Thank you to Grove Atlantic and NetGalley for providing this title in exchange for an honest review!

Rating: 3 1/2

If you ask me what the plot is about, I will lie.

Because I'm not sure.

Ghost Music is one of those books where the plot is an excuse to get to the deeper questions about life, death, love, and everything in-between.

Don't get me wrong: the plot is what it says on the tin. Song Yan and her husband Bowen bring his recently widowed mother to live with them. Suddenly, deliveries of mushrooms nobody asked for begin to arrive, and cooking them is the only, fragil thing bonding the women together. Song Yan quit her career as a musical prodigy to devote herself to her family, but Bowen refuses to have a child. While he's away on a business trip, Song Yan learns things about herself, her mother-in-law and her husband that send the normalcy of her life spinning.

But it's one of those books where you have to be okay with not getting all of the answers.

Ultimately, it was a really evocative, surrealist story about choices, relationships, and the meaning of life. It was a quick read for me, as it really drew me in. I really enjoyed the imagery, the culture, the characters. It had some really beautiful quotes, and it was heart-breaking at times.

So why the three and a half stars?

I guess I'm not fully okay with not getting all of the answers. I think the matter of Bai Yu was something I would especially have liked to see more of - not see it explained, because that's the charm, but... I don't know. A little explanation would have been nice, especially considering the ending.

If you typically enjoy this kind of stories, though, I would really recommend it!

An oddly soothing reading experience. While not necessarily lyrically written, there is a nice cadence to how this book is written and the language it uses that is more contemplative than emotional. Which is quite appropriate for a book that is pondering the quiet lives most of us lead and what exactly motivates us and gets us through on the day-to-day, not to mention the big and little griefs we accumulate along the way and our (in)ability to deal with them.

However, while this was a perfectly pleasant journey to undertake, I don't necessarily know why I went on it. While the author sometimes had some interesting things to say I don't think they considered them very deeply; likewise, the characters and their journeys could be quite shallow and, at worst, frustrating and irritating (especially Bowen and his mother). The lack of depth also made the pacing quite odd, and ultimately I wished the book had leaned more on its surrealism in lieu of its very light, slice of life plot. We really could have done with some more talking mushrooms.

Much appreciation for NetGalley and Grove Atlantic for providing this ARC. All opinions are my own.

I will be thinking about Ghost Music for a while. The surrealism is what really piqued my interest and also the reason why I stayed. If you enjoyed Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami then I recommend reading Ghost Music as it moves through the blurred line between what is real and what is merely a figment of a dream.

Although I found the characters to be complex, I wanted more from them. I felt the author was doing a good job on giving them life but in the end they felt distant and not fully fleshed out. However that also amplified the dream-like state I felt I was in throughout reading the book.

I enjoyed this book a-lot and this was my first experience from this author. The plot and storyline drew me in and loved the characters . I will be reading more from this author in the future .

Some stories are so charming, so endearing, that their style and form are valuable additions to their own narrative.

Ghost Music is a spectacular example.

When talking about loneliness, rupture or detachment, it is easy to resort to common places. This work does not. It takes concepts so distant, so dissimilar, so foreign, that it takes us on a journey where introspection, in itself, becomes one more character.

This is not necessarily an easy book to read. It is a book that constantly asks of the reader. But it is also a book that rewards those who dare to read it.

If the above doesn't show how much I liked it, I wouldn't know how else to convince you to give it a look. From the start you will fall in love with its two quite different narrative styles, and there is no better presentation for a work than its genius and charm.

This is a great read that I am sure you will enjoy.

3.5 stars
Thank you, Netgalley, for sending me this ARC in exchange for an honest review.
Though the story started out really interesting and intriguing and a lot of drama went down, I lost interest when the character of Bai Yu was introduced and his philosophy, or rather his quest for meaning in life, started. I still liked the overall story, and sometimes the decisions that the main character made as a result of Bowen's actions infuriated me.

