Review: Feeding Ghosts by Tessa Hulls.
MCD, March 2024. 400 p. ill. ISBN 9780374601652 (hardcover), $40.00.
Reviewed July, 2025
By: Lauren Scanlon, Teaching & Learning Specialist, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Feeding Ghosts is a moving, Pulitzer Prize-winning graphic memoir by Tessa Hulls that traces three generations of women through shifting cultural, historical, and psychological landscapes. The chronological beginning of the story is 1920s China, where we follow Sun Yi (Hulls’ grandmother) through her early life, career, and persecution during the rise of the Chinese Communist Party. After years of struggle, Sun Yi and her daughter (Hulls’ mother) escape China, eventually establishing themselves in America, where Hulls is born.
But Feeding Ghosts is not a chronological story. Hulls frequently breaks the fourth wall, overtly acknowledging her role as both narrator and main character. Diving into history and swimming back out again, Hulls weaves the present into the past and precisely articulates the ways in which history and trauma have shaped the lives of a political journalist, a good Chinese daughter, and an American cowboy.
One of the most striking elements of the novel is its heavily textured pages featuring a dark, repeating pattern. At different moments in the story, this pattern conjures a river, murky recesses of the mind, skeletal scaffolding, the haunted faces of wailing ghosts, a sea floor, and a wild west landscape. The book’s 400 pages are visually crowded and close, mirroring the claustrophobic, enmeshed relationships between these mothers, daughters, and ghosts across time and space.
Feeding Ghosts will be an excellent addition to libraries specializing in East Asian history as it vividly portrays historical events occurring in China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan. Feeding Ghosts would also be at home in library collections that feature intersectional identities, feminist theory, social politics of race, mental health, somatic therapy, generational trauma, and epigenetics. Due to recurrent themes of political violence and self-harm, this book may be best suited for teenage to adult audiences.
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