Stephen Hong Sohn's Blog, page 26
March 19, 2020
A Review of Rumaan Alam’s Rich and Pretty (Ecco, 2016).
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A Review of Rumaan Alam’s Rich and Pretty (Ecco, 2016).
By Stephen Hong Sohn
One night, after a particularly bad day not doing the revising thing, I picked up Rumaan Alam’s Rich and Pretty. Based upon general descriptions and the cover itself, I suspect that the novel was not unlike the Chicklit genre that we’ve seen come to prominence with titles like The Devil Wears Prada and Bridget Jones’s Diary. Alam’s novel does take some inspiration from these works, but diverges significantly especially in the narrative stylings. Alam employs a third person narrator that verges on stream of consciousness at times; this approach forces to do more work. You simply have to slow down and take more time to follow along. The plotting and associated events seem simple enough: Sarah and Lauren are besties. Sarah is the rich one; Lauren is the pretty one. Sarah is the one getting married; Lauren is the maid of honor. Sarah is dependable; Lauren is more impulsive. Despite their differences, they seemingly have maintained strong bonds since their youthful teen years. Sarah’s marriage does add some new wrinkles into the equation, as this event pushes both to reconsider their pasts together and what different life trajectories they’ve taken.
Of the two, Lauren certainly comes off as the more complicated and prickly of the pair: you can see that Lauren wields her beauty without much self-consciousness, but it allows her a level of agency that creates its own dilemmas. Men easily fall in love with her and pursue her, but she just as easily finds herself bored, even by their persistent devotion, their many talents, their dependable, above average love making, their dependable, above average good looks. Much of the novel thus finds its traction in why it is that Sarah ended up becoming such good friends with Lauren, this woman who seems slightly dissatisfied, yet ultimately comfortable with where her life has taken her. There is one particularly compelling moment that really sealed the deal for me as a reader, that made me understood Lauren’s power: Sarah had simply invested in a friendship in which she saw something indisputably elegant in someone else. In other words, Lauren became a kind of platonic curation, someone Sarah had handpicked to come into her world, a world of shopping at Barney’s and bachelorette parties on tropical islands.
To be sure, Sarah isn’t some vapid socialite, but her elite status is assured. She comes from lineage, whereas Lauren does not, but Sarah sees in her a beauty that will only get richer in time, and the novel seems to ask us: who doesn’t want to surround themselves with beautiful things, even as we try to work out larger, perhaps more weighty social problems? Lauren, who is beautiful, who attracts then beautiful men to her, and doesn’t even realize this gravitational pull, finds recognition and upward mobility in this friendship with Sarah. Sarah’s wedding, her unexpected pregnancy, all take a backseat to this philosophical, stream-of-conscious meditation on non-biological sisterhood, the families we create beyond the bounds of traditional kinships. Somehow, through all of the excesses of the novel, the many lavish dinners and bridal events, we wonder about how this alternative sisterhood will manage to last. Though the conclusion did seem somewhat anti-climactic, Alam’s careful rendering of this asymmetrical relationship is no doubt a page-turner.
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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 Robin Ha’s Almost American Girl (Balzer + Bray, 2020).
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A Review of Robin Ha’s Almost American Girl (Balzer + Bray, 2020).
By Stephen Hong Sohn
I absolutely ADORED this memoir, and I will be teaching it probably over and over again. First, THERE ARE ACTUAL PAGE NUMBERS! THANK THE GODS! After the trauma of reading Jeremy Jusay’s astounding, brilliant The Strange Ones, all I could think about when I opened this book was: “please, please let this book have page numbers so I can teach it.” There, those beautiful page numbers appeared like a miracle from the print production gods. Let’s let the official page at HarperCollins tell us what is going on with this equally astounding, brilliant book: “A powerful and moving teen graphic novel memoir about immigration, belonging, and how arts can save a life—perfect for fans of American Born Chinese and Hey, Kiddo. For as long as she can remember, it’s been Robin and her mom against the world. Growing up as the only child of a single mother in Seoul, Korea, wasn’t always easy, but it has bonded them fiercely together. So when a vacation to visit friends in Huntsville, Alabama, unexpectedly becomes a permanent relocation—following her mother’s announcement that she’s getting married—Robin is devastated. Overnight, her life changes. She is dropped into a new school where she doesn’t understand the language and struggles to keep up. She is completely cut off from her friends in Seoul and has no access to her beloved comics. At home, she doesn’t fit in with her new stepfamily, and worst of all, she is furious with the one person she is closest to—her mother. Then one day Robin’s mother enrolls her in a local comic drawing class, which opens the window to a future Robin could never have imagined.”