Thanks to NetGalley and Grove Atlantic for an ARC of this unique little book.

4 out of 5 stars

Song Yan's father once had great hopes for her. A brilliant pianist, he believed his daughter would follow in his footsteps. But Song Yan rebelled and married Bowen: a BMW executive she says is, in essence, a car salesman. She fills her time giving piano lessons to kids.

When Bowen's mother, who is getting older, moves in from Yunnan, Song's life changes. Trying to learn to live together, the only time Song and her mother-in-law have any kind of bonding time, is when they are cooking the mysterious mushrooms delivered to them. They are addressed to someone else from Bai Yu, and the first shipment they refuse, but the delivery is returned due to no return address. Song's mother-in-law is happy about them. The first shipment is mushrooms from her home region.

Bowen goes on a business trip, leaving Song and his mother to their own devices, not realizing that there is no pleasant dynamic building, no strong bonds beyond the mushrooms. Bowen's mother has also divulged information about Bowen's sister, someone whom Song has not heard of up til now. After so many deliveries, and right before Bowen leaves for Shanghai, the deliveries stop. Then a letter comes, requesting that the receiver come meet Bai Yu, for he has a favor to ask.

Bai Yu. The only Bai Yu Song can think of is the famous prodigy pianist who disappeared a decade earlier. Unable to refuse, she meets this stranger at a dilapidated but impressive house.

While Bowen's stay in Shanghai is extended, Song receives a phone call from a person from Yunnan, someone from Bowen's past who has deep secrets about Bowen that Song had not known about.

The entirety of this story is surreal, nearly hypnotic in its muted ambiance. Song doesn't have loud emotions, she tries to be a certain type of wife. She tries not to make waves with anyone. But she has dreams of an orange mushroom that speaks to her in the pitch black of a room with no exit, the only light coming from the mushroom itself.

I adore the writing. There are so many quotes I want to share, but as it was an ARC, I am unable to put them here, but I do so hope that they are quoted later when the final version is released.

I have to admit, there was one aspect of the story that I thought was one thing, but was something else entirely. I didn't like Bowen for the majority of the book, but by the end, I recognized that there are things in life that can break a person but instead of talking about it and moving through it, they hold it inside, where it poisons them and renders them bitter.

Filled with references to fugues, sonatas, and other musical pieces, this was a thoroughly captivating book.

4.5 STARS
Big thanks to NetGalley and Grove Atlantic for the e-ARC! After reading Braised Pork, I immediately wanted more work by An Yu to dive into and this did not disappoint. The book opens with main character Song Yan in a dreamlike interaction with a glowing talking orange mushroom. I was immediately confused but intrigued and knew from Braised Pork that there was no way this was gonna be a normal story.. When Song Yan comes to from this strange mushroom conversation, we are introduced to her husband and mother in law who is now moving into their home. Song Yan is constantly juggling her job as a piano teacher, trying to gain her mother in law’s approval, holding together her dysfunctional marriage and her feelings of inadequacy for not being a professional musician. Soon mysterious boxes of mushrooms are regularly delivered to their house with no return address, starting an unraveling of unpredictable disjointed chaos that kept me on the edge of my seat the whole time.
An Yu is an amazing author who always leaves me speechless and fascinated with her work. Easily one of my new favorite current authors.

This is a very haunting, dream-like book that tackles a lot of themes - music, art, life, death, marriage, motherhood. It's first=person and easy to read and become engaged with. I enjoyed it quite a bit. It's an odd little book that seems a bit magical, but is still grounded in the every day. Thanks to NetGalley for the ARC!!

