Review of the Enigmatic Madam Ingram and Sister Snake

By Olivia Ho

Review of The Enigmatic Madam Ingram by Meihan Boey (Singapore: Epigram, 2023) and Sister Snake by Amanda Lee Koe (New York: Ecco Books, 2024)

Cover of The Enigmatic Madam Ingram by Meihan Boey
Image description: Book cover illustration showing the silouette of a woman inside a glass gazebo against a dark background with pale flowers.

Cover of Sister Snake by Amanda Lee Koe
Image description: Book cover illustration of a woman’s hand casting the shadow of a snake against a bright green background.

In the cold, damp Scottish Highlands, a woman sits at a Malay handloom in a hothouse filled with an impossible tropical jungle. Over a century later, at a secluded island spa off the coast of Singapore, two women slip off the massage table and into the same sort of jungle, transforming into snakes.

In their sophomore novels, The Enigmatic Madam Ingram and Sister Snake, Singaporean authors Meihan Boey and Amanda Lee Koe draw on Asian mythologies to depict the monstrous feminine.

They rework the femmes fatales of folklore into complex, sympathetic figures, who must make the difficult choice to either suppress their natures and blend into human society, or embrace the risks of living as their true selves.

The Enigmatic Madam Ingram is the second instalment in Boey’s historical fantasy trilogy set in 19th- to early 20th-century Singapore. It follows the Epigram Books Fiction Prize–winning The Formidable Miss Cassidy (2021) and was shortlisted for the same prize in 2023; it was longlisted for the Dublin Literary Award. The trilogy’s conclusion, The Mystical Mr Kay, also won the Epigram prize in February 2025 and was published in July.

The Enigmatic Madam Ingram opens in 1906 as the wealthy, reclusive Letty Ingram leaves her manor in the Scottish Highlands for colonial Singapore, arriving awestruck amid a monsoon storm which seems to her like ‘tepid bathwater pouring down from a frightful and spectacular sky’. She has come ostensibly to visit her odious husband, a former East India Company employee now on his deathbed. This is but a pretext; she could not care less if he lives or dies. Her real purpose is to seek the help of a medium who may be able to resolve the curse from which she has suffered her entire life. 

Letty has Malayan heritage: her mother, Bungadarah, left her unnamed island in the Malay Archipelago with Letty’s father, the British trader William Ingram. Bungadarah reinvents herself as Rose Ingram and dazzles London society with her exotic beauty and magic gifts — though these come at a sinister cost. 

Letty’s memories of her childhood — of the secluded manor where her mother grew plants that could not have survived the Scottish climate and wove magnificent cloths on her kek tenun, or handloom — are patchy. She is also haunted by the faint recollection of a sister, Amirah, who would dance in London for their guests’ pleasure, but who has otherwise vanished entirely from Letty’s memory.

Boey brings back characters from her first novel, including the eponymous Miss Cassidy, a goddess who manifests as a middle-aged spinster to work as a governess in Singapore, and her suitor, retired businessman and ghost-seer Kay Wing Tong. The first novel’s gentle subversions involved reworking typically Western genres such as the comedy of manners or the fairy tale for a Singapore context, which made for a charming romp only slightly let down by the puzzling choice of a final villain from Greek myth. 

Its sequel, however, is something deeper and much darker. It is here that one begins to truly appreciate the complexity of Boey’s weaving: what appeared to be loose threads in the first novel are unexpectedly picked up here and woven back in, sometimes literally, as deftly as Bungadarah at her kek tenun.

Miss Cassidy is met with a formidable adversary in Bungadarah. Her name, Rose, evokes the 1951 English version of the Mandarin song ‘Rose, Rose, I Love You’, as sung by Frankie Laine; she is, as the song’s distinctly Orientalist lyrics go, ‘the flower of Malaya’ for whom all men make way. Letty recalls of her mother that ‘Wherever she went, whomever she spoke to, a gentle wave of good feeling and general bonhomie seemed to pervade’; she is sinuous, sensuous, simultaneously ‘exotic’ and ‘eminently agreeable’. A reader familiar with Southeast Asian supernatural lore will be able to guess quite quickly what manner of being Bungadarah is, but it is pleasurable nevertheless to watch the narrative work its way towards that revelation. 

The colonialism that simmered below the surface in the first novel is brought to a boil here. Bungadarah is taken from her island, inhabited only by the indigenous Orang Laut, across the seas by her British sailor husband; she bestows upon him untold wealth, which Letty later learns is derived from piracy. At times, the novel exhibits a certain anachronism of discourse — for instance, when Mr Kay criticises Miss Cassidy for being a ‘condescending white saviour’ — which breaks the immersion. Yet there is a historical weight to Boey’s emphasis that the magic that makes Rose so desirable to the British is ultimately grounded in violence and loss. An isolated immigrant mother, her world narrows to her daughters, for whom she experiences an all-consuming love that, in more than one sense, takes the form of possession. 