Wow, this memoir was just absolutely mind-bogglingly wonderful. I had intended only to crack it open, then finished it. I was so hyped up after I completed it, I cracked open another novel and almost finished that one too. Reading addiction is terrible, especially when it falls on “spring forward” of daylight savings. What you appreciate are the flourishes of the migrant experience that clarify how isolating and devastating it can be. Chuna is bookish, a little gender nonconforming, and introverted, so going to Hunstville, where she does not know the language, does not know any other Koreans than the family that she’s living with, and does not have many allies is a brutal transition. Chuna is re-christened Robin, but a change of the name does not necessarily make things easier. A Halloween venture is full of silences, as Robin struggles to understand her trick-or-treating partner’s monologues. Her new family has its own peculiar dynamics, with cousins and stepsiblings who do not work very hard to include her. Her own mother’s new relationship is soon on the rocks, and Robin cannot understand why they would give up their lives in Korea, when her mother had opened up a successful beauty salon, and they were living independently. Ultimately, what becomes clear is that this story is one about a mother’s fierce love for her daughter, one that also comes in the form of Western ideals of independent womanhood.
In Korea, still today, there are deep social stigmas attached to single mothers, so the graphic memoir ultimately details the kind of struggles that Robin’s mother had to negotiate just to get to the point where she was respected in her own community. A new life in the United States surely would have seemed ideal, even as it meant potentially giving up financial independence, if only for the possibility that they could live as a “normative” family unit. This message is one that Ha’s memoir makes clear. Even as the family dynamics that Robin’s mother pursues begins to crumble, Ha never falters in understanding why her mother made the choices she felt she had to. An extraordinary work.
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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 Lygia Day Peñaflor’s Unscripted Joss Byrd (Roaring Book Press, 2016).
lesliejfernandez
A Review of Lygia Day Peñaflor’s Unscripted Joss Byrd (Roaring Book Press, 2016).
By Stephen Hong Sohn
Targeted for middle grade readers, Lygia Day Peñaflor’s debut, Unscripted Joss Byrd, explores the life of a preteen movie star. The titular Joss Byrd is on a shoot in Montauk with her single mother Viva. She’s struggling to commit new scripts to memory, especially because of continual re-writes. At the same time, we immediately begin to see how much pressure Joss Byrd has on her young shoulders because she’s the “cash cow” for her family, so much so that her mother has already squandered a considerable amount of Joss’s earnings in a failed venture. But all is not well with Joss: she doesn’t always feel up for doing movies, and she needs to find a more productive way to memorize lines. Further still, she finds her older co-star on the movie (a man named Rodney who is a method actor) to be detestable and slimy. Fortunately, Joss is able to make a friend in her youthful co-star, Chris, who is playing her older brother in the movie.
The movie itself is a biopic based upon the director Terrance’s life. Complications begin to arise because Viva is having a sexual relationship with the director, despite the fact that he is married. Further still, Joss begins to realize that the movie shoot is encroaching on the lives of the locals, who cannot use specific beaches to surf or hang out. Joss is definitely caught in the middle, but she begins to find her way, especially with the help of a tutor named Damon, who enables her to memorize her lines with more efficiency. Her developing friendship with Chris is another stabilizing force.
Though Peñaflor’s debut has much going for it, especially with its insider-type look into the life of a child actor, the story itself was uneven. It was especially difficult to find any redeemable value in Joss’s mother. Peñaflor is forced to find a way to make Viva likable, but does not provide enough of a back story to support the major pivot that the conclusion makes. If anything, that particular character makes me worry about Joss Byrd well beyond the final pages. You wonder if she will find her way in a movie industry that seems so intent on exploiting her, on the one hand, and a mother who seems unable to engage her duties as a supportive parental guardian, on the other.