Every now and then I encounter a book that leaves me in awe of the author’s brain and this is one of those books. How could such a beautifully simple story even come from one person’s mind? This book has a musical style that pours out from the pages like a song and makes you listen to the subtleties of life and the meaning behind it all. While the plot may not seem action rich you are still driven in a desire to see what will happen next.
Grappling with the topics of life, love and purpose, An Yu takes us on a dreamlike journey into the forgotten small magical parts of living life. Like a piece of music, we are given a glimpse into the life of Song Yan, a former pianist that now teaches children how to play instead of playing for herself. She lives a life of isolation because her husband is a closed room and is frequently away on business. Her windowed mother-in-law moves into their apartment around the same time mysterious boxes of mushrooms begin to arrive in the mail. When the mushrooms stop coming to the apartment, she receives a letter from a stranger claiming to be Bai Yu, a former piano prodigy that has been missing for years, that is asking her to come to his house. Drawn by the mushrooms, the music, and her own inner turmoil she ventures into the unknown. She begins to learn of the choices that the people around her have made in their lives and how it has made them who they are. It opens her eyes to the fact that the choices she thinks she made, may not have even been choices, but more what happens when you fail to make a move with purpose. Was she really present in her life just because she has the memories that say she was? Once she opens her ears to the music in the world around her, she realizes that things are not as simple as she has always thought them to be and that safety, comfort, love, and loss are all part of the same fragile strand that is a human life. The fact that mushrooms thrive in darkness reminds you that beautiful things can come from our darkest of times.
For the first time in forever I found myself at a loss as to what to say in a review because I feel like I have steeped too long in its emotions and now they are mine. There are so many little things that went into what made Ghost Music great that every time I wrote a sentence, I wanted to add more and more, but then I went back and edited it out because I don’t want to give that part of myself away. It feels personal and vividly real. This is a story that will haunt me (in a good way) for a while, and I hope that anyone else who reads it will understand what I mean when they finish.

Thank you to NetGalley and Grove Atlantic for providing me with the ARC and the opportunity to read this book. As of now it is set for a January 2023 release.

This is one of those novels that long after it’s been read I still can not determine if the majority of this novel happened or if it was all a fever dream. This novel reminded me of an adult version of Alice and Wonderland. It was a trip that dived into a lot of hard topics; motherhood, lose, marriages that aren’t perfect, and grief. Highly recommend!

So, I'm a bit split about this book, it's really dreamlike, mystical, surreal and different and I can really see how this will appeal to many different readers and loads of people will probably really like it.
However, I found It a bit tedious and found myself skimming through the last chapters to get to the end.
So, not really for me personally but absolutely nothing wrong with the book and I think it will become very popular.

A magical book full of beautiful prose. A new favorite author. She writes like a fever dream come to life.

This was fascinating and odd and deep and complex and unexpected. A kind of surreal and magical dream interspersed with reality, family, relationships and decisions

Ghost Music / An Yu

My favourite novels are the ones that stay with me long after I finish reading them. Sometimes it’s the characters that linger, sometimes it’s the writing itself, and often it’s because the subject matter makes me want to learn more. A novel that prompts me to delve deeper into a particular subject and its meaning, its symbolism, or its culture is, to me, the perfect sort of novel.

An Yu’s deliciously strange and beautiful Ghost Music is that sort of novel. The surprising combination of mushrooms and classical piano music are at the heart of the story and after reading it—devouring it, actually—I spent hours down a rabbit hole learning about Yunnan mushrooms; learning and relearning their names, their relevance, their importance to the province and to the people who farm and/or collect them. It is fascinating stuff, truly.

In the opening pages of Ghost Music, we are introduced to Song Yan, although we don’t yet know her name. She wakes in the night and finds herself in a strange room, startled by an orange mushroom growing out of the floorboards. It tells her it would like to be remembered. ”’It is normal that you don’t understand,’ the mushroom said…”
“But when you leave this room, it said, I’d like you to remember me.”

From the realms of what appears to be a dream, Song Yan then moves to daylight and the real world of Beijing and the apartment she lives in with her husband Bowen and his mother who has just moved in with them after her husband’s death. Song Yan must navigate in the space between Bowen, a man who appears closed-off emotionally and whose sole focus is his job, and her mother-in-law who resents living with her son and his wife, and soon reveals a secret about her family’s past that further strains Song Yan’s relationship with her husband.

