Stephen Hong Sohn's Blog, page 18
December 27, 2021
A Review of Maxine Mei-Fung Chung’s The Eighth Girl (William Morrow, 2020)
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ljiang28
Written by Stephen Hong Sohn
Edited by Lina Jiang
Imprint: William Morrow
On Sale: 03/17/2020
List Price: 28.99 USD
So, I was in the mood for something perhaps a little bit lighter than a realist novel and figured something closer to genre fiction might be the fix. I picked up Maxine Mei-Fung Chung’s debut The Eighth Girl (William Morrow, 2020), which as it turns out is hardly “lighter” at all, since it twines together a thriller narrative with a human trafficking plot. Let’s let the official marketing description get this party started: “One woman, multiple personas. But which one is telling the truth? Beautiful. Damaged. Destructive. Meet Alexa Wú, a brilliant yet darkly self-aware young woman whose chaotic life is manipulated and controlled by a series of alternate personalities. Only three people know about their existence: her shrink Daniel; her stepmother Anna; and her enigmatic best friend Ella. The perfect trio of trust. When Ella gets a job at a high-end gentleman’s club, she catches the attention of its shark-like owner and is gradually drawn into his inner circle. As Alexa’s world becomes intimately entangled with Ella’s, she soon finds herself the unwitting keeper of a nightmarish secret. With no one to turn to and lives at stake, she follows Ella into London’s cruel underbelly on a daring rescue mission. Threatened and vulnerable, Alexa will discover whether her multiple personalities are her greatest asset, or her most dangerous obstacle. Electrifying and breathlessly compulsive, The Eighth Girl is an omnivorous examination of life with mental illness and the acute trauma of life in a misogynist world. With bingeable prose and a clinician’s expertise, Chung’s psychological debut deftly navigates the swirling confluence of identity, innocence, and the impossible fracturing weights that young women are forced to carry, causing us to question: Does the truth lead to self-discovery, or self-destruction?”
The big thing I’ll say off the bat is that, though I should have seen where this novel was moving to, I totally missed the boat. I had read a novel on this topic before, Emiko Jean’s We’ll Never Be Apart, which I had figured out on my own before the surprise ending. In this novel’s case, I was really surprised not once but three different times. The trick in the marketing’s wording is the phrase “self-aware.” Alexa is self-aware to a certain extent, but she also “loses time.” Chung must have pulled from her experience as a psychoanalyst, as she explores the complicated treatment for someone suffering from DID, otherwise known as dissociative identity disorder. The novel is structured primarily in alternating viewpoints. On the one hand, we have the psychoanalyst named Daniel. On the other, we have Alexa, who is seeking treatment, while also getting herself sucked in further and further into the world of Ella and her new job as a stripper. When Alexa and Ella realize that the strip club is really a front for a human trafficking ring, they devise a plan to try to get the club shut down. Of course, the problem is that Ella happens to work for quite a nefarious person, so this particular plot is not without its intricacies. Complicating matters is Alexa’s problematic attachment to her therapist Daniel. With Alexa’s alluring personality, you know that Daniel, too, is in trouble. In any case, there’s definitely a lot of intrigue and plot to work through, so I’m not surprised that Netflix has optioned this novel. I could see it making quite the fun popcorn movie! In any case, Chung’s debut has a lot going for it, especially its thrice of a surprise ending.
Buy the Book Here
comments
ljiang28
Written by Stephen Hong Sohn
Edited by Lina Jiang
Imprint: William Morrow
On Sale: 03/17/2020
List Price: 28.99 USD
So, I was in the mood for something perhaps a little bit lighter than a realist novel and figured something closer to genre fiction might be the fix. I picked up Maxine Mei-Fung Chung’s debut The Eighth Girl (William Morrow, 2020), which as it turns out is hardly “lighter” at all, since it twines together a thriller narrative with a human trafficking plot. Let’s let the official marketing description get this party started: “One woman, multiple personas. But which one is telling the truth? Beautiful. Damaged. Destructive. Meet Alexa Wú, a brilliant yet darkly self-aware young woman whose chaotic life is manipulated and controlled by a series of alternate personalities. Only three people know about their existence: her shrink Daniel; her stepmother Anna; and her enigmatic best friend Ella. The perfect trio of trust. When Ella gets a job at a high-end gentleman’s club, she catches the attention of its shark-like owner and is gradually drawn into his inner circle. As Alexa’s world becomes intimately entangled with Ella’s, she soon finds herself the unwitting keeper of a nightmarish secret. With no one to turn to and lives at stake, she follows Ella into London’s cruel underbelly on a daring rescue mission. Threatened and vulnerable, Alexa will discover whether her multiple personalities are her greatest asset, or her most dangerous obstacle. Electrifying and breathlessly compulsive, The Eighth Girl is an omnivorous examination of life with mental illness and the acute trauma of life in a misogynist world. With bingeable prose and a clinician’s expertise, Chung’s psychological debut deftly navigates the swirling confluence of identity, innocence, and the impossible fracturing weights that young women are forced to carry, causing us to question: Does the truth lead to self-discovery, or self-destruction?”
The big thing I’ll say off the bat is that, though I should have seen where this novel was moving to, I totally missed the boat. I had read a novel on this topic before, Emiko Jean’s We’ll Never Be Apart, which I had figured out on my own before the surprise ending. In this novel’s case, I was really surprised not once but three different times. The trick in the marketing’s wording is the phrase “self-aware.” Alexa is self-aware to a certain extent, but she also “loses time.” Chung must have pulled from her experience as a psychoanalyst, as she explores the complicated treatment for someone suffering from DID, otherwise known as dissociative identity disorder. The novel is structured primarily in alternating viewpoints. On the one hand, we have the psychoanalyst named Daniel. On the other, we have Alexa, who is seeking treatment, while also getting herself sucked in further and further into the world of Ella and her new job as a stripper. When Alexa and Ella realize that the strip club is really a front for a human trafficking ring, they devise a plan to try to get the club shut down. Of course, the problem is that Ella happens to work for quite a nefarious person, so this particular plot is not without its intricacies. Complicating matters is Alexa’s problematic attachment to her therapist Daniel. With Alexa’s alluring personality, you know that Daniel, too, is in trouble. In any case, there’s definitely a lot of intrigue and plot to work through, so I’m not surprised that Netflix has optioned this novel. I could see it making quite the fun popcorn movie! In any case, Chung’s debut has a lot going for it, especially its thrice of a surprise ending.
Buy the Book Here
comments
A Review of David Hoon Kim’s Paris is a Party, Paris is a Ghost (FSG, 2021)
Posted by:
trihal
About 40 pages in to this novel, I thought to myself: wow, this prose is just exquisite. I paused to look at the back cover and noted that one of my favorite writers, Alexander Chee, had blurbed it! I should have known I was in great hands once this novel got Chee’s seal of approval, and I’m here to tell you: David Hoon Kim’s Paris is a Party, Paris is a Ghost (FSG, 2021) is an absolutely intriguing, whimsically meandering journey. Let’s let the official marketing description provide us with some more tidbits: “In a strangely distorted Paris, a Japanese adoptee is haunted by the woman he once loved. When Fumiko emerges after one month locked in her dorm room, she’s already dead, leaving a half-smoked Marlboro Light and a cupboard of petrified food in her wake. For her boyfriend, Henrik Blatand, an aspiring translator, these remnants are like clues, propelling him forward in a search for meaning. Meanwhile, Fumiko, or perhaps her doppelgänger, reappears: in line at the Louvre, on street corners and subway platforms, and on the dissection table of a group of medical students. Henrik’s inquiry expands beyond Fumiko’s seclusion and death, across the absurd, entropic streets of Paris and the figures that wander them, from a jaded group of Korean expats, to an eccentric French widow, to the indelible woman whom Henrik finds sitting in his place on a train. It drives him into the shadowy corners of his past, where his adoptive Danish parents raised him in a house without mirrors. And it mounts to a charged intimacy shared with his best friend’s precocious daughter, who may be haunted herself.” While the novel is certainly structured around the loss of Fumiko, I think it’s best read through the lens of Henrik’s desire to connect with anyone he meets beyond a superficial level. There is a consistent sense that he’s seeking out something more meaningful, whether it is with friends or with possible romantic partners. The prose is always the standout: even as the novel meanders, twists and turns, you’re always buoyed up by Kim’s vivid sense of description, of affectual perception, of Henrik’s always dynamic insights of what he sees and feels. There is a very interesting shift in the narrative perspective early on in the novel that I still haven’t quite figured out, but even then, Kim’s signature prose style is apparent. The sure-footedness of the narrative voice is the standout of this work, which vividly gives us a sense of the Henrik’s struggle to find his place in Paris. The occasional frustration is that the narrative will occasionally turn away so abruptly from a given encounter than Henrik might having with another character, that your sometimes left a little breathless and wanting more. Yet, that kind of feeling is of course part and parcel of the longing that we feel always bubbling up under the surface of Henrik, who continually seeks the transcend the desultory everyday in the potentialities that exist when he leaps out across the great divide to connect with someone else.
