(Full disclosure: I received a free e-ARC for review through Netgalley. Content warning for violence including murder, assassination, and sexual assault, as well as generational and interpersonal trauma and mental illness.)

So I was originally approved to review this title on NetGalley waaaay back in October 2023, but after slogging through the first few pages, I quickly gave up: the text was too small and pixelated to read without getting a massive headache. (Note to publishers: please do better!) That alone was almost enough to turn me off of FEEDING GHOSTS, but I'm so thankful that I picked up a physical copy when it finally turned up at my local library, some eight months later. FEEDING GHOSTS is likely one of my favorite graphic novels of 2024, and THE single best graphic novel memoir I've ever read.

Author Tessa Hulls is a second generation immigrant; her mother came to America from Hong Kong as a college student, eventually settling down in a small rural town in California. Seven years later, Rose brought her own mother, Sun Yi, to join her. A former journalist who faced persecution in China, Sun Yi's struggle with mental illness seemingly began after she published her 1958 memoir, EIGHT YEARS IN RED CHINA, which became an instant bestseller (although Sun Yi only saw proceeds from the books' first print run). She hung on just long enough to get herself and her young daughter to safety - fleeing China for Hong Kong - and then slowly slipped into psychosis. (Aside from later dementia, Hulls doesn't elaborate on Sun Yi's specific diagnoses.)

As a child, Tessa only knew her grandmother as a vaguely defined shadow. Sun Yi and Tessa did not share a common language and, even if they did, Sun Yi remained glued to her desk most of the day, obsessively (re)writing the story of her life. Yet the relationship between Sun Yi and Rose - not as mother and daughter, but dependent and caregiver - cast a shadow on Tessa's own relationship with her mother, who saw her as another broken thing to be fixed.

After college, Tessa left home in pursuit of the freedom that only the wild frontier could provide a cowboy like herself: bicycling solo from California to Maine; taking on seasonal work in Alaska and Antarctica. But after the death of Sun Yi, Hulls begins to question the efficacy of her "no strings attached" lifestyle. She spends six months holed up in a cabin, drafting the outline of this book. She gets a grant to have Sun Yi's memoir translated into English, and another to travel to Hong Kong and China in pursuit of her matrilineal history. (Hulls's father is British; her mother's father, Swedish.)

The result is FEEDING GHOSTS, an absolutely epic story that adeptly demonstrates how the personal is political, and vice versa. Hulls excavates several generations of trauma, showing how political violence and repression fractures communities, families, and minds - including those of the survivors' descendants, born decades after the fact. The women in this story are complex, multi-layered individuals, who sometimes do the 'wrong' thing despite having the best of intentions. Hulls weaves the stories of her mother's and grandmother's lives with the history of China, resulting in a rich tapestry that's often painful to behold.

I guess my only complaint is Hulls's harsh judgment of her grandmother as a "gold digger" (although she does revise this somewhat towards the end of the narrative). Whether Sun Yi used her beauty to ensure the safety of herself and Rose is really immaterial, imho; the problem lies in social structures that value women for these attributes, such that their very survival depends on it. And what of the men who willingly participated in these transactions? Hulls seems to view them as dupes rather than active participants. Idk, the very term seems painfully outdated to this Gen X-er, and I've got a good decade on the author.

Feeding Ghosts was an incredible graphic novel. I appreciated the exploration of intergenerational trauma and the various events in the 3 women's lives. It is heavy but beautifully done.

Stunning art. Beautiful story. Something that I didn't know I needed. Very happy to have read this. Highly highly highly suggest it!

3.5 Stars

This is a powerful graphic novel memoir about three generations of Chinese women and their journey through mental health conditions, trauma and communist China to the present day. It is both moving and painful but the story is also gripping.

Tessa Hulls tells the story of her Chinese grandmother, Sun Yi; her mother, Rose; and herself. Each one of them grapples with issues of identity, trauma and trying to find how to live amongst the challenges of Communist China, Hong Kong as refugees, and the USA as immigrants but also as a mixed heritage American.

It is an epic journey which explores the impact of the Communist revolution on these three women and how that impact affected the health of the grandmother but also left marks on Tessa’s mother and shaped the fraught relationship between Tessa and her mother.

It is a dark and painful story with glimpses of light as Tessa and her mother explore their lives together. The artwork captures this because it is mostly black and white with dark tones. This highlights the difficulties and trauma that both women travel through. It is hard to read but it is also hopeful as both Tessa and her mother seek to comes to terms with their past and with each other.

It is a gripping read, slight too long for me but one that is engaging. If you like memoirs then this book is excellent, especial in the way it weaves in the horrors of the communist regime in China.

Copy provided in exchange for an unbiased review.

