Stephen Hong Sohn's Blog, page 25

Review: Caitlin Chung's Ship of Fates

Posted by: jacobballew

Wow, it’s been a long time since I reviewed something from the very cool indie press Lanternfish. Way back in the day, I read this funky, lovely little book by Vikram Paralkar called The Afflictions. Paralkar recently came out with a novel, Night Theater, which I have read! In any case, so I recently saw that they’d come out with another text of interest Caitlin Chung’s Ship of Fates (Lanternfish Press, 2020), and I am here to review it. First off, let’s give you some background from the official site: “In the gridlocked harbor of San Francisco's Barbary Coast, a ship hung with red paper lanterns draws crowds eager to gamble and drink. Aboard this red-lit ship, the fates of two young women will be altered irrevocably—and tied forever to that of an ancient lighthouse keeper who longs to be free. Set against the backdrop of Gold Rush–era San Francisco's Chinese immigrant community, Ship of Fates is a coming-of-age fairy tale that stretches across generations.” The first thing you’ll note right off the bat is that Ship of Fates has an intriguing structure. There are alternating narratives. There is a frame narrative involving a lighthouse keeper and her visitor and then there is an embedded narrative in which we get a sense of the lighthouse keeper’s life in a past period. The novel toys with a myth related to the “gold mountain,” famed in Chinese transnational circles as a nickname first for the West Coast of the United States and later for parts of Canada. In this particular novel, we find out that the lighthouse keeper is trying to fulfill the terms of a debt that she seems she can never repay. The story of how the lighthouse keeper continually comes to ruin is something that Chung patiently and beautifully lays out in exquisite prose and in her very talented, atmospheric production of setting. There is always something a little bit magical bubbling under the surface of Chung’s work, which certainly imbues the compelling Chinese/ American female characters with verve. Scenes that take place in San Francisco’s Barbary Coast ripple with tension and intrigue; you always feel as though the bottom of the plot is going to drop out from under you. An outstanding debut set primarily in the Gold Rush era. Let’s hope Chung has something in store for us soon.

 

 

Buy the Book Here:

 

https://lanternfishpress.com/shop/ship-of-fates

 

 

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Review: Naoise Dolan's Exciting Times.

Posted by: jacobballew

A Review of Naoise Dolan’s Exciting Times (Ecco, 2020).

 

 

  

At Asian American Literature Fans, we’ve been thinking about some site revamps in light of so much going on in the world. At this time, we’re going to continue to review Asian American literature but also include more offerings from other writers, who may not identify as Asian American. As part of this trend, I offer you a review of Naoise Dolan’s Exciting Times. I was alerted to this title and immediately wrote a colleague (who works in Irish postcolonial studies) about a reviewer’s tagline, which references both Kevin Kwan and Sally Rooney. So, you know, of course had to read this novel! In any case, let’s let the marketing description get us off the ground: “An intimate, bracingly intelligent debut novel about a millennial Irish expat who becomes entangled in a love triangle with a male banker and a female lawyer Ava, newly arrived in Hong Kong from Dublin, spends her days teaching English to rich children. Julian is a banker. A banker who likes to spend money on Ava, to have sex and discuss fluctuating currencies with her. But when she asks whether he loves her, he cannot say more than ‘I like you a great deal.’ Enter Edith. A Hong Kong–born lawyer, striking and ambitious, Edith takes Ava to the theater and leaves her tulips in the hallway. Ava wants to be her—and wants her.  And then Julian writes to tell Ava he is coming back to Hong Kong... Should Ava return to the easy compatibility of her life with Julian or take a leap into the unknown with Edith? Politically alert, heartbreakingly raw, and dryly funny, Exciting Times is thrillingly attuned to the great freedoms and greater uncertainties of modern love. In stylish, uncluttered prose, Naoise Dolan dissects the personal and financial transactions that make up a life—and announces herself as a singular new voice.” The connection to Sally Rooney is apt insofar as the novel treads similar ground as Rooney’s Conversations with Friends. Both novels have at their center a dysfunctional and stormy relationship. In Dolan’s case, the relationship between Julian and Ava is complicated to say the least, especially as Julian refuses to label their connection. This kind of limbo space becomes ever more tendentious once Julian leaves for a long work trip, and Ava meets Edith. What the novel does so brilliantly well is to give us a protagonist who often believes she knows more than she does. At the same time, Dolan’s incredible ability to mine and to allow us into Ava’s psychological interiority gives us a robust sense of her motivations. The other element well worth noting is the backstory of Ava’s time in Hong Kong. There are snippets of her teaching English language lessons to young students, and it becomes clear that this job, while certainly fulfilling in some ways, is not pushing Ava in others. Ava, who seems so curious and observant, finds her match in someone like Edith. In this sense, the novel begins to gather more solidity with their relationship. What Dolan is also able to achieve so well is the turbulent undercurrents of an interracial relationship, as Ava must navigate how to deal with Edith being in the closet. The novel is eminently readable and ends on a logical romantic note, which I thus found fulfilling, certainly so in these dark, pandemic times. (There is a moment when Ava, having caught a cold, wears a mask)!

