Christina Li’s The Manor of Dreams is the kind of novel that will haunt you in ways you didn’t think possible. On the surface, it’s about a former Hollywood starlet’s death and a mysterious inheritance that throws two families into uneasy proximity. The story digs deep into cultural identity, ambition, resentment, generational grief, and the quiet terror of what gets passed down without anyone ever speaking it out loud.
When the former starlet’s will reveals an unexpected heir, however, the house doesn’t just become contested property, but rather contested memory. Each character arrives believing they know what they’re owed, emotionally and materially. But the house has its own ideas … and so does Li.
The Ghosts We Carry, The Ones We Become
The brilliance of The Manor of Dreams lies in how it handles perspective. The narrative moves fluidly between characters — mothers and daughters from both sides of the inheritance divide — which offers layered glimpses into the baggage they’ve brought with them. Some of that baggage is cultural, some of it is personal. All of it is heavy, though.
This isn’t a horror novel in the traditional sense, but make no mistake: The Manor of Dreams is deeply unsettling. It’s the kind of story where the dread doesn’t come from what jumps out, but from what seeps in. The quiet rot it exposes in the foundations of family runs deep, festering, until even the walls seem heavy with memory. The house doesn’t just creak or groan; it reacts. Its spaces don’t feel haunted so much as saturated, steeped in the weight of what’s been done and left unsaid. Rooms remember. Gardens respond. And whether or not you believe in ghosts, Li makes it clear that trauma has a way of lingering.
The characters come undone, shedding the roles they’ve been forced into — dutiful daughter, abandoned child, silent witness — and questioning what’s left underneath. Each chapter adds another shade to the story, another revelation that complicates what we think we know. But it’s never melodramatic. Li doesn’t deal in theatrics. She deals in truth, and how much it costs to unearth it.
Inheritance As Curse, Ambition As Bait
The Manor of Dreams asks: What are people willing to endure, erase, or become in order to claim what they think is rightfully theirs? The house becomes a mirror, reflecting the quiet hungers of everyone who enters. Some want recognition. Others want safety, or closure, or absolution. Most want something they can’t even name.
And Li is smart enough not to make that desire simple. She doesn’t divide her characters into good and bad. Everyone here is flawed, but that complexity is where the novel finds its power. Even the ominous house, wild, almost sentient, feels like a character shaped by the ambition and loss of the people who lived within its walls.
There’s also something deeply rewarding about how the novel engages with identity, particularly through its intergenerational lens. The tensions between immigrant and American-born experiences, the class differences between the two families, and the unspoken realities of queerness and female ambition — all of these threads are pulled taut, never forced, always deliberate.
The Ache Of The Unsaid
What elevates this novel beyond its gothic bones is its emotional intelligence. It’s not afraid to sit in the murky places. Li doesn’t offer tidy resolutions. She’s not interested in vindication or punishment. She’s interested in what happens when people are finally forced to confront the stories they’ve told themselves their entire lives.
There are moments of beauty here, though. Quiet, aching, often uncomfortable. A glance between strangers who share a history they can’t name. A conversation that veers just close enough to the truth to wound. A garden that seems to know more than it should. Every detail feels intentional, every interaction loaded with unspoken context. It’s emotionally dense without ever feeling overwrought.
And even when the house slips into the surreal, it never loses its emotional grounding. The supernatural elements aren’t spectacle; they’re metaphor, manifestation, memory … They exist to underscore the emotional and psychological weight of the narrative, not distract from it.
In The End …
This isn’t a breezy family drama or a conventional ghost story. The Manor of Dreams pushes into murkier territory, where unease lingers in the silences and the emotional weight never quite lets up. It invites you to lean in closer, to notice what’s left unsaid, and to reckon with how the legacies we inherit, both spoken and unspoken, can quietly reshape who we are. It’s scary and good. A must-read!
About Christina Li:
Christina Li is the award-winning author of children’s books Clues to the Universe, which was a Washington Post summer book club pick, and Ruby Lost and Found, which was an NPR and New York Public Library Best Book of the Year and recognized for the Asian Pacific American Librarians’ Award for Best Children’s Literature. She is also the author of the YA title True Love and Other Impossible Odds, as well as a forthcoming fiction debut, The Manor of Dreams (Avid Reader Press), which has been listed as one of TIME Magazine’s most anticipated novels of 2025.
She loves to daydream about characters and drink too much jasmine green tea. She grew up in the Midwest and California but now calls New York home.