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 Kevin Kwan’s China Rich Girlfriend (Knopf Doubleday, 2015).
lesliejfernandez
A Review of Kevin Kwan’s China Rich Girlfriend (Knopf Doubleday, 2015).
By Stephen Hong Sohn
So, I had some definite trouble getting through Kevin Kwan’s China Rich Girlfriend, which is his sequel to Crazy Rich Asians. We’ll let B&N do some reviewing duties for us: “On the eve of her wedding to Nicholas Young, heir to one of the greatest fortunes in Asia, Rachel should be over the moon. She has a flawless Asscher-cut diamond from JAR, a wedding dress she loves more than anything found in the salons of Paris, and a fiancé willing to sacrifice his entire inheritance in order to marry her. But Rachel still mourns the fact that her birthfather, a man she never knew, won't be able to walk her down the aisle. Until: a shocking revelation draws Rachel into a world of Shanghai splendor beyond anything she has ever imagined. Here we meet Carlton, a Ferrari-crashing bad boy known for Prince Harry-like antics; Colette, a celebrity girlfriend chased by fevered paparazzi; and the man Rachel has spent her entire life waiting to meet: her father. Meanwhile, Singapore's It Girl, Astrid Leong, is shocked to discover that there is a downside to having a newly minted tech billionaire husband. A romp through Asia's most exclusive clubs, auction houses, and estates, China Rich Girlfriend brings us into the elite circles of Mainland China, introducing a captivating cast of characters, and offering an inside glimpse at what it's like to be gloriously, crazily, China-rich.”
So, this plot summary gives us a great idea of Kwan’s writerly goal: to show us how fabulous it is to be China-rich. Many of the Singaporean characters in this novel are not China-rich, meaning that they have boatloads of money, but aren’t necessarily in that super elite strata. If the Singaporean elites in the last book were the top of the top, Kwan shows up how high the top actually can extend. Part of the point here is that Kwan is playing around with the Chinese diaspora and its many variations, social classes, and formations. At the same time, while reading this novel, the reader must navigate Kwan’s shifting third person narratorial tonality, which consistently moves between ironic/ satirical, on the one hand, and fawning/ sycophantic, on the other. Readers are meant to take pleasure in but also find these cultures to be comical: we’re supposed to desire the lifestyle while somehow also denigrate its excesses. This kind of dissonance can get tiring, especially when the characters themselves seem to be window dressings to the extravagant lifestyle that Kwan wants to ensure is authentically represented. I have no doubt that all of the haute couture handbags and designer labels actually exist, but much of this rarefied culture was lost on me.
Rachel, who I found refreshing for her “middle-class” background is blandified in this particular book, as she’s carted off throughout China from one luxury location to the next. Much of her character is reduced to squeals of pleasure at [insert X luxurious location or item here]. If there is a plotline that Kwan does not meddle tonally with, it’s the domestic family and courtship plots. Rachel’s marriage to Nick Young is the source of consternation to multiple families, despite the fact that she is well educated, seems pleasant enough, and actually loves her husband-to-be. It is only when Rachel’s background is revealed to include Chinese economic royalty that she becomes “worthy” to her soon-to-be in-laws, but this new background generates only more problems because she is seen to tarnish her biological family’s reputation. Rachel is now an out-of-wedlock love child, who may be seen as a competitor to a massive inheritance. In this sense, Kwan’s novel has much more in line with some Victorian courtship and marriage plots, but without the Austenian narrator’s ability to generate sympathy for our heroine. In this case, Rachel cannot be considered a woman on the edges of the landed gentry: she’s smack dab in the middle of gobs and gobs of money.
The other, perhaps stronger storyline is Astrid Leong’s issue with her husband. It becomes apparent that she cannot “stand by her man,” because he’s constantly riding a wave of insecurity due to the fact that he feels she is always looking down on him because he “only” comes from self-made billionaire money. But, as is the case with Rachel’s storyline: eventually, at least for me, the exigencies of the super rich not only become comical, but often absurd and profanely so. Though Kwan revels in the mixture of comic and excessive, I did not like ending my own reading experience in a hybrid mode of hate-laughing characters. Nevertheless, as the cover illustrations serve to show, this novel also does function within the broader mode of Chiclit, and I will not fault Kwan for going full throttle in this genre convention mode: romance, designer labels, and inheritances are all on the line here. Commence the drama.