 

Buy the Book Here:

 

https://www.harpercollins.com/products/exciting-times-naoise-dolan

 

 

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Review: Sherwin Tija's Plummet

Posted by: jacobballew

  

A Review of Sherwin Tjia’s Plummet (Conundrum Press, 2019) 

 

 
So, I’ve been trying to catch up with the offerings by Conundrum Press, a very cool publisher north of the US border. To catch up on all the cool publications there, try this nifty link out:

 

https://www.conundrumpress.com/

 

 Let’s let the official marketing description get us off the ground here: “Take the plunge into a high-flying and hypnotic blend of heaven, hell, and high water When Amelia ‘Mel’ Eichenwald wakes up one morning, she finds herself in endless free-fall towards an Earth that is no longer there, surrounded by the junk of human existence. From high heels to houses, billions of random items drop alongside her like fallout from an exploded mall. She soon discovers she’s not alone. Others have been similarly plucked out of their lives and dropped off in mid-air. But why? For what purpose? And more importantly—and urgently—what is she going to eat? Where can she safely sleep? Plummet follows Mel as she attempts to survive, find allies, and negotiating the balance between becoming prey or predator. What makes us human — and what keeps us human —when gravity is all there is? How do you take a stand when there is literally no place to sit? Plummet will propel readers into a new dimension that’s part fable, part post-apocalyptic nightmare.” The most intriguing thing about this comic might be its author’s note which appears not soon after the narrative is over. We find out that Tjia’s inspiration to write this work was actually the images from 9/11 of people jumping off of the World Trade Center. What Tjia seeks to do, then, is to provide a “transitory” form of representational succor for falling bodies. Indeed, what he has created is a space in which a falling body might never actually hit the ground and might actually have to find a way to live a life in the space of falling. The serendipity of this kind of space is that apparently one can understand people who speak in other languages, at least for a certain amount of time.  I call Tjia’s approach to this representational succor “transitory” because the space in which the narrative unfolds is also somewhat dystopian. That is, there are lots of other things that are falling through space: not only does Mel come upon people who are in free-fall (and she even makes one good friend), but she also finds masses of objects that have been tethered together to form makeshift home spaces and islands. These masses, that are also falling, are often inhabited by unsavory individuals, some that seem to have an interest in the consumption of human flesh. Yes, readers, there are cannibals, so I instantly flash back to all the post-apocalyptic texts I’ve read (such as Cormac McCarthy’s The Road) in which you not only have to survive a potentially challenging space but also have to contend with duplicitous and malevolent individuals. The other thing that I appreciated about this text is the level of detail and thought that went into the story: what narrative problems occur when you have to consider the possibilities of falling through space for a seemingly infinite amount of time? This question actually needs to be addressed in some super practical ways. For instance, Tjia reminds us that people still need to urinate and to defecate while falling through the air, so things that might seem otherwise rather pedestrian become incredible problems in light of such free-floating acceleration. Tjia’s panels and images are super engaging and bring much liveliness to the storyline. This graphic novel is certainly one that you might consider adding, especially to a course on speculative fiction.  

