine new stories (including Hugo Award winner "If at First You Don't Succeed, Try, Try Again") combine with the original 10 included in Zen Cho's (Sorcerer to the Crown) enchanting debut short story collection, first published in 2014.
Vivian returns to Malaysia after the death of her grandmother, who may have been a witch, to find the old woman visiting her in her dreams. Odette, raised and emotionally abused by her uncle, takes desperate measures to secure his house for herself. Ah Lee, who prefers the term vampire instead of what she really is, worries about the boy that she likes and how to keep him from noticing that she eats people.
Cho makes Malaysian folklore and British colonialism frequent themes, which are sometimes strange and gothic but more frequently charming. Love is a recurring subject--such as the case of a dragon who falls for a very ordinary woman named Prudence. Diaspora is another: in "The Four Generations of Chang E," an age-old story about the ways immigrants and the next generations of their families relate to the culture around them plays out on the moon. Characters struggle to achieve their ambitions in ways to which readers can easily empathize, even if those characters are an imugi struggling to transform into a dragon or an earth spirit digging a first hole of its own.
Fans of Cho's novels will find just as much wit and warmth to savor in her short works. --Kristen Allen-Vogel, information services librarian at Dayton Metro Library