Buy the Book Here
https://us.macmillan.com/books/978037...
comments
trihal
About 40 pages in to this novel, I thought to myself: wow, this prose is just exquisite. I paused to look at the back cover and noted that one of my favorite writers, Alexander Chee, had blurbed it! I should have known I was in great hands once this novel got Chee’s seal of approval, and I’m here to tell you: David Hoon Kim’s Paris is a Party, Paris is a Ghost (FSG, 2021) is an absolutely intriguing, whimsically meandering journey. Let’s let the official marketing description provide us with some more tidbits: “In a strangely distorted Paris, a Japanese adoptee is haunted by the woman he once loved. When Fumiko emerges after one month locked in her dorm room, she’s already dead, leaving a half-smoked Marlboro Light and a cupboard of petrified food in her wake. For her boyfriend, Henrik Blatand, an aspiring translator, these remnants are like clues, propelling him forward in a search for meaning. Meanwhile, Fumiko, or perhaps her doppelgänger, reappears: in line at the Louvre, on street corners and subway platforms, and on the dissection table of a group of medical students. Henrik’s inquiry expands beyond Fumiko’s seclusion and death, across the absurd, entropic streets of Paris and the figures that wander them, from a jaded group of Korean expats, to an eccentric French widow, to the indelible woman whom Henrik finds sitting in his place on a train. It drives him into the shadowy corners of his past, where his adoptive Danish parents raised him in a house without mirrors. And it mounts to a charged intimacy shared with his best friend’s precocious daughter, who may be haunted herself.” While the novel is certainly structured around the loss of Fumiko, I think it’s best read through the lens of Henrik’s desire to connect with anyone he meets beyond a superficial level. There is a consistent sense that he’s seeking out something more meaningful, whether it is with friends or with possible romantic partners. The prose is always the standout: even as the novel meanders, twists and turns, you’re always buoyed up by Kim’s vivid sense of description, of affectual perception, of Henrik’s always dynamic insights of what he sees and feels. There is a very interesting shift in the narrative perspective early on in the novel that I still haven’t quite figured out, but even then, Kim’s signature prose style is apparent. The sure-footedness of the narrative voice is the standout of this work, which vividly gives us a sense of the Henrik’s struggle to find his place in Paris. The occasional frustration is that the narrative will occasionally turn away so abruptly from a given encounter than Henrik might having with another character, that your sometimes left a little breathless and wanting more. Yet, that kind of feeling is of course part and parcel of the longing that we feel always bubbling up under the surface of Henrik, who continually seeks the transcend the desultory everyday in the potentialities that exist when he leaps out across the great divide to connect with someone else.
Buy the Book Here
https://us.macmillan.com/books/978037...
comments
A Review of Lena Nguyen’s We Have Always Been Here (DAW, 2021)
Posted by:
trihal
What.A.Read. Seriously. I had trouble focusing on work because I started Lena Nguyen’s We Have Always Been Here (DAW, 2021), and then I didn’t want to put it down. Let’s let the marketing description do some work for us, shall we: “Misanthropic psychologist Dr. Grace Park is placed on the Deucalion, a survey ship headed to an icy planet in an unexplored galaxy. Her purpose is to observe the thirteen human crew members aboard the ship—all specialists in their own fields—as they assess the colonization potential of the planet, Eos. But frictions develop as Park befriends the androids of the ship, preferring their company over the baffling complexity of humans, while the rest of the crew treats them with suspicion and even outright hostility. Shortly after landing, the crew finds themselves trapped on the ship by a radiation storm, with no means of communication or escape until it passes—and that’s when things begin to fall apart. Park’s patients are falling prey to waking nightmares of helpless, tongueless insanity. The androids are behaving strangely. There are no windows aboard the ship. Paranoia is closing in, and soon Park is forced to confront the fact that nothing—neither her crew, nor their mission, nor the mysterious Eos itself—is as it seems.” This book is absolutely the one to get you in the mood for Halloween. Strange things are going on the ship, and Grace Park can’t quite figure out the issues going on. She’s truly in the dark for more reasons than you might think. First off, she’s one of the few crew members that are not conscripted. That is, she’s not working for the super organization known as the ISF, which basically controls the entire galaxy and star systems. Grace is earthborn, which means she has escaped some of the domination by the ISF, but others on the ship are not so lucky, as they must work within the confines of the ISF and their demands. Grace, while being hired by the ISF to observe the crew members and make reports on them, nevertheless never knows what is actually going on with this mission that takes them to a remote planet, which is on the edges of known civilization. Tensions soon emerge, as strange things start to go on. A crew member must be put into cryogenic sleep because the ship’s doctor, Chanur, believes that the crew member may be sick. But then more crew members begin to exhibit erratic behavior, and they must all figure out how to deal with a threat that has emerged, even if they do not know exactly where the threat is coming from. Nguyen has got a huge cast, something you might see in a bona fide Hollywhood film. There’s the military folx, including Wick, Sagara, Boone. There’s the surveyor, Natalya, and the cartographer, Fulbreech. There’s one other psychology, Keller. There’s also a number of important android workers that Park finds some comfort in, but they too begin to exhibit altered behaviors. The novel has a number of twists and turns, as it moves toward the conclusion, but if I had to give you any possible kernels of information through intertextual references that provide a little bit of spoilage: I’d say that the novel is best described as a cross between Annihilation and Event Horizon. There’s a little bit of space horror and a little bit of alien landscape issues at hand here. This debut was truly astonishing, and I will be certain to recommend this immersive work to fans of speculative fiction.