 

Buy the Book Here: 

 

https://www.conundrumpress.com/new-titles/plummet/ 

 

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An Introduction

Posted by: jacobballew

Hello there! My name is Jacob Ballew and I'll be the Fall 2020 administrator of this page. Currently, I'm an M.A. student in English at Fordham University in New York City, New York. This is my first time being here in New York actually. I'm from Southern California; most specifically, Riverside, a rather suburban town about an hour drive from Los Angeles. It was there where I got my B.A. in English from the University of California, Riverside and graduated Cum Laude c/o 2020. Previously, I've worked as an English/General Writing Tutor for the University of California, Riverside and the community city in the same city, Riverside Community College. I was doing that for three years, and throughout my employment, I gained a passion for editing and revisions. I have to admit, I'm more of an editor than a writer. However, writing will always be all the rage for me especially when I'm tackling an awesome topic.

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A Review of Joon Oluchi Lee’s Neotenica (Nightboat Books, 2020).

Posted by: stephenhongsohn



A Review of Joon Oluchi Lee’s Neotenica (Nightboat Books, 2020).

When I saw Joon Oluchi Lee had a novel coming out, I was so excited! I read a fascinating piece in Social Text many years ago that Lee had penned that was titled, “The Joy of the Castrated Boy,” which discussed gender fluidity amongst other such issues and concerns. Joon Oluchi Lee’s Neotenica (Nightbook Books, 2020) naturally brings out some similar themes in relation to this eccentric, stylized narrative. I was also enthused to find out that Lee has two other fictions that have been published, 94 (Publication Studio, 2015) and Lace Sick Bag (Publication Studio, 2013). I’ll have to find a way to get them!  Let’s let the official description give us some background on the novel I am reviewing: “Neotenica is a novel of encounters: casual sex, arranged-marriage dates, cops, rowdy teenagers, lawyers, a Sapphic flirtation, a rival, a child, and two important dogs. At the center of it are Young Ae, a Korean-born ballet dancer turned PhD student, and her husband, a Korean-American male who inhabits an interior femininity, neither transgender nor homosexual, but a strong, visceral femininity nonetheless. This novel is an adrenaline-filled ride sliding across the surface of desire and chance through the quotidian turned playful.” The first thing I’d like to state right off the bat is that this novel immediately makes me wonder about tone. I found myself pondering if there was a word to encapsulate the tone of the novel, which seems to move from satirical perspectives to erotic relationalities within quick bursts of narrative movement. The novel is also intriguingly constructed, as we get a sense of Young Ae and her husband not only through their own perspectives but also characters who interact with them. Lee deftly switches from first and third person narrators, while maintaining that dynamic tone I’ve been mentioning before. The most compelling element of the novel and its biggest structural binding point is the marriage between Young Ae and her husband. They find a level of mutual recognition in each other, while they seek out extramarital sexual liaisons. Lee takes time delving into the specifics of these complicated dynamics, embodying them with texture and tonal precision. There’s also something slightly slick about both characters, as they try to navigate their lives with a level of awkwardness. Upon thinking about this issue more, it fits perfectly within the title, as neoteny refers to a form of juvenilization. While there are biological reasons why someone might remain in a “juvenile” stage, Lee is obviously working more metaphorically. Indeed, Young Ae, for instance, is working on a PhD in English, but there is very little sense of why she feels it necessarily important to pursue this degree. Young Ae’s husband also seems to flit about his life with little sense of purpose. Though this kind of state of aimlessness can be disorienting to read, Lee’s meticulous tonality, the ways in which we are constantly left slightly askew by the perspective, always keeps us on very solid readerly ground. A review from Publishers Weekly notes “What’s left feels as true as it is absurd.” I cannot agree more. A totally original narrative that could perhaps only be published by a dynamic, independent press. It would be an excellent text to pair alongside something like Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictee or Pamela Lu’s Ambient Parking Lot. I can only imagine the discussions that would arise. For more on Nightboat’s groovy offerings, go here. I’ll be certain to review more titles over the coming year.