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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 Erin L. Schneider’s Summer of Sloane (Disney-Hyperion, 2016).
lesliejfernandez
A Review of Erin L. Schneider’s Summer of Sloane (Disney-Hyperion, 2016).
By Stephen Hong Sohn
So, I had a really conflicted reading reaction to Erin L. Schneider’s debut novel Summer of Sloane. The titular Sloane is our first person protagonist, and we’ll let B&N provide us with a summary: “Warm Hawaiian sun. Lazy beach days. Flirty texts with her boyfriend back in Seattle. These are the things seventeen-year-old Sloane McIntyre pictured when she imagined the summer she'd be spending at her mom's home in Hawaii with her twin brother, Penn. Instead, after learning an unthinkable secret about her boyfriend, Tyler, and best friend, Mick, all she has is a fractured hand and a completely shattered heart. Once she arrives in Honolulu, though, Sloane hopes that Hawaii might just be the escape she needs. With beach bonfires, old friends, exotic food, and the wonders of a waterproof cast, there's no reason Sloane shouldn't enjoy her summer. And when she meets Finn McAllister, the handsome son of a hotel magnate who doesn't always play by the rules, she knows he's the perfect distraction from everything that's so wrong back home. But it turns out a measly ocean isn't nearly enough to stop all the emails, texts, and voicemails from her ex-boyfriend and ex-best friend, desperate to explain away their betrayal. And as her casual connection with Finn grows deeper, Sloane's carefree summer might not be as easy to come by as she'd hoped. Weighing years of history with Mick and Tyler against their deception, and the delicate possibility of new love, Sloane must decide when to forgive, and when to live for herself.”
This summary is quite comprehensive, but I do have to provide some basic spoilers to fill in a major gap: Sloane’s heartbroken because her best friend Mick ended up sleeping with her boyfriend Tyler. Mick also gets pregnant on top of that and plans on keeping the baby, so Sloane’s trip to Hawaii to connect back with her mother and with her friends that live there really do provide the right kind of escape, for a time. There is a kind of compulsory heterosexuality to this young adult fiction, which can become cloying, especially given the sea change I’ve seen in this genre over the depictions of teenagers from so many different backgrounds, but Schneider’s concluding arc shifts us further away from the many romantic triangles that pop up to meditate upon questions of forgiveness, blame, and guilt.
The other element that’s central for communities here is Sloane’s complicated ethnoracial background, because she definitely identifies as a mixed ethnic individual, even as both she and her twin brother might look phenotypically white. The novel doesn’t tend to explore this angle as much as it could have because of the focus on romance and friendships, which is a bit of a bummer given the ethnic diversity found in Hawaii, so that was another element that I found to be somewhat lackluster. Nevertheless, Schneider is well aware of certain formula elements of the young adult fiction, especially with respect to romance, so there will be much for fans of this genre with respect to core themes and issues.
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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March 12, 2020
A Review of Evelyn Skye’s The Crown’s Fate (Balzer + Bray, 2017)
lesliejfernandez
A Review of Evelyn Skye’s The Crown’s Fate (Balzer + Bray, 2017)
By Stephen Hong Sohn
I was really excited by this title because I really enjoyed the first in Skye’s Crown Series. In Evelyn Skye’s, The Crown’s Fate (Balzer + Bray, 2017), our merry cast has reassembled to give Russian intrigue and statecraft another go. We’ll let B&N take it away from here: “Russia is on the brink of great change. Pasha’s coronation approaches, and Vika is now the Imperial Enchanter, but the role she once coveted may be more difficult—and dangerous—than she ever expected. Pasha is grappling with his own problems—his legitimacy is in doubt, the girl he loves loathes him, and he believes his best friend is dead. When a challenger to the throne emerges—and with the magic in Russia growing rapidly—Pasha must do whatever it takes to keep his position and protect his kingdom. For Nikolai, the ending of the Crown’s Game stung deeply. Although he just managed to escape death, Nikolai remains alone, a shadow hidden in a not-quite-real world of his own creation. But when he’s given a second chance at life—tied to a dark price—Nikolai must decide just how far he’s willing to go to return to the world. With revolution on the rise, dangerous new magic rearing up, and a tsardom up for the taking, Vika, Nikolai, and Pasha must fight—or face the destruction of not only their world but also themselves.”
