We all have ancestors. Every single one of us, whether we know them or not. Even books. Hungry Bones may officially be my debut novel, but she has a lineage all the same. I want to tell you about one of Hungry Bones’ ancestors. A spirit that haunts her pages. There would be no Hungry Bones without Karen and Misty. 

Fun fact: Hungry Bones is not my first book. My first book was banned when I was ten- years-old. Actually, not to brag, but it was a whole series of books, The Adventures of Karen and Misty. Karen and Misty was a hit in Mrs. Olden’s fourth grade class at Perkins Elementary. For a few weeks one spring, I was their queen. 

The series followed a girl named Karen as she solved crimes in her town and outwitted mean adults who never believed her. Her sidekick, her best friend, the Watson to her Holmes, was a fluffy black dog named Misty. Karen had long black hair, talked too much, and – I believe this is canon – could run really fast. Misty followed her everywhere, could jump remarkably high, and protected Karen against the bad guys. Insider info: Karen was based on me, Misty was based on my dog, Misty. 

I would sit at my desk during Creative Writing period and write my books while also assigning Karen and Misty stories to my fellow classmates. “Yes, I think an airplane adventure would make a great Karen and Misty #5, Marisa! Write it by Friday, okay?” I was a firm but benevolent ruler. At one point my entire class was writing Karen and Misty books. In fact the other fourth grade class across the hall was also writing Karen and Misty books. The teachers had a meeting about me (still not bragging…but I kind of am). 

Let’s be clear here: I was one of three Asian kids in my class. The only Chinese American kid and the only girl. My class was mainly white and most of the books made available to us featured white main characters. When we read books with characters who weren’t white, they were never Asian. Little Louise would devour books about spooky crime solving kids, best friends getting into wacky hijinks, and the joys and terrors of growing up – but I almost always had to rewrite the protagonist in my head if I wanted to see myself in those stories. Even for an eager, hungry, imaginative mind that gets exhausting after a while. After a while, you just wish you could be the blue-eyed beauty who easily fits into the role of “young American hero” you keep reading about. 

So it was no small feat that I got my entire fourth grade class to write about a Chinese girl. A Chinese girl who was the smartest, funniest, bravest kid in town. 

I didn’t set out to write Karen and Misty as an answer to Chinese American representation in middle grade novels of the ’90s. I mean, I was ten, my heroes were Bunnicula, Claudia Kishi, and the Unicorn from The Last Unicorn. I wrote Karen and Misty books because it was fun to imagine Misty and me going on all sorts of wild adventures. Who else was I going to imagine but myself?

With Karen and Misty, I was free to be who I was, unapologetically. I didn’t have to pretend to understand all the nuances of my friends’ families who came over on the Mayflower, but I also didn’t have to be the Chinese Cultural Ambassador for fourth graders at Perkins Elementary. I could be of both worlds or even at odds with both worlds. Or I could just be a kid! Being Chinese American was part of the story but not the whole story. I think lot of immigrant kids or children of immigrants feel that way. But the stories we offer kids – especially back in the pre-Internet ye olde times – don’t always make room for that. 

Some might argue that a Chinese American girl’s adventures aren’t relatable to kids who do not share that background. Some might argue that Asian stories can’t be popular outside of Asian communities. Still more might argue that Asian or Asian American stories might alienate kids who aren’t from such cultures. 

Then what happened in Mrs. Olden’s fourth grade class? Why did all those kids who couldn’t tell a bao from onigiri care so much about that character? How on earth did they manage to care about a character who didn’t look just like them? 

Because some things – curiosity, fear, wonder – speak to the core of every young person. My fourth grade classmates didn’t care if Karen was Chinese, Irish, American, or a t-rex, they just liked her. And maybe, just maybe, their worlds got a little bigger and brighter with Karen in it. 

I might be giving The Adventures of Karen and Misty too much credit but perhaps not, it was a pretty magical time. 

But all great empires eventually fall. I’ll never forget the day Mrs. Olden stood up in front of the classroom, waved her arms and all but shouted, “No more Karen and Misty books!” The queen had been dethroned. 

Decades later, when I sat down to write Hungry Bones, a Chinese American hungry ghost story about two lonely girls stuck (for different reasons) in a haunted house, Karen and Misty were nudging me along. But this time, I wasn’t just writing for myself, I was writing for Little Louise too. All the Little Louises out there. 

I wrote Hungry Bones so that maybe the “weird” Asian kid in a place like Texas, Missouri (both places I lived), or Washington State where Mrs. Olden’s class was, might read this story and think, “Wait, there I am! I can be the main character.” 

What I love about the main characters in Hungry Bones, Molly and Jade, is that they both have to draw their own map for their lives. Nobody can explain to Molly how to be the new kid move after move; nobody can tell her how to interpret the memories of the dead that infiltrate her brain. Nobody can show Jade how to be a ghost. To borrow a phrase from another series of books I loved as a kid, they have to choose their own adventure. 

And choosing your own adventure, with courage, sometimes with defiance, can be a big part of being the Asian kid, the immigrant kid, the kid who doesn’t quite fit in for whatever reason. Though she wasn’t thinking it at the time, Little Louise chose her own adventure with Karen and Misty. She chose to put herself at the center of the story when before she had been told things like, “You can’t be Ariel the Little Mermaid, you’re CHINESE. You can be a seahorse.” 

In Hungry Bones the characters talk about how those that came before us, ancestors by blood or experience, paved the way for the choices we get to make now. As I said before, without Karen and Misty there would be no Hungry Bones. Those books, stapled together with construction paper covers, were always in the back of my head, living on as evidence that such stories matter. It’s my hope that someone, a Little Louise, Lex, Li, or Laurie – someone who might be feeling a bit lonely – might meet Molly and Jade and be inspired to choose their own adventure and build upon this ancestry. 

Meet the author

Author of the upcoming middle grade novel Hungry Bones (Scholastic Press), Louise has written and produced countless videos for the successful YouTube channel, Ask a Mortician (she’s literally lost count). You may also remember Louise’s work from HuffPost, The Order of the Good Death, xoJane’s “Creepy Corner,” and the podcast Death in the Afternoon. When she’s not writing about spooky or mortal matters, Louise works in cat rescue & adoption in Brooklyn where she lives with four black cats and an immortal cactus. 

INSTAGRAM: @LouiseHung1

About Hungry Bones

A chilling middle grade novel about a girl haunted by a hungry ghost.

Molly Teng sees things no one else can.

By touching the belongings of people who have died, she gets brief glimpses into the lives they lived. Sometimes the “zaps” are funny or random, but often they leave her feeling sad, drained, and lonely.

The last thing Jade remembers from life is dying. That was over one hundred years ago. Ever since then she’s been trapped in the same house watching people move in and out. She’s a ‘hungry ghost’ reliant on the livings’ food scraps to survive. To most people she is only a shadow, a ghost story, a superstition.

Molly is not most people. When she moves into Jade’s house, nothing will ever be the same—for either of them. After over a century alone, Jade might finally have someone who can help her uncover the secrets of her past, and maybe even find a way out of the house—before her hunger destroys them both.

ISBN-13: 9781338832587
Publisher: Scholastic, Inc.
Publication date: 10/01/2024
Age Range: 8 – 12 Years

Filed under: Guest Post