Buy the Book Here
https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/we-have-always-been-here-lena-nguyen/1138089009
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trihal
What.A.Read. Seriously. I had trouble focusing on work because I started Lena Nguyen’s We Have Always Been Here (DAW, 2021), and then I didn’t want to put it down. Let’s let the marketing description do some work for us, shall we: “Misanthropic psychologist Dr. Grace Park is placed on the Deucalion, a survey ship headed to an icy planet in an unexplored galaxy. Her purpose is to observe the thirteen human crew members aboard the ship—all specialists in their own fields—as they assess the colonization potential of the planet, Eos. But frictions develop as Park befriends the androids of the ship, preferring their company over the baffling complexity of humans, while the rest of the crew treats them with suspicion and even outright hostility. Shortly after landing, the crew finds themselves trapped on the ship by a radiation storm, with no means of communication or escape until it passes—and that’s when things begin to fall apart. Park’s patients are falling prey to waking nightmares of helpless, tongueless insanity. The androids are behaving strangely. There are no windows aboard the ship. Paranoia is closing in, and soon Park is forced to confront the fact that nothing—neither her crew, nor their mission, nor the mysterious Eos itself—is as it seems.” This book is absolutely the one to get you in the mood for Halloween. Strange things are going on the ship, and Grace Park can’t quite figure out the issues going on. She’s truly in the dark for more reasons than you might think. First off, she’s one of the few crew members that are not conscripted. That is, she’s not working for the super organization known as the ISF, which basically controls the entire galaxy and star systems. Grace is earthborn, which means she has escaped some of the domination by the ISF, but others on the ship are not so lucky, as they must work within the confines of the ISF and their demands. Grace, while being hired by the ISF to observe the crew members and make reports on them, nevertheless never knows what is actually going on with this mission that takes them to a remote planet, which is on the edges of known civilization. Tensions soon emerge, as strange things start to go on. A crew member must be put into cryogenic sleep because the ship’s doctor, Chanur, believes that the crew member may be sick. But then more crew members begin to exhibit erratic behavior, and they must all figure out how to deal with a threat that has emerged, even if they do not know exactly where the threat is coming from. Nguyen has got a huge cast, something you might see in a bona fide Hollywhood film. There’s the military folx, including Wick, Sagara, Boone. There’s the surveyor, Natalya, and the cartographer, Fulbreech. There’s one other psychology, Keller. There’s also a number of important android workers that Park finds some comfort in, but they too begin to exhibit altered behaviors. The novel has a number of twists and turns, as it moves toward the conclusion, but if I had to give you any possible kernels of information through intertextual references that provide a little bit of spoilage: I’d say that the novel is best described as a cross between Annihilation and Event Horizon. There’s a little bit of space horror and a little bit of alien landscape issues at hand here. This debut was truly astonishing, and I will be certain to recommend this immersive work to fans of speculative fiction.
Buy the Book Here
https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/we-have-always-been-here-lena-nguyen/1138089009
[image error]
comments
November 23, 2021
A Review of Kazuo Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun (Knopf, 2021)
Posted by:
ccape
Written by Stephen Hong Sohn
Edited by Corinna Cape
Wow! What a novel! I’m reviewing Kazuo Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun (Knopf 2021), which is, in my estimation, one of Ishiguro’s best, right up there with A Pale View of Hills and The Remains of the Day.
The official marketing description is pithy, but here it is: “Nobel Laureate Kazuo Ishiguro does not disappoint with this latest novel set in a technologically advanced society that feels not dissimilar from our own. We see and understand the world through Klara, an advanced and keenly observant Artificial Friend whose sole purpose is to help the child who owns her. Hopeful and haunting at the same time, Klara’s story leads to big questions: What qualities make a person unique? How do we value people and things in our society? What does it mean to love?” The story is told from the first person perspective of Klara, who is a slightly less advanced model of the Artificial Friend, which is abbreviated as an AF in the fictional world. The story is told from a retrospective positionality, though it is not clear from what point Klara is narrating until the conclusion.
The novel opens with Klara reminiscing about her time in a store where AFs are sold. Klara is one of a number of different AFs that are on constant display, at various locations within the store. Klara will occasionally get the chance to be positioned at the store’s front window, which gives her the best chance to be bought by a customer. In this fictional world, children are often given AFs as companions. In one of Klara’s turns at the front of the store, she interacts with someone outside named Josie. Josie promises to return, which Klara tries to honor. While other customers come and go, with one even attempting to purchase Klara, Klara still finds a way to remain unbought, even at the consternation of the Manager, who reminds Klara that children make promises all the time. But Klara is actually right. Josie returns, and Klara is bought by Josie’s family. Klara then tells us about how she acculturates to living with Josie and her family. She has to deal with the Housekeeper, and the Mother (aka Josie’s mother), as well as Josie’s tortured friendship with a local boy named Rick. In this process, we begin to discover that this fictional world is one separated primarily by class, with some children being marked as “lifted,” while the others are considered to be of a lower class. The term “lifted” is not entirely explained until further on in the text—and I will provide a spoiler warning here, so you can look away if you need to—but part of the reason why we never find out immediately is because everything is filtered through Klara’s understanding and perspective. Ultimately though, children who are lifted have undergone some sort of genetic engineering. There is a potential cost to being lifted because some of these children end up with illnesses, as a result of gene editing. Both Josie and Josie’s older sister Sal are lifted, but both also have serious side effects of the process. Sal ends up dying, while Josie has a serious chronic illness that may also take her life, though the text doesn’t ever clarify what Josie’s (or Sal’s) maladies might be. Thus, Klara’s presence in the household is not simply to be Josie’s friend but also to be a kind of caretaker.
Indeed, Klara, as she watches Josie experiences bouts of her sickness, tries to make an appeal to the Sun—yes, the Sun in the sky—who Klara believes has the power to restore Josie. In this way, Ishiguro is supremely masterful in locating the idiosyncrasies in the logic of an artificial intelligent mind. Klara, who is solar-powered, believes that the Sun truly does have miraculous abilities, which may extend to Josie. While the premise of the novel is direct enough, Ishiguro has some real twists and surprises in store. And of course, what Ishiguro is always best at is describing the complicated ways in which we love and desire each other, as family members, as romantic objects, as well as exploring the dynamic between the robot and the human. The concluding sequence is particularly affecting, as Ishiguro gives us pause in thinking about how we treat objects that we assume do not have feelings and do not have sentience. The book has much in line with Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go, but for me, of the two, Klara and the Sun is superior. I believe my response to it is, in part, to the absolutely intricate way in which Ishiguro inhabits the mind of an artificial intelligence, which colors how the entire story is narrated and understood.
Buy the Book Here
comments
ccape
Written by Stephen Hong Sohn
Edited by Corinna Cape
Wow! What a novel! I’m reviewing Kazuo Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun (Knopf 2021), which is, in my estimation, one of Ishiguro’s best, right up there with A Pale View of Hills and The Remains of the Day.
The official marketing description is pithy, but here it is: “Nobel Laureate Kazuo Ishiguro does not disappoint with this latest novel set in a technologically advanced society that feels not dissimilar from our own. We see and understand the world through Klara, an advanced and keenly observant Artificial Friend whose sole purpose is to help the child who owns her. Hopeful and haunting at the same time, Klara’s story leads to big questions: What qualities make a person unique? How do we value people and things in our society? What does it mean to love?” The story is told from the first person perspective of Klara, who is a slightly less advanced model of the Artificial Friend, which is abbreviated as an AF in the fictional world. The story is told from a retrospective positionality, though it is not clear from what point Klara is narrating until the conclusion.
The novel opens with Klara reminiscing about her time in a store where AFs are sold. Klara is one of a number of different AFs that are on constant display, at various locations within the store. Klara will occasionally get the chance to be positioned at the store’s front window, which gives her the best chance to be bought by a customer. In this fictional world, children are often given AFs as companions. In one of Klara’s turns at the front of the store, she interacts with someone outside named Josie. Josie promises to return, which Klara tries to honor. While other customers come and go, with one even attempting to purchase Klara, Klara still finds a way to remain unbought, even at the consternation of the Manager, who reminds Klara that children make promises all the time. But Klara is actually right. Josie returns, and Klara is bought by Josie’s family. Klara then tells us about how she acculturates to living with Josie and her family. She has to deal with the Housekeeper, and the Mother (aka Josie’s mother), as well as Josie’s tortured friendship with a local boy named Rick. In this process, we begin to discover that this fictional world is one separated primarily by class, with some children being marked as “lifted,” while the others are considered to be of a lower class. The term “lifted” is not entirely explained until further on in the text—and I will provide a spoiler warning here, so you can look away if you need to—but part of the reason why we never find out immediately is because everything is filtered through Klara’s understanding and perspective. Ultimately though, children who are lifted have undergone some sort of genetic engineering. There is a potential cost to being lifted because some of these children end up with illnesses, as a result of gene editing. Both Josie and Josie’s older sister Sal are lifted, but both also have serious side effects of the process. Sal ends up dying, while Josie has a serious chronic illness that may also take her life, though the text doesn’t ever clarify what Josie’s (or Sal’s) maladies might be. Thus, Klara’s presence in the household is not simply to be Josie’s friend but also to be a kind of caretaker.