This a beautiful and touching story about an really tough subject. This book deals with mother-daughter relationships, mental health and intergenerational trauma in a gripping way, and the eerie illustrations reinforce the book's purpose. The pacing was a bit slow for me, but I'm sure others will love it

A raw graphic memoir exploring mental illness and the identity of our narrator as a child and adult of mixed heritage.
People like to categorise, naturally our brain wants to put things in groups, because it's easier to understand - but this will always hurt people as we are all more than a few tags. Throw in a history of mental illness and family secrets and you have quite a lot to unpack in your life before you are remotely ok.
This book is very real, in the sense that we see the author trying to understand as much as us, trying to gather a full picture, judging what is told to her, trying to fill in gaps, trying to make sense of something that will probably never make sense, because it's life, and life is messy.
I found that book very touching, and important in what it says about humanity as a whole, about being different, about not being what people expect, about never quite fitting anywhere, about wanting to belong, about wanting answers.

A detailed memoir about mental illnesses that haunts 3 generations of woman in a family. Not really a fan of the illustrations, its too eerie. But overall it’s ok

I found this book to be really gripping, but the reading experience really frustrating — solely due to the quality of the digital advance reader copy. Each page is very dense, containing very ink-heavy illustrations and bubbles full of handwritten text, but the image resolution quality of the e-galley was so low that even in full page mode it was a struggle to make out the words, and zooming it didn’t add any clarity. This was very distracting and tiresome, because the story itself was wonderfully layered and painfully honest, the kind of introspective narrative that invites immersion, but my eyes were simply too tired from making out the text to read uninterrupted. Either a regular typographic font or a higher quality of images would have fixed the problem… anyway, I’m determined to give this book another read after it is out on paper, to experience it as it was meant to be.

But typographic woes aside, the story itself is great. So much honest thoughts about intergenerational drama, gentle humour side by side with horrors and fears, unadorned but persistent interest in untangling complex family history — it’s all there. At times, it reminded me of Alison Bechdel’s things, because in many ways that’s my formative experience of this kind of graphic novel storytelling, at times it reminded me of the classics of Asian American women-centric literature likes of Amy Tan, but the combined language of the images and story was wholly author’s own,

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for the ARC of a Feeding Ghosts by Tessa Hulls.

Feeding Ghosts is the beautifully told story of three generations of women and their love for one another through the hardships of trauma, of moving to a completely different country, of doing what you think is the best for your child. It isn't the easiest book to read, but it is such a rich text, full of history and important personal perspectives.

I am not the biggest fan of the illustrations as I found them quite dark (not in themes but in colour, a lot of the pages have big blocks of black), but they do provide good visual representation and support the text.

Also, warning for a few "body horror" type illustrations.


Thank you NetGalley and Farrar, Straus and Giroux, MCD for the opportunity to read this ARC.

Feeding Ghosts is a creative, well-written, well-researched memoir. Tessa Hulls spent 6 years working on this this captivating work of art. The illustrations are detailed and beautiful. Hulls weaves in history, humor and saddness in this epic story of three generations of women.

She shares the challenges that her grandmother and mother faced and the impact that these challenges have had on their relationships. I learned so much about Chinese history, identity and the struggles of immigration in this book. The word epic is overused but in this case, I believe epic is truly an approrpriate word to describe this incredible graphic novel. I highly recommend it!

Thank you to NetGalley and Farrar, Straus and Giroux for an advanced reader copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

“Feeding Ghosts” by Tessa Hulls is a story of a three generational Chinese family who deals with obligation and cultural issues but mixed with mental illness and trauma. I will be honest I really didn’t like the art style. The story was interesting but because the art was such a big part of it I couldn’t really like the plot too much. 1 out of 5 stars from me.

Words won't ever be able to do it justice - you have to read it yourself - but here's my attempt to describe this incredible graphic memoir.

Feeding Ghosts is a tender yet painful depiction of three generations of Chinese women and their shared (and diverging) history. The story closely follows their complicated relationships based on values such as duty, obligation, fear and identity as shaped by their respective native cultures, and fearlessly tackles brutal stories of mental illness, intergenerational trauma and heartbreaking historical events that contributed to them.

This isn't a regular comic. Expect the text to be in the spotlight - it's extensively researched from a historical and sociological perspective, well-written, and on par with the spectacular illustrations that accompany it throughout.

There's a handy timeline at the beginning of the book detailing the events in chronological order for easy referencing. The book is also full of real quotes and photographs that provide context. It's very respectful by - to paraphrase the author - letting people speak for themselves, and recognizing individual truths. This allows the reader to draw their own conclusions and makes it so much easier to empathize with each of the characters in turn.

This was both a relatable and emotional read for me. Can't recommend it enough.

✨ Disclaimer ✨ I received a free copy of this book and this is my honest review.