When the first of many mysterious deliveries of mushrooms arrives at the apartment, Bowen’s mother recognizes them as ji zong mushrooms, grown in the Yunnan province where their family lived, and a tenuous bond forms between the women as they shop for and prepare meals for Bowen—soups and stews and noodles—that will highlight the mushrooms they receive.

Song Yan recognizes the name of the sender of the mushrooms, Bai Yu. Could this be Bai Yu, the piano prodigy her father wanted her to emulate before she gave up performing and switched to teaching piano? The same Bai Yu who disappeared without a trace years before, on the eve of his European tour?

When the mushroom deliveries cease, so too, it seems, does the connection between the two women in the home, but a letter from Bai Yu asking Song Yan to visit him sparks another kind of connection. This connection, between the past and the present, the real and the imagined, the world of who we are and who we present to others, sees Song Yan beginning to learn more about herself and to understand, ultimately, what she needs.

This is a gorgeously haunting story that moves between the world of the fantastic and that of the everyday, often with both worlds overlapping in a shift that throws the reader ever so slightly off balance and feeling the need to recalculate. An Yu manages this with such grace and lyricism, it feels effortless. With Ghost Music, she digs deeply into the ways we can’t escape our past, and of how the spectre of our past haunts and shapes us, even as we try—especially as we try—to forget it.

4.5 stars. Melancholic and surreal, this book is for fans of Haruki Murakami, and Hiromi Kawakami. I loved how dreamy the prose was, and I couldn’t stop reading bc it felt like I was sleepwalking and i just wanted to stay in the dream. I truly enjoyed this book— about a prodigy’s descent into madness, a woman trying to piece together her almost-broken marriage, a man who carries too much weight, and the secrets all of them keep from each other that threaten the very equilibrium of their lives. Deep, haunting, and beautiful, An Yu is an author I will be following and reading from now on. I cannot wait to read Braised Pork next! Thank you so much Netgalley for the digital arc xx

I struggled with reading this one. I wanted to love it, and I may have if in another time, but I just don't understand how any part of this could even attempt to feel like a real story. Not only is the main character the biggest silent shit talker, she apparently NEVER speaks to her husband, refuses to stand up for herself in any sense of the term, and also finds a random person in the meantime due to a mushroom delivery? Idk, I REALLY wanted to love this after reading the other reviews but I just couldn't find anything to hang onto.

Ghost Music was a surreal dream of a book, the beautiful prose weaving a path from one part of the story to the next much like a piece of music leading from one movement to another. There is a plot, but many of its points are left unresolved at the end, as the point is more about the journey. Song Yan was a character I connected with right from the start, and it was a delight to follow her throughout the novel as she assessed her life and feelings through the various revelations that came to light about those around her, interspersed with her strange interactions with the orange mushrooms. This was the kind of story you sink into at the moment of reading but then dwell on in more depth after you've put the book down. I loved every minute of reading it and would definitely pick up another book by An Yu in the future. It gets five stars from me.

"Its high-pitched voice now took on a hint of melancholy, as though it couldn't put into words what it really was. To compare itself with a ghost meant that it had to abandon something important in its essence, like a raindrop that feel through the air knowing that it would lose its shape forever upon hitting the ground."

Ghost Music is a surreal, dreamlike novel that contemplates life, love and existentialism through slow, patient slices of everyday life. The story is punctuated with encounters with glowing mushrooms, or "spirits", that appear and plead only to be remembered forever. And of course, between An Yu's beautiful prose and dreamy writing, there is a plot buried somewhere deep inside, shaping the progression throughout the different sections.