Indeed, Klara, as she watches Josie experiences bouts of her sickness, tries to make an appeal to the Sun—yes, the Sun in the sky—who Klara believes has the power to restore Josie. In this way, Ishiguro is supremely masterful in locating the idiosyncrasies in the logic of an artificial intelligent mind. Klara, who is solar-powered, believes that the Sun truly does have miraculous abilities, which may extend to Josie. While the premise of the novel is direct enough, Ishiguro has some real twists and surprises in store. And of course, what Ishiguro is always best at is describing the complicated ways in which we love and desire each other, as family members, as romantic objects, as well as exploring the dynamic between the robot and the human. The concluding sequence is particularly affecting, as Ishiguro gives us pause in thinking about how we treat objects that we assume do not have feelings and do not have sentience. The book has much in line with Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go, but for me, of the two, Klara and the Sun is superior. I believe my response to it is, in part, to the absolutely intricate way in which Ishiguro inhabits the mind of an artificial intelligence, which colors how the entire story is narrated and understood.
Buy the Book Here
comments
November 22, 2021
A Review of C. Pam Zhang’s How Much of These Hills is Gold (Riverhead Books, 2020)
Posted by:
ljiang28
Written by Stephen Hong Sohn
Edited by Lina Jiang
I’m not going to lie. I had a couple of false starts with C. Pam Zhang’s How Much of These Hills is Gold (Riverhead Books, 2020). The prose is absolutely stunning and carries this novel forward up until the bittersweet end. Let’s let the marketing description give us some context: “An electric debut novel set against the twilight of the American gold rush, two siblings are on the run in an unforgiving landscape--trying not just to survive but to find a home.
Ba dies in the night; Ma is already gone. Newly orphaned children of immigrants, Lucy and Sam are suddenly alone in a land that refutes their existence. Fleeing the threats of their western mining town, they set off to bury their father in the only way that will set them free from their past. Along the way, they encounter giant buffalo bones, tiger paw prints, and the specters of a ravaged landscape as well as family secrets, sibling rivalry, and glimpses of a different kind of future. Both epic and intimate, blending Chinese symbolism and reimagined history with fiercely original language and storytelling, How Much of These Hills Is Gold is a haunting adventure story, an unforgettable sibling story, and the announcement of a stunning new voice in literature. On a broad level, it explores race in an expanding country and the question of where immigrants are allowed to belong. But page by page, it's about the memories that bind and divide families, and the yearning for home.”
Zhang’s style is really all her own, and the relationship between the two siblings, Sam and Lucy, possesses a rawness that is as appropriate to their personal connection as it is to the landscape that they must survive. The novel basically opens with Sam and Lucy trying to find a place to bury their Ba. Through key anachronic sequences, we get a larger sense of what brought Sam and Lucy to this point. Most prominently, we discover that their father, Ba, has an incessant drive to prospect, to gamble, and to hope for a more stable future. Of course, given their status as Chinese Americans, they face considerable discrimination and barely eke out a sustainability living. The tenuousness of this future eventually takes an incredible toll, fracturing the family and eventually leading to Ba’s death. Despite his passing, the two try to make their way through the West. Eventually, the two part ways, with Lucy making a new life as Lucinda. She makes friends with the rich daughter of a prospector, only to discover that Sam has returned to town, upending the anonymity that Lucy had cultivated. Ultimately, the story is about Lucy and Sam’s enduring connection, and their desire to support each other, even as the odds always seem stacked against them. The conclusion takes Lucy and Sam to the City, a kind of fictionalized San Francisco, where they hope to gain passage to another land, somewhere that might be more welcoming of all of their social differences. Where Zhang leaves us is certainly not the Hollywood ending we might have desired, but it strikes as all the more appropriate given the harshness of the land, and the times in which they live. An exceptional debut.
Buy the Book Here
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ljiang28
Written by Stephen Hong Sohn
Edited by Lina Jiang
I’m not going to lie. I had a couple of false starts with C. Pam Zhang’s How Much of These Hills is Gold (Riverhead Books, 2020). The prose is absolutely stunning and carries this novel forward up until the bittersweet end. Let’s let the marketing description give us some context: “An electric debut novel set against the twilight of the American gold rush, two siblings are on the run in an unforgiving landscape--trying not just to survive but to find a home.
Ba dies in the night; Ma is already gone. Newly orphaned children of immigrants, Lucy and Sam are suddenly alone in a land that refutes their existence. Fleeing the threats of their western mining town, they set off to bury their father in the only way that will set them free from their past. Along the way, they encounter giant buffalo bones, tiger paw prints, and the specters of a ravaged landscape as well as family secrets, sibling rivalry, and glimpses of a different kind of future. Both epic and intimate, blending Chinese symbolism and reimagined history with fiercely original language and storytelling, How Much of These Hills Is Gold is a haunting adventure story, an unforgettable sibling story, and the announcement of a stunning new voice in literature. On a broad level, it explores race in an expanding country and the question of where immigrants are allowed to belong. But page by page, it's about the memories that bind and divide families, and the yearning for home.”
Zhang’s style is really all her own, and the relationship between the two siblings, Sam and Lucy, possesses a rawness that is as appropriate to their personal connection as it is to the landscape that they must survive. The novel basically opens with Sam and Lucy trying to find a place to bury their Ba. Through key anachronic sequences, we get a larger sense of what brought Sam and Lucy to this point. Most prominently, we discover that their father, Ba, has an incessant drive to prospect, to gamble, and to hope for a more stable future. Of course, given their status as Chinese Americans, they face considerable discrimination and barely eke out a sustainability living. The tenuousness of this future eventually takes an incredible toll, fracturing the family and eventually leading to Ba’s death. Despite his passing, the two try to make their way through the West. Eventually, the two part ways, with Lucy making a new life as Lucinda. She makes friends with the rich daughter of a prospector, only to discover that Sam has returned to town, upending the anonymity that Lucy had cultivated. Ultimately, the story is about Lucy and Sam’s enduring connection, and their desire to support each other, even as the odds always seem stacked against them. The conclusion takes Lucy and Sam to the City, a kind of fictionalized San Francisco, where they hope to gain passage to another land, somewhere that might be more welcoming of all of their social differences. Where Zhang leaves us is certainly not the Hollywood ending we might have desired, but it strikes as all the more appropriate given the harshness of the land, and the times in which they live. An exceptional debut.
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A Review of Alexandra Kleeman’s Something New Under the Sun (Hogarth, 2021)
Posted by:
ccape
Written by Stephen Hong Sohn
Edited by Corinna Cape
I picked up Alexandra Kleeman’s Something New Under the Sun (Hogarth, 2021) with her first novel in mind, the strange and quirky You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine. Something New Under the Sun is likewise filled with its own idiosyncratic characters and off-kilter situations.
Let’s let the marketing description give us some information: “East Coast novelist Patrick Hamlin has come to Hollywood with simple goals in mind: overseeing the production of a film adaptation of one of his books, preventing starlet Cassidy Carter's disruptive behavior from derailing said production, and turning this last-ditch effort at career resuscitation into the sort of success that will dazzle his wife and daughter back home. But California is not as he imagined: Drought, wildfire, and corporate corruption are omnipresent, and the company behind a mysterious new brand of synthetic water seems to be at the root of it all. Patrick partners with Cassidy—after having been her reluctant chauffeur for weeks—and the two of them investigate the sun-scorched city's darker crevices, where they discover that catastrophe resembles order until the last possible second. In this often-witty and all-too-timely story, Alexandra Kleeman grapples with the corruption of our environment in the age of alternative facts. Something New Under the Sun is a meticulous and deeply felt accounting of our very human anxieties, liabilities, dependencies, and, ultimately, responsibility to truth.”