There’s quite a bit that this description leaves out. First off, Nikolai is trapped in a shadow world at the beginning of the novel, precisely because of the events of the first book, The Crown’s Game. The “game” of that book pitted the two possible enchanters against each other; the loser would have to die. But, the loser didn’t die: the loser went to some shadow world in which Nikolai wasn’t dead, but he wasn’t alive either. The only way Nikolai could achieve any semblance of power in this shadow world was by siphoning off the energies of living beings. This method of energy transference, though, is a kind of dark magic, which he abhors. Nikolai’s mother is part of this shadow world and is able to use her influence to find ways to give Nikolai enough energy to move outside the shadow world and back into the physical world. Even once he is freed from that shadow plane, he still is not fully alive, and he must continually draw energy from living beings just to retain any materiality. The import of this dark energy is made evident because it slowly corrupts Nikolai’s intentions, twisting them to the point that he’s willing to do anything he can to take power away from Pasha, who was once his trusted surrogate brother.
One of the dangers that Skye toys with in this novel is to make Nikolai totally unlikable, while trying to push Vika toward Pasha as a kind of romance triangle. For me, this ploy wholly didn’t work. I had already bought in by the conclusion of the last novel that Nikolai and Vika were meant to be for each other, so I was rather impatiently waiting to see how Skye would intend to extend their separation. In this case, the triangle is, for the most part, unsuccessful precisely because Pasha is a rather boring romantic foil: he’s not very tsar-like nor does he have magical powers. Besides the fact that he has a beefcake bod from years of athletic and military training, there doesn’t seem to be much going for him. At the same time, once Nikolai turns full on evil, you start hating him, too, and this novel was one that I made me think: “Vika, you must run away from these two stupid men.” In any case, then, the tension that drives a narrative forward through the romantic triangle seemed lost on me. I almost thought that Pasha’s sister Yuliana was the most interesting option for Vika’s proper romantic foil, even though she, too, seemed perverted by her desire to rule over others.
The novel’s conclusion leaves an open-ended plot device concerning the rising level of magic that has caused old, mystical creatures to awaken, but I’m unsure as to whether or not this series is an actual trilogy or a planned duology. Recent listings do not show a third book, so I’m confused as to whether or not this installment is the end of the Crown series. Fortunately, fans of this series will be happy to note that Skye leaves most of the plot strands resolved. Unfortunately, if you were counting on the romance plot to be part of the high stakes tension in this particular work, you may be disappointed.
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 Karuna Riazi’s The Gauntlet (Salaam Reads, 2017).
lesliejfernandez
A Review of Karuna Riazi’s The Gauntlet (Salaam Reads, 2017).
By Stephen Hong Sohn
The Salaam Reads imprint over at Simon and Schuster’s Children’s Division is one of the best responses to the “We Need Diverse Books” campaign that I’ve seen. It presumably targets the acquisitions of books related to Arab American/ Middle Eastern American/ Near Eastern contexts. One recent publication coming out of that imprint is Karuna Riazi’s The Gauntlet (Salaam Reads, 2017), which reads like an Oriental tale combined with the story from Jumanji.
Here is the Kirkus Reviews evaluation of the text: “A young hijabi finds herself, her brother, and her friends trapped in a very dangerous game. Upper East Side Bangladeshi-American Farah's having a hard time clicking with her old friends from Queens when they come to her 12th birthday party. But when her trying-but-adorable little brother—he has ADHD—vanishes into a mysterious board game called The Gauntlet of Blood and Sand, white Essie and brown-skinned Alex don't hesitate to join Farah in jumping in to rescue him. Once in the game, they are given three challenges—and failure to win all three will trap them there. Farah's desperation to find Ahmad heightens these deadly stakes. In her debut, Riazi gives readers a Muslim protagonist who resists genre clichés: she's resolute rather than feisty, smart but aware of her weaknesses. Secondary characterization is not so strong; Essie and Alex seem more types than people. The superb worldbuilding offers an ever shifting topography, rather like an Escher vision of the East. Riazi's lush descriptions reject exoticization, Farah's cultural familiarity positioning readers within her perspective: a ‘sweet sunset pink mosque, beautifully domed and proudly placed,’ reminds her of buildings she's seen in Bangladesh and India, ‘sharing a linked history of wide arches and rounded roofs.’ Riazi combines such tropes as a magic map with the winningly original lizard Resistance corps, offering just the right mix of familiarity and newness. A solid middle-grade fantasy and an auspicious debut.”