 

https://nightboat.org/

 

 

The press maintains a robust backlist that includes a number of Asian American authors, including but not limited to Brandon Som, Vi Khi Nao, Bhanu Kapil, and Myung Mi Kim.

 

Buy the Book Here:

 

https://nightboat.org/book/neotenica/

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A Review of Deepak Unnikrishnan’s Temporary People (Restless Books, 2017)

Posted by: sorayaz

A Review of Deepak Unnikrishnan’s Temporary People (Restless Books, 2017)

By Gnei Soraya Zarook

 

“Temporary People is a work of fiction set in the UAE, where I was raised and where foreign nationals constitute over 80% of the population. It is a nation built by people who are eventually required to leave” (Unnikrishnan ix).

 

For a bit more context before I start, I’m going to let Goodreads give us a summary of this work that I find so difficult to summarize for all its brilliance: “In the United Arab Emirates, foreign nationals constitute over 80 percent of the population. Brought in to construct the towering monuments to wealth that punctuate the skylines of Abu Dhabi and Dubai, this labor force works without the rights of citizenship, endures miserable living conditions, and is ultimately forced to leave the country. Until now, the humanitarian crisis of the so-called “guest workers” of the Gulf has barely been addressed in fiction. Deepak Unnikrishnan delves into their histories, myths, struggles, and triumphs. Unnikrishnan presents twenty-eight linked stories that careen from construction workers who shapeshift into luggage and escape a labor camp, to a woman who stitches back together the bodies of those who’ve fallen from buildings in progress, to a man who grows ideal workers designed to live twelve years and then perish—until they don’t, and found a rebel community in the desert.”

 

This is a collection that haunts me, makes me laugh, and breaks my heart, all within a few sentences of each other. It is one of my favorite things I have ever read, and I think one of the reasons for this is that I am starved for literature about this very specific group of people. My parents were migrant workers who decided to labor in the U.A.E. (and later on, the Middle East at large) in order to earn and send money back home to Sri Lanka. “Tax-free!”, as Iqbal, one of the construction workers in Chapter Two of Temporary People, bellows (15). I spent many childhood years in the U.A.E. and in Saudi Arabia, coming back home to Sri Lanka during the school holidays. So when Unnikrishnan’s characters talk about the massive cargo containers that workers use to ship goods from the UAE back home, I know what they are talking about. I can still smell them; I smell the wood alongside the promise that migrants will remit, will bring back home stuff, goods, presents, possessions, luxuries, capital, to make their years abroad worthwhile, to be able to say, “Look what I have brought.”

 

Unnikrishnan’s work reminds me of Shailja Patel’s equally unique Migritude, which went from being a one-woman performance to being a text that uses letters, personal history, political events, timelines, poems, and a suitcase full of sarees to explore three generations of migration in Patel’s family and to weave together the violence of empire and its impact on women. Patel’s answer to the looming question, “What have you brought?” is “I brought Migritude.” It is a brave answer, one that gets to one of the questions I still grapple with: Can we remit with things other than the commodities of capitalism? Even though Unnikrishnan does not explicitly ask or answer such a question, I read Temporary People as a form of remittance, given his note at the beginning of the work that states how much he wanted to write about the people who live and work without rights or protections in the UAE. I read it this way because I can feel the heart put into every decision that Unnikrishnan has made, from the glorious play on language to the speculative imaginaries to the stories told by his characters.