This novel primarily follows these two characters and their various exploits trying to unravel a kind of conspiracy afoot in relation to the film production. Why, for instance, does everyone drink WAT-R, a kind of stand-in for the real thing? WAT-R is only partially made of water, but is supposedly enhanced by various flavorings and additives. Somehow the producers seem to be huge investors in WAT-R and seem far more interested in certain returns than on anything related to the film. Kleeman’s deployment of this novel technology certainly moves Something New Under the Sun into the realm of science fiction.
But what I absolutely adored about Kleeman’s characterization is the journey that Cassidy Carter goes through from the start of the narrative to the end. I found her to be an emotionally complex character in way that often outshone Patrick, who originally seems to be the ostensible protagonist. For his part, Patrick originates as the reader’s center of identification. Like Patrick, we’re confused by the strangeness of the Hollywood types that populate the text and the glossy surface that we’re used to seeing concerning representations of Los Angeles. In this way, Kleeman is following in a long tradition of writers who have depicted the so-called City of Angels and complicated how we come to understand this location. Kleeman’s work offers its own way of thinking about Los Angeles in the COVID moment, with its emphasis on natural disasters, droughts, and fires.
The other subplot involves Patrick’s tenuous relationship to his wife (Alison) and child (Nora). They are staying at an eco-commune called Earthbridge. It would seem that Alison is someone ahead of her time in the sense that she already foresees the various disasters that are going to befall Americans. But Alison’s retreat into the commune effects little change, which is part of the larger novel’s problem. What are we to do about these various issues related to climate, drought, and the living conditions that are rapidly changing how we live and how we can thrive? The bleakness of this novel is that we get very little in the way of answers. The increasingly dystopian nature of this concluding arc was, in my opinion, disappointing, but Kleeman is an exceptionally talented prose writer. Her words spark off the page and give truly dynamic weight to her characters and the various plots.
Buy the Book Here
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ccape
Written by Stephen Hong Sohn
Edited by Corinna Cape
I picked up Alexandra Kleeman’s Something New Under the Sun (Hogarth, 2021) with her first novel in mind, the strange and quirky You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine. Something New Under the Sun is likewise filled with its own idiosyncratic characters and off-kilter situations.
Let’s let the marketing description give us some information: “East Coast novelist Patrick Hamlin has come to Hollywood with simple goals in mind: overseeing the production of a film adaptation of one of his books, preventing starlet Cassidy Carter's disruptive behavior from derailing said production, and turning this last-ditch effort at career resuscitation into the sort of success that will dazzle his wife and daughter back home. But California is not as he imagined: Drought, wildfire, and corporate corruption are omnipresent, and the company behind a mysterious new brand of synthetic water seems to be at the root of it all. Patrick partners with Cassidy—after having been her reluctant chauffeur for weeks—and the two of them investigate the sun-scorched city's darker crevices, where they discover that catastrophe resembles order until the last possible second. In this often-witty and all-too-timely story, Alexandra Kleeman grapples with the corruption of our environment in the age of alternative facts. Something New Under the Sun is a meticulous and deeply felt accounting of our very human anxieties, liabilities, dependencies, and, ultimately, responsibility to truth.”
This novel primarily follows these two characters and their various exploits trying to unravel a kind of conspiracy afoot in relation to the film production. Why, for instance, does everyone drink WAT-R, a kind of stand-in for the real thing? WAT-R is only partially made of water, but is supposedly enhanced by various flavorings and additives. Somehow the producers seem to be huge investors in WAT-R and seem far more interested in certain returns than on anything related to the film. Kleeman’s deployment of this novel technology certainly moves Something New Under the Sun into the realm of science fiction.
But what I absolutely adored about Kleeman’s characterization is the journey that Cassidy Carter goes through from the start of the narrative to the end. I found her to be an emotionally complex character in way that often outshone Patrick, who originally seems to be the ostensible protagonist. For his part, Patrick originates as the reader’s center of identification. Like Patrick, we’re confused by the strangeness of the Hollywood types that populate the text and the glossy surface that we’re used to seeing concerning representations of Los Angeles. In this way, Kleeman is following in a long tradition of writers who have depicted the so-called City of Angels and complicated how we come to understand this location. Kleeman’s work offers its own way of thinking about Los Angeles in the COVID moment, with its emphasis on natural disasters, droughts, and fires.
The other subplot involves Patrick’s tenuous relationship to his wife (Alison) and child (Nora). They are staying at an eco-commune called Earthbridge. It would seem that Alison is someone ahead of her time in the sense that she already foresees the various disasters that are going to befall Americans. But Alison’s retreat into the commune effects little change, which is part of the larger novel’s problem. What are we to do about these various issues related to climate, drought, and the living conditions that are rapidly changing how we live and how we can thrive? The bleakness of this novel is that we get very little in the way of answers. The increasingly dystopian nature of this concluding arc was, in my opinion, disappointing, but Kleeman is an exceptionally talented prose writer. Her words spark off the page and give truly dynamic weight to her characters and the various plots.
Buy the Book Here
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A Review of Marie Lu’s Steelstriker (Roaring Brook, 2021)
Posted by:
ccape
Written by Stephen Hong Sohn
Edited by Corinna Cape
One of the most anticipated releases for me this year has been Marie Lu’s Steelstriker (Roaring Brook, 2021), which brings us to the close of the duology that began Skyhunter. At the conclusion of Lu’s series, Lu offers up an acknowledgments page that begins with admitting that this duology is her darkest. I certainly agree, and I remember reading the first installment and feeling as though the darkness was fairly relentless, even as the characterization—something that Lu has always excelled at—remained first rate. The interplay between Talin and Red continues with Steelstriker.
Let’s let Macmillan’s marketing description get us moving: “As a Striker, Talin was taught loyalty is life. Loyalty to the Shield who watches your back, to the Strikers who risk their lives on the battlefield, and most of all, to Mara, which was once the last nation free from the Karensa Federation’s tyranny. But Mara has fallen. And its destruction has unleashed Talin’s worst nightmare. With her friends scattered by combat and her mother held captive by the Premier, Talin is forced to betray her fellow Strikers and her adopted homeland. She has no choice but to become the Federation’s most deadly war machine as their newest Skyhunter. Red is no stranger to the cruelty of the Federation or the torture within its Skyhunter labs, but he knows this isn’t the end for Mara – or Talin. The link between them may be weak, but it could be Talin and Red's only hope to salvage their past and safeguard their future. While the fate of a broken world hangs in the balance, Talin and Red must reunite the Strikers and find their way back to each other in this smoldering sequel to Marie Lu’s Skyhunter.”
The one drawback of these descriptions is that they have to streamline the plot so much that only the primary protagonists become central to the marketing! What I love about this text is that it’s really the side characters that bring up the stakes of the novel. Early on, Red and his allies are ambushed because Red’s psychic link with Talin ends up inadvertently alerting the Premier about their plans to commandeer a train that’s holding key prisoners. In that battle, two of Red’s allies—Adena and Aramin (who is Jeran’s partner)—are captured, while he and another character, Jeran, remain free. The capture of Adena and Aramin is crucial to the plot precisely because the rest of the novel involves Red and Talin trying to figure out how to get them out. Talin has her own complications, as she is basically under the lock and key of the Premier, forced to do his bidding partly because of the fact that the Premier is essentially holding Talin’s mother hostage. If Talin tries to disobey, the Premier will torture and even kill her mother. This kind of stranglehold is precisely why the novel is so dark. Talin, though we understand her sense of ethics and morals, often is forced into killing people she does not want to or engaging in actions she finds incredibly repugnant. To read alongside this kind of plot is definitely heavy and dark!
In any case, what I loved about the novel is the payoff: there’s a lot of people you don’t want to die, so Lu really has work cut out for her. So many characters are in incredibly dangerous situations, so the conclusion is really gratifying in the way that Lu gives so many of them incredible and rewarding forms of closure. If there is a minor critique I would make about the text, then it’s that I was hoping that the ghosts would be more prominent in this particular text. I had wondered more about the science behind the ghosts and whether or not there might be a way to reverse engineer what had gone on with those who had turned into ghosts. Otherwise, Lu’s text is always first rate.