I’d have to agree with the majority of the assessments. Even my earlier description of the novel as something deriving out of the Oriental tale is not quite accurate because the narrative perspective is given over to a character who wouldn’t see jinns and other such creatures as necessarily all the strange. At the same time, the novel’s intriguing conceit about being trapped inside of a game has larger ramifications that make the stakes of this particular work far higher than what you might expect out of a middle grade novel. At one point, they come to realize that most of the people they are meeting in the game have, in one way or another, been trapped inside the game. Riazi must have us suspend our sense of danger because we don’t really want to think of children, or anyone for that matter, really falling prey to a world ruled by a fearsome architect who wants nothing more than to beat gameplayers and trap them for all eternity.
We’re not surprised when the threesome finally escape the game, but they also take with them another former player, now an adult, who had been missing for some decades. This player had been in the game during a period of time when Farah’s aunt first engaged The Gauntlet as a child, so these two adults are reunited at the end. But the realist convictions of this text create additional problems for the conclusion that Riazi can only sidestep by concluding the novel: after all, the police have been searching for Farah; Farah’s aunt has given Farah’s mother a presumable explanation for her disappearance, which I’m sure could not have gone over well; and finally, what does one do when one has disappeared for decades and trapped inside a game? These issues are not worked out, but it’s a testament to Riazi’s unique narrative conceit that we’re willing to let these conundrums slide by, especially in the hopes that there will be another installment.
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 Taran Matharu’s The Battlemage (Feiwel & Friends, 2017).
lesliejfernandez
A Review of Taran Matharu’s The Battlemage (Feiwel & Friends, 2017).
By Stephen Hong Sohn
Taran Matharu’s, The Battlemage, is the final installment in the Summoner trilogy, which has definitely been one of my favorite YA trilogies. The rather anemic editorial description at B&N doesn’t do that much for us, so suffice it to say that the conclusion of the last installment left Fletcher and friends making a hasty escape from the Orcs through a portal that leads them into the ether. For the uninitiated, the ether is the domain of the demons, certainly not anywhere that living beings can survive for long periods. Indeed, without the ingestion of a special kind of plant, living beings will eventually die there, so Fletcher and his allies must find a way out of the ether and hatch a longer-term plan about how they will sustain their existences if they run out of that plant. The first half of the novel involves the team’s trials and tribulations in the ether: they must battle Khan, the evil white orc, along with hordes of other demons. They are occasionally assisted by a magnificent new demon of their own, a turtle-like creature called a Zaratan (that no one can actually harness and therefore control). Eventually, through a little bit of luck and persistence, Fletcher and friends find the plant they need, while also fortuitously finding a portal out of the ether. From here, the team must find a way to forward information about the dastardly plans of some of the other nobles, the ones who essentially planned their demise by pushing them into the doomed mission that was the subject of book 2. Because of the corrupt regime, Fletcher and friends, despite having evidence of the treachery, cannot assume that those in power will cast out their duplicitous cronies. Fortunately, Fletcher and his merry band persist and also are able to overcome the twisted regime structure, but then Fletcher is left with an entirely new task: to take over the mantle as the royal of a particular region of the kingdom, the location that borders the Orc lands. He’s going to need an army and a new set of colonists, if he is to have any luck sustaining a new settlement, but the novel’s second half flags severely in this area.
Matharu sort of has two distinct narratives to deal with in this final installment, and it’s difficult really to create the proper pacing because of this incredible shift. The back half sees the reader traipsing through a resettlement sequence, training montage narratives, and other such moments in order to generate what will necessarily be the climactic battle between Khan, who is still very much alive, and Fletcher, very much harried by his time as a publicly recognized royal (recall that he didn’t even realize he was from such a prestigious background until it was unveiled in book 2). Matharu’s concluding battle is so viciously wrought that I almost wondered how the novel was supposed to be wrapped up so quickly. The author clearly knows genre conventions: he stacks the deck to make it look as though all hope is lost at multiple points, but somehow, someway, we know that good will prevail.