 

And yet, for every special kernel in this book that I recognize as a result of being a child of foreign nationals who worked in the UAE, there are many more instances that challenge me. Every few pages there are words I need to look up, references and gestures to real-world events, comparisons and connections that reveal even darker truths than the ones I was aware of. I spent an entire six weeks of a seminar with Dr. Stephen Hong Sohn on Asian American Speculative Fiction attempting to write on this book, only to find that I could manage to fit into one paper only the first story about a woman named Anna who stitches and / or glues together men who have fallen from construction sites where they work. I mapped out the story on a huge piece of paper stuck to my bedroom wall, and came to realize how much politics and history were packed into it. As such, this becomes a book that I so want everyone to read because while our reading can do little, perhaps, to change the state of things for foreign nationals in the UAE, it will certainly change the way you understand the glitz and glamour of the UAE, and perhaps the Middle East at large, and your own space within the flows of capital in the world. If nothing else, it will give you something to consider when you next encounter workers at airport layovers in this and other parts of the world.

 

So much care and thoughtfulness have gone into every character, even when that character is an elevator that molests children. Unnikrishnan’s characters are deeply real and multifaceted, and the facets that Unnikrishnan chooses to employ are significant. It is not that these characters are merely human and flawed, but that their desires are so impacted by their connections to loved ones at home and by the promises of the Gulf that it is difficult to know where they begin and end as desiring beings. As such, we are reminded through every step of reading this book about the ways in which desire is connected to the political. I'm reminded again of Iqbal, who, while dying in Anna's arms (none of her usual ministrations have worked to patch him up), tells her of a dream he has where he is a bird. With his talons, he grips the building he has helped build, and flies up and away with it, to someplace cool, so that he and his family can enjoy it. I'm so moved by this image, of the laborer who wants, of course, not to tear down the beautiful structure that he built within a system that exploits him to build it, but to enjoy it someplace else, someplace where living can be pleasurable. The idea that the material comforts of capitalism can and should belong to people in ways that alleviate and make enjoyable their existence in this world, I think, is something that fiction still has much to say about, especially to those of us who theorize about burning down that which does not serve an ethical vision of the world. But a character like Iqbal might have something different to say, and I think we should listen.

Buy the Book Here!
Gnei Soraya Zarook, PhD Student in English, at gzaro001@ucr.edu

 

 

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A Review of Vikram Paralkar’s Night Theater (Catapult, 2020).

Posted by: lesliejfernandez

A Review of Vikram Paralkar’s Night Theater (Catapult, 2020).

By Stephen Hong Sohn

Here, I’m reading one of the debuts I was most excited about: Vikram Paralkar’s, Night Theater (Catapult, 2020). I recall reading Paralkar’s prior publication, The Afflictions, which was a kind of fictional encyclopedia that I found very intriguing in terms of both content and form. I could see that Paralkar was already a kind of writer seeking to experiment. He continues to push himself with his debut novel Night Theater. Let’s let the official site give us a basic description: “A surgeon flees a scandal in the city and accepts a job at a village clinic. He buys antibiotics out of pocket, squashes roaches, and chafes at the interventions of the corrupt officer who oversees his work. But his outlook on life changes one night when a teacher, his pregnant wife, and their young son appear. Killed in a violent robbery, they tell the surgeon that they have been offered a second chance at living if the surgeon can mend their wounds before sunrise. So begins a night of quiet work, ‘as if the crickets had been bribed, during which the surgeon realizes his future is tied more closely to that of the dead family than he could have imagined. By dawn, he and his assistant have gained knowledge no mortal should have. In this inventive novel charged with philosophical gravity and sly humor, Vikram Paralkar takes on the practice of medicine in a time when the right to health care is frequently challenged. Engaging earthly injustice and imaginaries of the afterlife, he asks how we might navigate corrupt institutions to find a moral center. Encompassing social criticism and magically unreal drama, Night Theater is a first novel as satisfying for its existential inquiry as for its enthralling story of a skeptical physician who arrives at a greater understanding of life's miracles.”