Buy the Book Here
comments
ccape
Written by Stephen Hong Sohn
Edited by Corinna Cape
One of the most anticipated releases for me this year has been Marie Lu’s Steelstriker (Roaring Brook, 2021), which brings us to the close of the duology that began Skyhunter. At the conclusion of Lu’s series, Lu offers up an acknowledgments page that begins with admitting that this duology is her darkest. I certainly agree, and I remember reading the first installment and feeling as though the darkness was fairly relentless, even as the characterization—something that Lu has always excelled at—remained first rate. The interplay between Talin and Red continues with Steelstriker.
Let’s let Macmillan’s marketing description get us moving: “As a Striker, Talin was taught loyalty is life. Loyalty to the Shield who watches your back, to the Strikers who risk their lives on the battlefield, and most of all, to Mara, which was once the last nation free from the Karensa Federation’s tyranny. But Mara has fallen. And its destruction has unleashed Talin’s worst nightmare. With her friends scattered by combat and her mother held captive by the Premier, Talin is forced to betray her fellow Strikers and her adopted homeland. She has no choice but to become the Federation’s most deadly war machine as their newest Skyhunter. Red is no stranger to the cruelty of the Federation or the torture within its Skyhunter labs, but he knows this isn’t the end for Mara – or Talin. The link between them may be weak, but it could be Talin and Red's only hope to salvage their past and safeguard their future. While the fate of a broken world hangs in the balance, Talin and Red must reunite the Strikers and find their way back to each other in this smoldering sequel to Marie Lu’s Skyhunter.”
The one drawback of these descriptions is that they have to streamline the plot so much that only the primary protagonists become central to the marketing! What I love about this text is that it’s really the side characters that bring up the stakes of the novel. Early on, Red and his allies are ambushed because Red’s psychic link with Talin ends up inadvertently alerting the Premier about their plans to commandeer a train that’s holding key prisoners. In that battle, two of Red’s allies—Adena and Aramin (who is Jeran’s partner)—are captured, while he and another character, Jeran, remain free. The capture of Adena and Aramin is crucial to the plot precisely because the rest of the novel involves Red and Talin trying to figure out how to get them out. Talin has her own complications, as she is basically under the lock and key of the Premier, forced to do his bidding partly because of the fact that the Premier is essentially holding Talin’s mother hostage. If Talin tries to disobey, the Premier will torture and even kill her mother. This kind of stranglehold is precisely why the novel is so dark. Talin, though we understand her sense of ethics and morals, often is forced into killing people she does not want to or engaging in actions she finds incredibly repugnant. To read alongside this kind of plot is definitely heavy and dark!
In any case, what I loved about the novel is the payoff: there’s a lot of people you don’t want to die, so Lu really has work cut out for her. So many characters are in incredibly dangerous situations, so the conclusion is really gratifying in the way that Lu gives so many of them incredible and rewarding forms of closure. If there is a minor critique I would make about the text, then it’s that I was hoping that the ghosts would be more prominent in this particular text. I had wondered more about the science behind the ghosts and whether or not there might be a way to reverse engineer what had gone on with those who had turned into ghosts. Otherwise, Lu’s text is always first rate.
Buy the Book Here
comments
November 19, 2021
A Review of Paige Clark’s She is Haunted (Allen & Unwin, 2021).
Posted by:
ccape
Written by Stephen Hong Sohn
Edited by Corinna Cape
I was on the lookout for things ghostly; it might have been because it was October and, well, Halloween was just around the corner! So I chanced upon Paige Clark’s slick yet poignant short story collection, She is Haunted (Allen & Unwin, 2021). I use the descriptor “slick” because some of the stories verge on a level of minimalism, even as they strike at the complicated nature of love and the relationships we hold most dear.
Let’s let the marketing description give us more context: “A mother cuts her daughter's hair because her own starts falling out. A woman leaves her boyfriend because he reminds her of a corpse; another undergoes brain surgery to try to live more comfortably in higher temperatures. A widow physically transforms into her husband so that she does not have to grieve. In She Is Haunted, these renditions of the author search for recognition and connection, and, more than anything else, small moments of empathy. But in what world will she move beyond her haunted past and find compassion for herself? With piercing insights into transnational Asian identity, intergenerational trauma and grief, the dynamics of mother-daughter relationships, the inexplicable oddities of female friendship, and the love of a good dog, Paige Clark has crafted an exquisite, moving and sophisticated debut work of fiction. Full of wit and humour, She Is Haunted announces an entrancing new literary voice as contemporary as it is unique.”
If there is a thematic conceit that unites the collection, it is the intricate nature of our most intimate relationships. Most stories include characters of Chinese descent, which dovetails with the author’s ethnoracial ancestry. There were many standouts. The description of the boyfriend who reminds a woman of a corpse is in the last story “Dead Summer.” The description is a red herring because the crucial aspect is that the protagonist’s mother has died, so the protagonist is undergoing a period of serious mourning. Many of these stories, in fact, deal with this kind of haunting. The story concerning the woman who attempts to transform into her husband is “Times I’ve Wanted to be You.” Again, the issue driving this woman to become her husband is that he has died, so she attempts to find a way to be near to him. The standout story (for me) was “In a Room of Chinese Women.” The premise is essentially that the protagonist, a Chinese American woman, is having to entertain the ex-girlfriend of her now-husband. This woman has just lost her own partner; she also happens to be of Chinese descent, though she is from Australia. When this ex-girlfriend arrives, the protagonist is none too happy. Why is this woman here? What purpose does it serve for her to stay with them in their one bedroom condo? These questions certainly give readers pause about what will ensue. The first night of frivolity keeps us on edge, but it is on a second outing that something shifts. Indeed, the protagonist and this woman go to Chinatown, where they delight in the food and, most important, discover that they have more in common than the protagonist would have first wanted to admit. This shift was striking and perfectly in tone with where Clark was leading us: to give us a sense of the dynamic nature of our connections and how quickly they can change, this time definitely for the better. Another real standout was “What We Deserve,” which follows a woman named Rosa, who is subsisting in an elder care facility. Though she is receiving pretty great attention from the attendants on staff, she feels imprisoned there. Her relationship to her daughter is a bit frayed, and we read with relief when Rosa somehow manages to bust herself out of there, if only for one torrid summer night, to feel the heat on her cheek. The opening story is of course one that really sets the tone for the collection as a woman bargains with God: she tries to make a deal about who can die in her life, so she can spare the death of her lover and her baby.
I really enjoyed reading this collection, more so in the wake of personal losses I’ve suffered over the past couple of years. I come to this work, then, perhaps as the right kind of reader. I also have discovered with much delight that the work is set to come out in the United States with Two Dollar Radio, a wonderful independent publisher that we’ve covered on AALF before (check out the work of Xiaoda Xiao). I’m sure we’ll be hearing from Paige Clark again in the future.
Buy the Book Here
comments
ccape
Written by Stephen Hong Sohn
Edited by Corinna Cape
I was on the lookout for things ghostly; it might have been because it was October and, well, Halloween was just around the corner! So I chanced upon Paige Clark’s slick yet poignant short story collection, She is Haunted (Allen & Unwin, 2021). I use the descriptor “slick” because some of the stories verge on a level of minimalism, even as they strike at the complicated nature of love and the relationships we hold most dear.
Let’s let the marketing description give us more context: “A mother cuts her daughter's hair because her own starts falling out. A woman leaves her boyfriend because he reminds her of a corpse; another undergoes brain surgery to try to live more comfortably in higher temperatures. A widow physically transforms into her husband so that she does not have to grieve. In She Is Haunted, these renditions of the author search for recognition and connection, and, more than anything else, small moments of empathy. But in what world will she move beyond her haunted past and find compassion for herself? With piercing insights into transnational Asian identity, intergenerational trauma and grief, the dynamics of mother-daughter relationships, the inexplicable oddities of female friendship, and the love of a good dog, Paige Clark has crafted an exquisite, moving and sophisticated debut work of fiction. Full of wit and humour, She Is Haunted announces an entrancing new literary voice as contemporary as it is unique.”