If there’s one beef I had about this particular series it’s that Matharu’s world building doesn’t allow for enough Pokemon-type content. Because summoners only have so much energy available to gain a new demon (and because demon-catching itself is so difficult), there isn’t much opportunity for the team to gain new demons to use in battle. There is only one distinct new demon that is harnessed in the entire text by Fletcher and his allies in the ether, so that was a bit of letdown. My attitude here was amplified by the lexicon of demons that Matharu actually provides at the conclusion, where you get a full description of rare, sought after demons and their powers. In any case, Matharu has already stated in interviews that this particular fictional world is based upon an analogic relationship to racial differences in our own, so this series gets huge kudos for me for resisting the kind of abstractions that make the YA paranormal genre so challenging to consider as a viable teaching and even scholarly option. Whatever my minor quibbles about YA or even Matharu’s final book in this series, I’m following whatever he produces in the future, including what looks like a prequel series that will focus on Arcturus, one of Fletcher’s mentors. Bring it 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 Rowan Hisayo Buchanan’s Harmless Like You (W.W. Norton, 2017).
lesliejfernandez
A Review of Rowan Hisayo Buchanan’s Harmless Like You (W.W. Norton, 2017).
By Stephen Hong Sohn
Let’s employ B&N’s editorial description to get things started: “Written in startlingly beautiful prose, Harmless Like You is set across New York, Connecticut, and Berlin, following Yuki Oyama, a Japanese girl fighting to make it as an artist, and Yuki’s son Jay who, as an adult in the present day, is forced to confront his mother’s abandonment of him when he was only two years old. The novel opens when Yuki is sixteen and her father is posted back to Japan. Though she and her family have been living as outsiders in New York City, Yuki opts to stay, intoxicated by her friendship with the beautiful aspiring model Odile, the energy of the city, and her desire to become an artist. But when she becomes involved with an older man and the relationship turns destructive, Yuki’s life is unmoored. Harmless Like You is a suspenseful novel about the complexities of identity, art, adolescent friendships, and familial bonds that asks—and ultimately answers—how does a mother desert her son?”
Well, this novel was definitely a tough read for me. On the one hand, the novel is beautifully written, with complex representations of the main characters. I agree with the phrase that the prose is “startlingly beautiful,” but one of the issues that does come up is the rather bleak fictional world. Buchanan does employ an interesting alternating first and third person perspectives that are set decades apart. This technique provides the novel with a measure of momentum because we’re left wondering how these two perspectives are connected. The third person perspective is given to Yuki Oyama, and we see the challenge of her growing up in New York City. It’s pretty clear that she’s desperate to retain her American identity, so much so that she makes a tentative friendship with a fellow teen named Odile. This friendship provides her with an opportunity to stay in New York City, especially when her father and mother move back to Japan. Indeed, Odile, and her mother Lillian, offer her the opportunity to live with them. Of course, Yuki has to adapt to this very different lifestyle, which includes having to witness the physical abuse that occurs between Lillian and her boyfriend, Lou, as well as their distinctly American existence. Yuki’s determination to remain in America leads her to take a post with The Paper, a job that opens up for her through the networking introduction offered by Lou, who is a journalist. Ultimately, we should not be too surprised that Yuki eventually falls in love with Lou, and they engage in their own ill-fated romance.
In the more contemporary first person narration, from the perspective of a mixed-race character named Jay, we are offered a completely different view of an American life. Here, Jay is involved in the art world, working on exhibitions and lining up new, exciting cultural producers. Jay’s life is complicated when his wife Mimi becomes pregnant. His passion for his marriage seems to be waning, which leads him to engage in an affair. At the same time, we begin to discover the connection between the two time periods and the perspectives. Jay is Yuki’s estranged son, and he needs to get a signature from her in order to complete a document-based issue related to his deceased father and Yuki’s former husband. Eventually, and here I’ll be providing spoilers, we discover that Yuki’s relationship with Lou ends, and Yuki finds herself falling into the arms of another man, an architect by the name of Edison. Edison is blindly in love with Yuki and offers to marry her, even though Yuki doesn’t return those feelings. But, Yuki’s in a very difficult position; she’s just been thrown out of Lou’s, her prospects in terms of her career are limited, and she’s still tarrying with a desire to create art that has become ever more important to her. Edison’s offer of marriage seems to be a lifeboat, but we soon begin to see that the marriage that follows constrains Yuki even further. She doesn’t want to be a housewife, she fails to create art, and falls into an incredible depression. Yuki eventually becomes pregnant, and their child is named Jay. Thus, we come to find out the explicit connection between those perspectives.