In modern day Beijing, Song Yan lives with her husband, Yang Bowen, and Bowen's infirm mother in a small apartment. Song Yan was a former pianist whose parents held her to expectations she could not keep, and so after marrying, she makes a living teaching piano to young children. Bowen is a BMW car salesman fleeing his claustrophobic hometown in Yunnan, and his indifferent/distant relationship with Song Yan is every bit as dysfunctional as it is infuriating. Bowen's mother only wishes for her son to leave behind a legacy of his own in the form of children (and to an extent Song Yan does too), but Bowen pushes back at every step, and it is this tension that drives the first plot of the story.

In the second storyline, Bai Yu, a once-respected piano prodigy, summons Song Yan to his house through the lucre of mushrooms and begs her to help him find proof that he is living through his music. I choose to believe that it was not coincidence Bai Yu summoned her, and it is here that some of the more abstract ideas are explored: the glowing mushrooms, the not-quite-corporealness of Bai Yu, the strange void formed from music. Bai Yu lives in one of Beijing's last hutongs, or narrow streets full of ancient courtyards, and its intersection between that which is old and new seems all too fitting for his character theme, while introducing surreal imagery of its own.

The introduced characters are so beautifully executed, and in such little text too. We are given the perspective of Song Yan's character, and it is through this that we see the inner workings of her mind and how she factors in every decision. Song Yan is not a perfect character by any means — she quails at confrontation at every moment, and is unable to build deep connections with other people. At first, I didn't understand Bowen's motivations or thought process either, but at the end I think it's crucial to remember that he, like his wife or any other character, are only human. Their flaws are unabashedly exposed to the world no matter how hard they try to fight it. And though I didn't like most of the characters on their own (although, in real life, people are hardly any different), voyuering on their interactions with each other made me enjoy their dynamics with each other.

Additionally, some of the questions or initial plotlines that An Yu introduces have no resolution. At the beginning, this infuriated me. However, as I kept reading, I found that I enjoyed the subversion of expectations: nothing was explained, but again, few things in life are. This, too, adds to the dream-like effect of the entire story, and its characters navigate through this world lost, dazed and confused. There is no happy ending for any of An Yu's characters, only continual existence, and sometimes not even that. What does it mean to truly have a purpose in life? How does one break free from merely existing?

Overall, Ghost Music was a delightful, beautifully illustrated novel that also makes for a quick fantasy/magic realism read. I appreciated its length and thought that the surrealism was executed extremely well, but what I really liked even more was that when it delved into more spiritualistic themes, it stayed far from the trap of traditional Buddhism/folk religions-oriented fantasy that many Chinese-American authors fall into. I look forward to exploring more of Yu's work in the future!

I received an ARC of this book from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

Loss is at the forefront of this atmospheric novel by talented author An Yu. Ghost Music opens with a query: “Can you please help me?” Song Yan replies: “What do you need?” “Well, you see, I’d like to be remembered”. This conversation with a mushroom, takes place in a dreamscape but sets the mood for the rest of the book.

Song Yan and her husband Bowen could be said to be living the dream. She teaches piano to young, talented children and Bowen is an executive for BMW. Both, though, have abbreviated their lives from what was expected of them. Both have secrets. The tension in the house increases when Bowen’s widowed mother come to live with them. The only agreement between the two women is that they both want a child in the household but Bowen stands firm that this is not in his plans.

The story unfolds with the delivery of a box of rare mushrooms and continues with the introduction of many missing characters; a sister, a child, a mate, a piano virtuoso. Some make their way into the story, some do not. The troubled mushroom dreams continue, always taking place in a door-less room from which Song Yang is unable to escape. The dream will impose on reality when Song Yang goes to find the mysterious terminus a quo of the mushrooms. She travels along labyrinthine alleyways to a courtyard where behind the gate she discovers a man who has been assumed dead for ten years.

Ghost Music deals with how we reconcile to the people and events that are no longer in our lives or the perceived things that never happened. What is the music we write about the people we’ve disappointed or those that disappoint us? Will we recognize people we’ve never met? Will we destroy them?

#GhostMusic #NetGalley