If there is a thematic conceit that unites the collection, it is the intricate nature of our most intimate relationships. Most stories include characters of Chinese descent, which dovetails with the author’s ethnoracial ancestry. There were many standouts. The description of the boyfriend who reminds a woman of a corpse is in the last story “Dead Summer.” The description is a red herring because the crucial aspect is that the protagonist’s mother has died, so the protagonist is undergoing a period of serious mourning. Many of these stories, in fact, deal with this kind of haunting. The story concerning the woman who attempts to transform into her husband is “Times I’ve Wanted to be You.” Again, the issue driving this woman to become her husband is that he has died, so she attempts to find a way to be near to him. The standout story (for me) was “In a Room of Chinese Women.” The premise is essentially that the protagonist, a Chinese American woman, is having to entertain the ex-girlfriend of her now-husband. This woman has just lost her own partner; she also happens to be of Chinese descent, though she is from Australia. When this ex-girlfriend arrives, the protagonist is none too happy. Why is this woman here? What purpose does it serve for her to stay with them in their one bedroom condo? These questions certainly give readers pause about what will ensue. The first night of frivolity keeps us on edge, but it is on a second outing that something shifts. Indeed, the protagonist and this woman go to Chinatown, where they delight in the food and, most important, discover that they have more in common than the protagonist would have first wanted to admit. This shift was striking and perfectly in tone with where Clark was leading us: to give us a sense of the dynamic nature of our connections and how quickly they can change, this time definitely for the better. Another real standout was “What We Deserve,” which follows a woman named Rosa, who is subsisting in an elder care facility. Though she is receiving pretty great attention from the attendants on staff, she feels imprisoned there. Her relationship to her daughter is a bit frayed, and we read with relief when Rosa somehow manages to bust herself out of there, if only for one torrid summer night, to feel the heat on her cheek. The opening story is of course one that really sets the tone for the collection as a woman bargains with God: she tries to make a deal about who can die in her life, so she can spare the death of her lover and her baby.
I really enjoyed reading this collection, more so in the wake of personal losses I’ve suffered over the past couple of years. I come to this work, then, perhaps as the right kind of reader. I also have discovered with much delight that the work is set to come out in the United States with Two Dollar Radio, a wonderful independent publisher that we’ve covered on AALF before (check out the work of Xiaoda Xiao). I’m sure we’ll be hearing from Paige Clark again in the future.
Buy the Book Here
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November 17, 2021
Review of My Sweet Girl by Amanda Jayatissa (Berkley, 2021)
Posted by:
ljiang28
Written by Stephen Hong Sohn
Edited by Lina Jiang
I’m always thrilled to read anything that has to do with Sri Lanka that isn’t marketed as a trauma text. So My Sweet Girl by Amanda Jayatissa, a psychological thriller, was a book I was really excited about. It took me a while to get into the story, which felt like it was dragging at the start. I found the main character, Paloma, kind of insufferable, with her inability to know what on earth is going on in her own life, but that was by design, I think. About halfway through the book, I became so curious about what was going on that I couldn’t put it down and finished it in that sitting.
The novel is set between Sri Lanka and San Francisco, USA, and begins with Paloma trying to hold things together after she finds Arun, to whom she is subletting a bedroom in her apartment, murdered. We find out that Arun has learned of a deep dark secret that Paloma has been keeping, but she finds him dead in the apartment before she can confront him about it. And then, just as soon as she discovers this, his body disappears and Paloma must figure out if she has gotten so intoxicated lately that she is now hallucinating, or if something more sinister is going on with respect to her past. We learn that Paloma is also the adopted daughter of a white American couple, who chose her while visiting an orphanage they sponsored in Sri Lanka.
That’s all I will say about the plot because as someone who doesn’t read psychological thrillers, I don’t know how to avoid spoilers. So, instead I will say what else I enjoyed about this lovely work. First off, I’m impressed at how much this novel reminded me of home and of childhood, of living in the US as a Sri Lankan, and also of so many other texts, all at the same time. There’s likely much more references than the ones I caught, but I thought of Jane Eyre, A Little Princess, and Jordan Peele’s 2019 film, Us.
Aside from these allusions, the most fascinating aspect of the storyline is how it illuminates issues around scarcity of resources. The girls in the orphanage go to absolutely desperate measures to make sure they have the best chance at getting chosen for adoption. The proprietors of the orphanage themselves take on harmful practices in order to secure funds from donors to keep the orphanage open and running. There is desperation at every layer, so that Paloma’s childhood memories, which seem on the surface to be about her and her best friend in the orphanage, are laced through with arguments that center around the desire to be adopted. Childhood friendships don’t get to be simple and unencumbered in a space like this, but are always tested under the weight of needing to survive, of knowing that whatever respite is there in the present is temporary. Love and family, in this world, become resources to be fought for also.
It might sound like I am taking a murder mystery book and making it about something more than what it is, but I don’t think so. The novel might read as *simply* a psychological thriller to folks who have lived lives of relative privilege/comfort and never had to think much about the availability and distribution of resources. But if you do live in, have lived in, or are familiar with what life looks like in place that have been exploited by colonial systems and where you are not part of the elite in those places, then these issues of scarcity and survival are not only true, but they are commonplace. We do not think about them twice. As wrong as they are, the decisions taken by those in charge at the orphanage become understandable to me. This acceptance, I think, becomes its own kind of horror, and the novel forces us to take time to reflect on that.
Overall, I’m impressed that Jayatissa has created an enjoyable read where every plot point gets moved along swiftly by things that are considered too serious to be enjoyable: colonial legacies, whiteness, capitalism, transracial adoption, racism and assimilation. To me, these are the real psychological and material horrors lying under the surface of each decision characters make in the text, and placing these issues just beneath the action, rather than draping them in melancholy at the center, is a brilliant move. I can see a reading of the ghosts and mirroring in the model as ways to think about mourning, melancholia, and trauma, but I was much more absorbed by the novel’s take on what survival looks like in the wake of violence. Survival is complicated, the novel reminds us, and even if we cannot root for the ways in which some choose to survive, they certainly make for entertaining and surprising villains.
Buy the Book Here
comments
ljiang28
Written by Stephen Hong Sohn
Edited by Lina Jiang
I’m always thrilled to read anything that has to do with Sri Lanka that isn’t marketed as a trauma text. So My Sweet Girl by Amanda Jayatissa, a psychological thriller, was a book I was really excited about. It took me a while to get into the story, which felt like it was dragging at the start. I found the main character, Paloma, kind of insufferable, with her inability to know what on earth is going on in her own life, but that was by design, I think. About halfway through the book, I became so curious about what was going on that I couldn’t put it down and finished it in that sitting.
The novel is set between Sri Lanka and San Francisco, USA, and begins with Paloma trying to hold things together after she finds Arun, to whom she is subletting a bedroom in her apartment, murdered. We find out that Arun has learned of a deep dark secret that Paloma has been keeping, but she finds him dead in the apartment before she can confront him about it. And then, just as soon as she discovers this, his body disappears and Paloma must figure out if she has gotten so intoxicated lately that she is now hallucinating, or if something more sinister is going on with respect to her past. We learn that Paloma is also the adopted daughter of a white American couple, who chose her while visiting an orphanage they sponsored in Sri Lanka.
That’s all I will say about the plot because as someone who doesn’t read psychological thrillers, I don’t know how to avoid spoilers. So, instead I will say what else I enjoyed about this lovely work. First off, I’m impressed at how much this novel reminded me of home and of childhood, of living in the US as a Sri Lankan, and also of so many other texts, all at the same time. There’s likely much more references than the ones I caught, but I thought of Jane Eyre, A Little Princess, and Jordan Peele’s 2019 film, Us.
