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Pauline Chow is a writer, coach, and ancestral magic practitioner, crafting alternative histories and optimistic futures. She is a Pushcart Prize nominated author with words in Cosmic Monthly Horror, Space and Time Magazine, Apocalypse Confidential, and more. Not your average data scientist, she once sued slumlords and advocated for affordable housing in Southern California. Now, she lives in the woods and is planning her next trip to a historical (hopefully haunted) hotel.
Reviewed by Essien Asian for Readers' Favorite
Since Ling Shaw's father vanished during a voyage, she clings to the hope of his eventual return to their family. In the interim, she works at her uncle's herbal medicine shop and dedicates herself to her studies. The tension in her quiet community has heightened since a child went missing, prompting her uncle to prohibit her from delivering herbs to specific clients. Determined to prove her worth, Ling disregards his restrictions and takes medicine to one of his patients. Upon her arrival, she unwittingly witnesses a murder but decides to remain silent, unable to articulate what she saw that night. When the police arrest her uncle, convinced he is the killer, Ling realizes she must take action. Her search for answers plunges her into a shadowy realm of mythical beings and bloodlust in Pauline Chow's Chasing Moonflowers.
Pauline Chow employs creative storytelling in Chasing Moonflowers to transform gruesome instances, such as two purple eyeballs leaping into a bag, into something mildly humorous and perfectly plausible for the open-minded reader. The dialogue is authentic, as Ling and her relatives use era-appropriate terms like ghosts to describe the foreigners. The highlight of Chow's narrative style is how she weaves in subtle clues, connecting them so that perceptive readers must solve the mystery in a specific sequence to grasp the narrative entirely. The author combines varied pacing with a careful focus on intricate details, such as Ling's immediate surroundings, to craft hair-raising scenes that amplify the suspense. Chow expertly intertwines these elements to create a riveting novel that keeps readers looking over their shoulders while unwilling to put it down.