 

I very much appreciated the stylistic and generic hybridity at play in this narrative, what this description calls “social criticism and magically unreal drama.” What you begin to realize is that the father of this family, a teacher, has more secrets than he is at first willing to reveal. I must provide a spoiler warning at this point. Eventually, the teacher begins to let the doctor in on more secrets from the afterlife, and we discover that the afterlife is, perhaps, just as corrupt and obscure as real life can be. This revelation is probably the whole philosophical point of the novel: that there may be nothing more than a version of the life we are already in once we pass on into the great unknown, not something great or grand or even evil or diabolical… more of the same, just on a different plane of existence. The final arc does move in an unexpected direction, as the unborn child is extracted from her mother’s womb. Then, the family vanishes, and the doctor is left with this baby, who is not yet alive.

 

By the conclusion, though, something stirs, and we realize that the dead can give birth to live things. It is this kind of reversal that makes the novel so unexpectedly strange and intriguing. If there is another element to explore, it’s in the novel’s social critique of the medical field, especially as it unfolds in impoverished areas. The need for someone like the doctor is exceedingly great, but he is only forced to that part of the country because of a scandal. In this sense, the novel brings to mind the fact that those who are in the greatest of needs are often the ones who are given the least resources. The novel thus comes off as a meditation on the doctor’s ethos: what principles will he retain in the face of great challenges and how can he intervene to help those in distress, despite how little support he is given?  Without many answers, the novel still finds a way to keep us in its speculative, philosophical thrall.

 

Buy the Book Here:

Review Author: Stephen Hong Sohn
Review Editor: Leslie J. Fernandez

If you have any questions or want us to consider your book for review, please don’t hesitate to contact us via email!
Prof. Stephen Hong Sohn at ssohnucr@gmail.com
Leslie J. Fernandez, PhD Student in English, at lfern010@ucr.edu

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A Review of Tosca Lee’s The Line Between (Howard Books, 2019).

Posted by: lesliejfernandez

A Review of Tosca Lee’s The Line Between (Howard Books, 2019).

By Stephen Hong Sohn

Well, it’s been a minute since I’ve been able to finish a full novel. I feel like I’m in the middle of about five right now. It’s a really bad habit. My copy of Tosca Lee’s The Line Between (Howard Books, 2019) arrived recently, and though I knew I was supposed to finish some other books, I dove right in. I’ve been a fan of Tosca Lee’s work for quite some time. She knows how to write for plot. There’s always a great hook to the storyline. The Line Between is no different. The opening brings up dead pigs and strange slaughters, then it shifts over to a narrative concerning a cult. Our narrator is Wynter Roth, and she’s just been exiled from The New Earth cult. We’re not quite sure why, but we know she doesn’t really want to go, despite what are not ideal circumstances in that community. As she adjusts to life outside the cult, weird things are happening. A bunch of individuals have dead due to what seems to be rapid early onset dementia. They don’t know what’s going on, and they don’t know if it’s contagious, but… of COURSE it is, since that’s the whole point of moving the plot forward. So, folks, we have our outbreak narrative.

 

I didn’t expect this thing to entirely come together. Something about cults, disease coming from the permafrost, and an outbreak narrative, didn’t necessarily seem to gel together (at least at first). Eventually though the cult aspect actually seemed quite logical given where this novel ends up going. Here is where I will pause for my spoiler warning, reminding you that you should not read on unless you want to be spoiled. So, the cult aspect is something that seems right for this novel precisely because Wynter is heading toward a plot resolution that necessarily involves a potential and radical reformulation of community dynamics due to the outbreak itself. The kind of isolation that Wynter exists within while in the cult has some relational connection to the level of sequestration she then faces while attempting to find a cure for REOD (rapid early onset dementia).