The conclusion of the novel sees Jay traveling to Germany, where Yuki is now living. This ending is where Buchanan’s work shines the most, because she doesn’t give us the kind of standard rapprochement that we might expect. Instead, there is a subtlety to their interactions that shows us a desire to connect, but also a real understanding that the gulf between them cannot be repaired by one engagement. Also, given the rather distant effect offered by the third person narration for much of the novel, something of Jay’s perspective enables us to see Yuki with a little bit more sympathy by the final pages. So many of the characters seem so incredibly unhappy and frustrated by their lives that we’re desperate for this elegant levity; it’s unfortunate that it comes so late. In some ways, my reading experience is reminiscent of the one I had while reading Jun Yun’s Shelter. Traveling through a fictional world filled with such dreary plots becomes emotionally draining, and you come out of the work exhausted.
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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 Firstborn (Howard Books, 2017).
lesliejfernandez
A Review of Tosca Lee’s Firstborn (Howard Books, 2017).
By Stephen Hong Sohn
So, this installment looks to be the conclusion to Tosca Lee’s series that began with The Progeny, which focused on the descendants of the Countess of Bathory, who is purportedly known to be one of the most prolific serial killers in all recorded history, but Lee is always up for re-imagining big time villains. She’s already done this kind of work in Iscariot and Demon: A Memoir; here, we’re treated to her re-envisioning of Bathory through her oppressed descendants, who are being tracked down and killed by Hunters. On the one side, you have Bathory’s progeny, like our narrator, Audra Ellison. On the other, you have Bathory’s sworn enemies, who are called the Scion. Led by the mysterious figure only known as the Historian, these families are an alternative genealogy that employ Hunters to wipe out the progeny one by one.
Of course, Audra is so-totally not up for being killed, which is why this novel even exists. The end of the first novel ended on a huge cliffhanger, which I will not spoil for you. In any case, this particular novel obviously begins with where the last one left, without actually resolving that cliffhanger. The bigger problem is that Audra’s husband, Luka, has been kidnapped, and Audra must find a way to get to him before he is killed. Fortunately, Audra’s quite powerful and because she is a direct descendant of Bathory, she is marked as the firstborn, someone with extraordinary capabilities that specifically manifest by her ability to persuade people to believe anything that she wants. With help from other progeny, like Jester, the technical expert; Claudia, an older friend; and Piotrek, who is Claudia’s sibling-protector, they are able to rescue Luka and focus on the larger task at hand: to take down the Historian and all the Scions, the associated Hunters, and the entire system that’s been created to kill off Bathory’s descendants. Yes, my friends, there’s a lot for Audra to do.
Lee’s well up to the task of generating the right kind of momentum for this plot-reliant novel. Occasionally, we’re having to mediate the romantic subplot between Luka and Audra, which carries much of the emotional weight of the novel, but I tended to find these sections obstructive and found myself impatient to find out how Audra was going to manage to take down the Historian with so many obstacles ahead of her. The balance between the personal dynamics and the Big Bad seems to be general dilemma of the paranormal romance writer, and I’ll never be the reader that will be easily swayed by the necessity of the romantic element as part of the formula. In any case, I certainly enjoyed reading this novel, but I did wonder about its political dynamic especially in comparison to Lee’s other works. Here, part of Lee’s point, as it seemed to be in Sheba: Rise of Queen, is to show how misogynistic discourses might have played an influence in how we construct myths behind supposedly evil women. This perspective is not to say that Lee is somehow recovering the Countess as some hero, but her fiction always blooms in the space of what is unsaid and offers us imaginative glimpses into these historical lacuna.
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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