Difficult loves also drive Sister Snake, which retells the Chinese legend of two immortal snake spirits, Bai Suzhen and Xiaoqing, or Madam White Snake and Little Green, who can transform into human form and pledge to be sisters for eternity. In the present day of Lee Koe’s novel, the sisters are estranged. Su is a prim and proper politician’s wife in Singapore. Emerald, ever the chaotic party girl, is making ends meet as a sugar baby in New York, feeding off the qi, or life force, of her clients. In the parlance of last summer’s social media trends, Su is very demure, very mindful; Emerald is brat.

When an outing with a client ends in violence in Central Park, Emerald is forced to go on the run and Su flies over at once to put in the fix. She asks Emerald to come live with her in Singapore, but Emerald chafes against the city’s clockwork efficiency and out-of-bounds markers. She despises Su’s husband, Paul, who has risen above a difficult childhood to place himself in the running for the next Chief Minister. Emerald is, however, fascinated by Tik, the couple’s security officer, who is a closeted lesbian. As Emerald’s transgressions draw suspicion, Su begins to fear that her sister’s audacity will endanger the careful cocoon she has built to keep herself safe. 

The sisters’ duality brings out two different sides of the city. Su’s Singapore is the one cemented in the global imagination by the likes of Kevin Kwan’s Crazy Rich Asians (2013) — branded goods in the exclusive boutiques of Orchard Road and Marina Bay Sands, landed homes in lush Bukit Timah. Emerald discovers through Tik another Singapore, just out of sight in its back lanes and in the Metabolist mall that is Golden Mile Complex, where Tik’s ex-girlfriend Ploy works as a dancer in a Thai nightclub. Some of the novel’s finest sequences are set after dark in the warren of Golden Mile Complex, inhabited by Thai and Vietnamese guest workers and Chinese apothecaries; in real life, these residents will most likely have been displaced now that the building has been sold for redevelopment.

Unlike the magnificent sweep of Lee Koe’s dazzling debut novel, Delayed Rays of a Star (2019), which followed three groundbreaking actresses across the decades, Sister Snake is slimmer, sharper, and knows where to strike to draw blood. Lee Koe’s arch, urbane prose is laced with sly provocations — ‘He look like he eat chili, will diarrhea!’ is Ploy’s pithy assessment of Paul — but beneath the quips simmers a vivid rage. Paul and Emerald fall out at their first meeting over Paul’s misgendering of a student with gender dysphoria, whom he views as the beginning of a ‘transgender epidemic’. ‘Her body!’ roars Emerald, before stalking off. ‘This is exactly what we worry about when we send our scholars to the US, to the UK’, a disapproving Paul tells Su. ‘We lose them to all these Western values’. The novel’s depiction of civil servants can verge at times on caricature, though Lee Koe is able, particularly in Paul’s case, to introduce a surprising degree of nuance. 

Sister Snake is a novel about passing — what it costs to belong, and what it takes to live freely. Su takes pains to train herself to walk without slithering and speak without sibilance; she denies herself the relief of moulting, moulding herself instead into Paul’s perfect support system. Tik, too, must hide her sexuality to get by at work and at home, where her mother stoically pretends that the women Tik brings home are just friends. Su tells Emerald that she likes Singapore because it is a place where, ‘as long as people follow the script, they’re safe’. Yet the text is replete with reminders that underneath it all, Su is just as monstrous as Emerald, if not more so; in fact, repression has made her deadlier. When she finally goes off-script in the novel’s astounding climax, it is with devastating results. 

Yet, despite its anger, Sister Snake brims above all with love. Neither Boey nor Lee Koe’s novels centre romantic love: though Miss Cassidy carries on a long-distance relationship with Mr Kay, this does not take precedence over Letty’s predicament; although the original Legend of the White Snake focused on the romance between Bai Suzhen and her mortal lover Xu Xian, Lee Koe foregrounds sisterhood. Letty searches for her lost sister Amirah; Emerald and Su cannot stand living together, but spend a thousand years coming back to each other anyway.

In both novels, characters construct communities of care outside of the biological family unit, as Miss Cassidy gambles her own position to protect Letty, and Emerald is rescued repeatedly by her friends — Tik and Ploy in Singapore, and her roommate Bartek in New York. ‘Ride or die, baby’, declares Bartek after discovering Emerald’s secret. ‘You’re a queen, I’m a queen. We don’t need saving. We’re out here, thriving’.

Feminist theorist Donna Haraway writes of how, in a world damaged by colonialism and capitalism, we must learn to make kin across species boundaries and ‘stay with the trouble’, her way of describing the messy entanglements we exist in — these are not always safe or pleasant, and may even seem monstrous, but nonetheless we have to recognise the ways in which we are inextricable from each other. Following threads across time and space, intertwining the human and not-human, Boey and Lee Koe’s speculative feminisms weave ways in which we might not just save, but thrive.

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Olivia Ho is a PhD candidate in English Language and Literature at University College London. Her research focuses on the interstitial city in urban speculative fiction. She was formerly arts editor and chief book reviewer at The Straits Times newspaper in Singapore. Her reviews have also appeared in Wasafiri, Literary Review, Foundation, and more.

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