 

Lee has her hands full because she also decides to throw in a romance plot. I tend to find these elements to be less compelling in novels involving what seem to be end-of-the-world scenario, but I suppose there must be multiple forms of hope that are possible in such fictional worlds. When the novel ends, there’s already a snippet provided revealing that there will be more to the story, so I can’t wait for the next installment! Perhaps, what’s most impressive is the way Lee continually pushes her own aesthetic approaches. She has published a number of what I can only call religious “counterfictions,” and then moved on to a series that reimagined the descendants of the Countess of Bathory (infamously known as one of the most prolific serial killers). Now she’s given us this outbreak narrative, so she continues to explore these new genres. I haven’t had a chance to read her co-authored works with Ted Dekker, so there’s always more to catch up on.

 

Buy the Book Here:

 

Review Author: Stephen Hong Sohn
Review Editor: Leslie J. Fernandez

If you have any questions or want us to consider your book for review, please don’t hesitate to contact us via email!
Prof. Stephen Hong Sohn at ssohnucr@gmail.com
Leslie J. Fernandez, PhD Student in English, at lfern010@ucr.edu

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A Review of Tosca Lee’s A Single Light (Howard Books, 2019).

Posted by: lesliejfernandez

A Review of Tosca Lee’s A Single Light (Howard Books, 2019).

By Stephen Hong Sohn

So, I did a bad thing: I started writing this review probably weeks or perhaps even a month after finishing the novel. I frankly couldn’t put the second installment of The Line Between series down and wanted to know how it ended. I do recall that that night I thought, “okay, I will give myself an hour or so to read,” and three hours later, I was still reading and refusing to go to bed! EEK!

 

In any case, I know I’ve said before that Tosca Lee is a master at building moment and propelling a plot forward, but let’s let the Howard Books official description get us started first: “Six months after vanishing into an underground silo with sixty others, Wynter and Chase emerge to find the area abandoned. There is no sign of Noah and the rest of the group that was supposed to greet them when they emerged—the same people Wynter was counting on to help her locate the IV antibiotics her gravely ill friend, Julie, needs in order to live. As the clock ticks down on Julie’s life, Wynter and Chase embark on a desperate search for medicine and answers. But what they find is not a nation on the cusp of recovery thanks to the promising new vaccine Wynter herself had a hand in creating, but one decimated by disease. What happened while they were underground? With food and water in limited supply and their own survival in question, Chase and Wynter must venture further and further from the silo. Aided by an enigmatic mute named Otto, they come face-to-face with a society radically changed by global pandemic, where communities scrabble to survive under rogue leaders and cities are war zones. As hope fades by the hour and Wynter learns the terrible truth of the last six months, she is called upon once again to help save the nation she no longer recognizes—a place so dark she’s no longer sure it can even survive. Fast-paced and taut, A Single Light is a breathless thriller of nonstop suspense about the risks of living in a world outside the safe confines of our closely-held beliefs and the relationships and lives that inspire us.”

 

Lee’s got a lot to do with this particular novel because there are at least two plots that require solving: the first is related to Julie, who desperately needs antibiotics. This particular narrative strand moves the story forward once Chase, Wynter, and some of the others emerge from the silo. This portion is probably one of the best parts of the novel because readers are absolutely tickled about finding out what’s been going on since they’ve essentially been on lockdown. The disappointment is that the landscape is not unlike many post-apocalyptic fictions (if you’re familiar with this terrain). Society has essentially broken down; there are some wayward, ethically good people but there are also charismatic leaders with very shifty morals. In this kind of environment, getting the antibiotics once needs is a little bit more complicated. The larger scale problem is related to the fact that there seems to be a possible way to develop a vaccine or a treatment for the disease that has ravaged the United States. The final sections of the novel thus shift the stakes to this higher dimension where Wynter’s cooperation is necessary to make sure some sort of cure can be developed.

 

One of the main things that I will take away from reading this series is that I didn’t expect it to end based upon where it began: Wynter was a fervent follower in a cult. By the conclusion, she’s really become a heroine with incredible survival skills, willing to fight for what she believes in. In some sense, Lee must have been reading up on her young adult paranormal romance protagonists, as this novel does follow the tried-but-seemingly-always successful formula: a somewhat ordinary person comes to be thrown into an extraordinary situation and must come up against a great evil, all the while still managing to snag the properly handsome romantic lead. Fans of the genre will of course gobble this story up, and then be waiting for whatever Tosca Lee is cooking up next.

