Initially, I read The Glowing Life of Leeann Wu back in May (?), but as is wont to happen in 2025, my brain erased all memory of everything I had read. So I started again a few months later and it was like revisiting a friend I hadn’t seen in forever. At first I was a bit anxious because I had positive feelings, but no memory. Then I got to a line that almost made me shoot coffee out my nose because it is a classic Mindy Hung line, “Somehow, she looked at the charming bundle of hostility I was at that point and thought I’d make a good colleague.” I knew everything would be ok, and it was. Leeann Wu is funny, thoughtful, and engrossing.
Leeann Wu got me thinking on what a contemporary North American gothic looks like. Modernity with its technology doesn’t necessarily lend itself to gothic vibes. That said, it’s got a lot of gothic elements: a castle (kind of), a haunting, supernatural elements, atmosphere, a past that must be acknowledged, and a woman in distress. Gothic stories are often in response to change and to a past that demands a reckoning.
Leeann faces a summer of changes as her daughter, Lulu, gets ready to go off to college and perimenopause hits. It’s not just her, though, the unusual heat and humidity is impacting everyone. Leeann, a midwife, is concerned about her patients and even more concerned when her hands start to glow. Lulu is worried Leeann is going to wither away from loneliness and is trying to encourage her to become closer to her mother, Shu-ling, and maybe develop a hobby. Lulu is less happy about the glowing hands and that the hobby her mother seems to be developing is a younger man, Kenji.
The book opens with an accident at a lightning struck crumbling castle (university building). There’s an immediate sense of wrongness. The weather is oppressive and strange things are happening. In a lot of gothic literature the haunting is coming from the earth, but here it feels like it’s the weather brings the haunting – the air is thick, strange storms blow in, and no one is sleeping because of the heat. Haunted skies feel appropriate because Leeann was brought to Canada on a plane from Taiwan as a toddler by her mother. The sky and the weather connect Taiwan and Ontario in a way earth doesn’t. As the summer goes on, the veil between spirit and mortal thins, but the usual Western suspect in veil thinning, Halloween, is no where to be found.
Using the drama of the gothic to explore Leeann Wu’s summer is genius. Perimenopause is a second puberty – vast hormonal upheaval – and a time to take stock of where your life is at that point. The supernatural strains Leeann’s relationships with her mother and daughter, but it also opens other avenues of connection between them, especially with the family history making itself felt. Leeann and her glowing hands are the center around which everyone else moves. Her insecurities and her well earned confidence, her anger at her mother and her care for her daughter and patients, give Leeann a rich complexity. She is the gothic hero and the gothic heroine. And Kenji is just happy to be there with her.
I enjoyed reading this multiple times. Mindy Hung, who also writes as Ruby Lang and Opal Wei, always tells a good story about people I want to read about.
I received this as an advance reader copy from Alcove Press and NetGalley. My opinions are my own, freely and honestly given.