Aside from these allusions, the most fascinating aspect of the storyline is how it illuminates issues around scarcity of resources. The girls in the orphanage go to absolutely desperate measures to make sure they have the best chance at getting chosen for adoption. The proprietors of the orphanage themselves take on harmful practices in order to secure funds from donors to keep the orphanage open and running. There is desperation at every layer, so that Paloma’s childhood memories, which seem on the surface to be about her and her best friend in the orphanage, are laced through with arguments that center around the desire to be adopted. Childhood friendships don’t get to be simple and unencumbered in a space like this, but are always tested under the weight of needing to survive, of knowing that whatever respite is there in the present is temporary. Love and family, in this world, become resources to be fought for also.
It might sound like I am taking a murder mystery book and making it about something more than what it is, but I don’t think so. The novel might read as *simply* a psychological thriller to folks who have lived lives of relative privilege/comfort and never had to think much about the availability and distribution of resources. But if you do live in, have lived in, or are familiar with what life looks like in place that have been exploited by colonial systems and where you are not part of the elite in those places, then these issues of scarcity and survival are not only true, but they are commonplace. We do not think about them twice. As wrong as they are, the decisions taken by those in charge at the orphanage become understandable to me. This acceptance, I think, becomes its own kind of horror, and the novel forces us to take time to reflect on that.
Overall, I’m impressed that Jayatissa has created an enjoyable read where every plot point gets moved along swiftly by things that are considered too serious to be enjoyable: colonial legacies, whiteness, capitalism, transracial adoption, racism and assimilation. To me, these are the real psychological and material horrors lying under the surface of each decision characters make in the text, and placing these issues just beneath the action, rather than draping them in melancholy at the center, is a brilliant move. I can see a reading of the ghosts and mirroring in the model as ways to think about mourning, melancholia, and trauma, but I was much more absorbed by the novel’s take on what survival looks like in the wake of violence. Survival is complicated, the novel reminds us, and even if we cannot root for the ways in which some choose to survive, they certainly make for entertaining and surprising villains.
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A Review of Chris McKinney’s Midnight, Water City (Soho Press, 2021)
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ljiang28
Written by Stephen Hong Sohn
Edited by Lina Jiang
Well, I didn’t expect Chris McKinney’s Midnight, Water City (Soho Press, 2021) to be the type of book published by Soho, which typically boasts a strong crime fiction catalogue. Certainly, this novel follows some generic expectations but it’s also set far into the future. Other reviews have called this novel a cyber-noir, which is a term I’ve only vaguely heard before but it seems very apt.
Let’s let the official marketing description do some work for us: “Year 2142: Earth is forty years past a near-collision with the asteroid Sessho-seki. Akira Kimura, the scientist responsible for eliminating the threat, has reached heights of celebrity approaching deification. But now, Akira feels her safety is under threat, so after years without contact, she reaches out to her former head of security, who has since become a police detective. When he arrives at her deep-sea home and finds Akira methodically dismembered, this detective will risk everything—his career, his family, even his own life—and delve back into his shared past with Akira to find her killer.
With a rich, cinematic voice and burning cynicism, Midnight, Water City is both a thrilling neo-noir procedural and a stunning exploration of research, class, climate change, the cult of personality, and the dark sacrifices we are willing to make in the name of progress.” This novel had so many twists and turns, my head was spinning, but what I love about the narrative is that the protagonist was highly flawed and has a complicated perspective. Akira Kimura is widely embraced by modern society all over the planet as a savior; she is in some sense deified when she is able to take out the asteroid. Yet, over the course of the narrative, we begin to peel back the layers behind Akira to find out exactly how complicated a person she was. For starters, she had twin daughters, one of whom she herself killed when she found it had a birth defect. The other daughter, though surviving, nevertheless bears incredible trauma not only from the loss of her sister but also from her upbringing.
So, at this point, I will provide my requisite spoiler warning, so that those who may not want such narrative details will now look elsewhere. So, as I was saying: This daughter, Ascalon (which is also the name of the scar that appears across the night sky where the asteroid was blasted) is crucial to the plot, as she seeks out a complicated form of revenge in which she could take the place of her mother. Ascalon knows that Akira would reach out to her former bodyguard, so Ascalon begins to play everyone in Akira’s life like pawns. Of course, our protagonist-detective is himself blinded to Akira’s own machinations, so the story becomes one in which we see how much mother and daughter are alike. I think the element that I struggled with the most was trying to figure out where I stood in relation to both Akira and Ascalon: were they sociopathic narcissists that could not see the damage that they produced? Their actions strike quite disparately against the narrator-protagonist, who still seeks to find justice amid the ruins of Akira’s many stratagems. Supposedly, this particular work is the first in a trilogy, and it will be interesting to see where McKinney moves with this novel. For those not in the know, McKinney is the author of several other novels primarily set in Hawaii, so it’s always exciting to see an author really push himself aesthetically. A thrilling yet dark dive into a futuristic noir!
Buy the Book Here
comments
ljiang28
Written by Stephen Hong Sohn
Edited by Lina Jiang
Well, I didn’t expect Chris McKinney’s Midnight, Water City (Soho Press, 2021) to be the type of book published by Soho, which typically boasts a strong crime fiction catalogue. Certainly, this novel follows some generic expectations but it’s also set far into the future. Other reviews have called this novel a cyber-noir, which is a term I’ve only vaguely heard before but it seems very apt.
Let’s let the official marketing description do some work for us: “Year 2142: Earth is forty years past a near-collision with the asteroid Sessho-seki. Akira Kimura, the scientist responsible for eliminating the threat, has reached heights of celebrity approaching deification. But now, Akira feels her safety is under threat, so after years without contact, she reaches out to her former head of security, who has since become a police detective. When he arrives at her deep-sea home and finds Akira methodically dismembered, this detective will risk everything—his career, his family, even his own life—and delve back into his shared past with Akira to find her killer.
With a rich, cinematic voice and burning cynicism, Midnight, Water City is both a thrilling neo-noir procedural and a stunning exploration of research, class, climate change, the cult of personality, and the dark sacrifices we are willing to make in the name of progress.” This novel had so many twists and turns, my head was spinning, but what I love about the narrative is that the protagonist was highly flawed and has a complicated perspective. Akira Kimura is widely embraced by modern society all over the planet as a savior; she is in some sense deified when she is able to take out the asteroid. Yet, over the course of the narrative, we begin to peel back the layers behind Akira to find out exactly how complicated a person she was. For starters, she had twin daughters, one of whom she herself killed when she found it had a birth defect. The other daughter, though surviving, nevertheless bears incredible trauma not only from the loss of her sister but also from her upbringing.
So, at this point, I will provide my requisite spoiler warning, so that those who may not want such narrative details will now look elsewhere. So, as I was saying: This daughter, Ascalon (which is also the name of the scar that appears across the night sky where the asteroid was blasted) is crucial to the plot, as she seeks out a complicated form of revenge in which she could take the place of her mother. Ascalon knows that Akira would reach out to her former bodyguard, so Ascalon begins to play everyone in Akira’s life like pawns. Of course, our protagonist-detective is himself blinded to Akira’s own machinations, so the story becomes one in which we see how much mother and daughter are alike. I think the element that I struggled with the most was trying to figure out where I stood in relation to both Akira and Ascalon: were they sociopathic narcissists that could not see the damage that they produced? Their actions strike quite disparately against the narrator-protagonist, who still seeks to find justice amid the ruins of Akira’s many stratagems. Supposedly, this particular work is the first in a trilogy, and it will be interesting to see where McKinney moves with this novel. For those not in the know, McKinney is the author of several other novels primarily set in Hawaii, so it’s always exciting to see an author really push himself aesthetically. A thrilling yet dark dive into a futuristic noir!
Buy the Book Here
comments