Buy the Book Here:

 

Review Author: Stephen Hong Sohn
Review Editor: Leslie J. Fernandez

If you have any questions or want us to consider your book for review, please don’t hesitate to contact us via email!
Prof. Stephen Hong Sohn at ssohnucr@gmail.com
Leslie J. Fernandez, PhD Student in English, at lfern010@ucr.edu

 

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A Review of Samra Habib’s We Have Always Been Here: A Queer Muslim Memoir (Viking Canada, 2019)

Posted by: lesliejfernandez

A Review of Samra Habib’s We Have Always Been Here: A Queer Muslim Memoir (Viking Canada, 2019)

By Stephen Hong Sohn

It’s sometimes difficult to get a hand on those North of the border publications but AALF made some friends there (thanks to A.M.), and now we’re catching up on some of those offerings. We’re starting with Samra Habib’s We Have Always Been Here: A Queer Muslim Memoir (Viking Canada, 2019), which immediately had me at the subtitle! Here is the official book description: “How do you find yourself when the world tells you that you don't exist? Samra Habib has spent most of her life searching for the safety to be herself. As an Ahmadi Muslim growing up in Pakistan, she faced regular threats from Islamic extremists who believed the small, dynamic sect to be blasphemous. From her parents, she internalized the lesson that revealing her identity could put her in grave danger. When her family came to Canada as refugees, Samra encountered a whole new host of challenges: bullies, racism, the threat of poverty, and an arranged marriage. Backed into a corner, her need for a safe space--in which to grow and nurture her creative, feminist spirit--became dire. The men in her life wanted to police her, the women in her life had only shown her the example of pious obedience, and her body was a problem to be solved. So begins an exploration of faith, art, love, and queer sexuality, a journey that takes her to the far reaches of the globe to uncover a truth that was within her all along. A triumphant memoir of forgiveness and family, both chosen and not, We Have Always Been Here is a rallying cry for anyone who has ever felt out of place and a testament to the power of fearlessly inhabiting one's truest self.”

 

This memoir is absolutely extraordinary in terms of how it narrates the development of Habib’s activist, feminist, and LGBTQIA political engagements. While she is eventually able to leave a problematic arranged marriage, her next relationship is perhaps equally tendentious, as she tries to figure out how to move forward with her life. She eventually finds a community that includes feminists, queers, artists, and activists, and she cultivates a stronger relationship with her inner sense of purpose and independence. As she comes to terms with her own sexual identity, she also begins to realize that her family, which at first seemed resistant to her exploration of her queerness, is starting to understand and embrace who she is. Perhaps, my favorite revelation in this memoir concerned Habib’s work toward making more visible queer Muslim communities. She at first faces some resistance, as her contacts don’t always want to be the public face of such issues, but Habib (as she has been throughout the memoir) is ultimately relentless. It is this persistence, this desire to continue toward this sense of greater purpose that makes this memoir so inspiring. She eventually does go on to release this photo project, more of which can be read about here:

 

As a general note, the field of queer Asian North American literature at large is so much the better for this publication, as there remains much more to be explored for queer South Asian and queer Muslim American communities. The ending sequence of the memoir, which delve into Habib’s return to the faith, is exceptionally crucial simply as a mode by which to understand how religion and queerness, spirituality and sexuality, might find a place in one’s life.

 

Buy the Book Here:

 

Review Author: Stephen Hong Sohn
Review Editor: Leslie J. Fernandez

If you have any questions or want us to consider your book for review, please don’t hesitate to contact us via email!
Prof. Stephen Hong Sohn at ssohnucr@gmail.com
Leslie J. Fernandez, PhD Student in English, at lfern010@ucr.edu

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