Black Water Sister

I bought this book while traveling in Malaysia, as I was looking for a local read that would be originally written in a language that I could understand. I'm not currently a frequent fantasy reader but I was when I was a teenager and I found the setting and premise of the book quite original and interesting. It gives a good idea of a different relationship to the supernatural and, knowing nothing about this part of the Chinese Malaysian culture, it was like an introduction to what I suppose must be some bases of that mythology. I enjoyed how the dialogues were written, with all different kinds of English depending on the character who is speaking and the situation, which really sounded as my local friends. It is quite fast paced and it reads easily. I enjoyed reading the book but, that being said, I wasn't mindblown. Despite the original background story, the overall style and the construction of the story were quite conventional. I think the author made a great job at popularizing local beliefs but, ironically, the modern setting of the Malaysian society was too fantasized to me : - The rich antagonists didn't seem real to me, but more similar to irrealistic characters from Crazy Rich Asians and the like. - I think the toxic family relationships are well depicted, but anything related to work seemed fake, as if it was a teenager imagining how work would be. - The characters were too functional to me: it was as if their only features were the ones that were useful to the narrative, they didn't exist otherwise. - The lesbian angle could have been an interesting extra layer but the relationship seemed fake and conventional to me (the girlfriend is the most puppet character of all). The coming out story felt more like a generic hardship for the main character so that the book could get somewhere, but it wasn't connected to the main story. To say it otherwise: it's like the author was told that at the end of the book the characters are supposed to have moved on with their life and learned something, so she picked up a subject to move on with; it could had been any hardship, however, and the main story with the gods and all that wouldn't have been any different. These aspects (generic style, lack of real-life depiction, functional characters, lack of depth in normal life experiences) made me think more of fan fiction than a real novel, which is a shame because I think the author really did her best to convey a complex subject such as a traditional belief system, yet she missed what should have been the easy part: just describing the world around her. I'd say that I'd recommend it for the cultural background, but if I had to recommend one Malaysian book, I'd rather recommend "The sum of our folies", by Shih-Li Kow.