"Hungry Bones" is a 2024 young adult fantasy/horror novel by Louise Hung, who worked as a magazine and scriptwriter before writing this book. It is set in contemporary times, and has unambiguously supernatural elements.
Molly Teng is a 13 year old Chinese-American girl who has been carried across the United States by her freewheeling mother, Dot. In a bit of relatable content that could have been the basis of a non-supernatural themed book, Molly resents her mother's constant moving and scheming and unable to set down roots. But there is another problem: Molly possesses psychometry and often has difficult flashbacks when touching old or memorable items. The books plot begins when they move into a new home somewhere near Denton County, Texas that is incredibly cheap to rent because it is also haunted. And Molly can see the ghost, a 100+ year old Chinese girl named Jade. Despite her initial fear, Jade eventually makes contact with Molly, and they become best friends. Despite being a ghost, Jade is also capable of eating, and is in fact a hungry ghost (a concept that Molly is not yet aware of, but which clicked for me immediately). Jade can not remember her earthly life, but is desperate to understand it, something that she hopes Molly's psychometry will help her with. Since psychometry is an unpleasant experience for Molly (and the stronger the memory, the more intense the pain), she is reluctant to go through the process. In the novel's conclusion, she finds out that her strict aunt, estranged from her mother, knows about her powers (which ran in the family), and together, they help unlock the truth of what happened to Jade. The book comes to a conclusion that involves solving Jade's personal fate, as well as connecting it with the history of the Chinese in the United States.
This was a very well-written book, and it did something that is very difficult to do in a horror book--threaded the needle where we always feel a little connected to reality, even as we accept the presence of the supernatural. In other books that I've liked, this has been accomplished by never really making things supernatural, or by keeping the setting just slightly askew from our modern world. In the early chapters of this book, I thought it might go the direction of making the idea of a ghost totally commonplace, and that Jade's job would be to help Molly become a girlboss by winning the school science fair or something. But this book maintained the element of horror, or at least of the eerie. We could believe that Molly had a ghost best friend and that it was real---all while keeping the idea that it was still spooky and weird for her. Part of this is that the book keeps itself confined to a small amount of characters, and since it takes place in the summer, Molly never needs to go to school. The book only has a few central characters, all of whom are also (by coincidence or design?) women. And I think that the fact that this book has a plot that would basically work as a non-supernatural story, makes it more effective as a supernatural story. The story of Molly's troubles with a rootless mother meshes perfectly with her forming a connection with a ghost.
(Also, strangely enough, this book had a few things that I could connect with: in 2014, like Molly, I found myself travelling from Maine to Denton County Texas, and also, like Molly (and this sounds like a joke but this is true), I was raised by a mother who moved frequently and who had conflicts with a sister over that sister's ability to see ghosts).
Overall, I say this book succeeded very well at one of the hardest things to do in a horror story: it established the supernatural elements as real, while never losing the sense of the eerie. And it did it all while telling a character-driven story that communicated something real about growing up.