Stephen Hong Sohn's Blog, page 37

A Review of Jen Sookfong Lee’s The Conjoined (ECW Press 2016).

Posted by: xiomara

A Review of Jen Sookfong Lee’s The Conjoined (ECW Press 2016).
By Stephen Hong Sohn



I’m trying to catch up on some indie press offerings, especially some of them North of the Canadian border, and I had to pick up Jen Sookfong Lee’s The Conjoined (ECW Press 2016), which had an absolutely can’t-stop-reading plot. Let’s let Barnes & Noble help us out here:

“On a sunny May morning, social worker Jessica Campbell sorts through her mother’s belongings after her recent funeral. In the basement, she makes a shocking discovery — two dead girls curled into the bottom of her mother’s chest freezers. She remembers a pair of foster children who lived with the family in 1988: Casey and Jamie Cheng — troubled, beautiful, and wild teenaged sisters from Vancouver’s Chinatown. After six weeks, they disappeared; social workers, police officers, and Jessica herself assumed they had run away. As Jessica learns more about Casey, Jamie, and their troubled immigrant Chinese parents, she also unearths dark stories about Donna, whom she had always thought of as the perfect mother. The complicated truths she uncovers force her to take stock of own life. Moving between present and past, this riveting novel unflinchingly examines the myth of social heroism and traces the often-hidden fractures that divide our diverse cities.”

When I went over to B&N to extract this marketing description, I noticed that the novel had only received one review and gave the novel *gasp* one star! This reviewer noted that the novel was hard to follow and that the ending was a letdown, while also commenting on what the reviewer thought was an excessive use of profanity. In any case, I couldn’t disagree MORE. I was absolutely riveted by the premise: I wanted to know how the mystery would unfold. The shifting third person is necessary, as readers need more information that any one character possesses. If there is a minor quibble to be made, then it would come from the traditionalist mystery reader. I should now provide a spoiler warning at this point, so turn away now before I ruin some major things. So, as Jessica gets further and further into figuring out what might have happened to Casey and Jamie, it becomes evident that her mother harbored more secrets than Jessica was willing to admit. Here, Lee plays with the subjectivity of third person narration, as that specific entity cannot necessarily access Jessica’s unobstructed mind. If there is a version of an unreliable third, it seems that Lee has employed one here. As Jessica reveals more and more of her memories, her mother evidently harbored significant trauma due to a childhood event in which her fraternal twin had been killed. It is unclear whether or not Jessica’s mother (Donna) may have accidentally or willfully pushed her own brother to his death. Whatever the case, this moment also alters Donna’s relationship with her own mother. As Donna grows up with a shadow of guilt or shame or sense of responsibility toward what happened to her brother, she becomes a foster mother. Taking care of these kids helps Donna assuage her complicated feelings of the past until of course Casey and Jamie show up with all of their psychic and emotional baggage. The novel never conveys whether or not Donna might have killed them, but there is still a suspicion. But like any excellent noir, Lee is turning us elsewhere: to the urban inequalities of Vancouver, the flaws in the foster care system, the impossible expectations given to social workers to affect change. As with any great noir, the mystery cannot be solved because it exists in a larger system of interlocking social inequalities.

Buy the Book Here:

https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-conjoined-jen-sookfong-lee/1124569509

Review Author: Stephen Hong Sohn
Review Editor: Nicholas Clark

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 sohnucr@gmail.com
Nicholas Clark, PhD Student in English, at nclar004@ucr.edu

 

comments

A Review of Jaed Coffin’s Roughhouse Friday (FSG, 2019).

Posted by: xiomara

A Review of Jaed Coffin’s Roughhouse Friday (FSG, 2019).
By Stephen Hong Sohn

Jaed Coffin is the author of a previous memoir (A Chant to Soothe Wild Elephants), which I unfortunately still haven’t read. Sometimes I go backward, and I certainly will after reading Coffin’s Roughhouse Friday (FSG, 2019), a stunning work that concerns masculinity and coming-of-age involving a mixed-race Thai-American. Let’s let the official description over at the MacMillan site give us some context:

“While lifting weights in the Seldon Jackson College gymnasium on a rainy autumn night, Jaed Coffin heard the distinctive whacking sound of sparring boxers down the hall. A year out of college, he had been biding his time as a tutor at a local high school in Sitka, Alaska, without any particular life plan. That evening, Coffin joined a ragtag boxing club. For the first time, he felt like he fit in. Coffin washed up in Alaska after a forty-day solo kayaking journey. Born to an American father and a Thai mother who had met during the Vietnam War, Coffin never felt particularly comfortable growing up in his rural Vermont town. Following his parents’ prickly divorce and a childhood spent drifting between his father’s new white family and his mother’s Thai roots, Coffin didn’t know who he was, much less what path his life should follow. His father’s notions about what it meant to be a man—formed by King Arthur legends and calcified in the military—did nothing to help. After college, he took to the road, working odd jobs and sleeping in his car before heading north. Despite feeling initially terrified, Coffin learns to fight. His coach, Victor ‘the Savage,’ invites him to participate in the monthly Roughhouse Friday competition, where men contend for the title of best boxer in southeast Alaska. With every successive match, Coffin realizes that he isn’t just fighting for the championship belt; he is also learning to confront the anger he feels about a past he never knew how to make sense of. Deeply honest and vulnerable, Roughhouse Friday is a meditation on violence and abandonment, masculinity, and our inescapable longing for love. It suggests that sometimes the truth of what’s inside you comes only if you push yourself to the extreme.”

The description does an admirable job of giving us a sense of the stakes of this memoir, although that last line is far too sentimental, one that doesn’t ring true given the self-reflexivity and rawness of Coffin’s work. Coffin basically grows up in the shadow of his father’s abandonment. The contours of this abandonment are complicated by Coffin’s devout love of him and understanding that there’s something not quite right about the way Coffin and his mother are left behind. Coffin’s ambivalent disposition is what propels this memoir, especially as Coffin tries to carve out a path to become a man beyond the example given to him by his father. The problem is, of course, that Coffin’s father constructs an image of masculinity that is ultimately seductive, one borne out of the pages of Hemingway novels and frontier mythos. To rise up to this kind of man, we are not surprised to see Coffin then set out on a journey that tests his survival skills and his ability to fight in the ring. For all of Coffin’s navel-gazing, the concluding arc left me torn, but I will not provide any spoilers here. Suffice it to say that Coffin does set up a possible next sequence of memoirs, one that will move to yet another continent and place (I don’t know what the author has planned, but it would be a smart bet). Otherwise, this book would pair quite well with a memoir/autobiographical novel like Carlos Bulosan’s America is in the Heart, which traverses some similar terrain, yet penned in distinctly different centuries (as well as other Asian American novels set in Maine such as Mei Mei Evans’s Oil and Water and the recently published Unpassing by Chia-Chia Lin). There is a sobering side plot about indigenous education that reveals the problems of contingent labor and “stopgap” tutoring. You can’t help but wonder what happens to so many of the students that go Coffin’s way. And just a note: Coffin’s prose is particularly beautiful. There are moments where Coffin captures the rugged and austere landscape of the Alaskan wilderness. These times are certain to take your breath away. This year has been an incredible year for the memoir/creative nonfictional works. Roughhouse Friday certainly rises to the very top, alongside the recent publications of T. Kira Madden, Alexander Che, Esme Weijun Wang, and Julie Yip-Williams.

Buy the Book Here:

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374251956

Review Author: Stephen Hong Sohn
Review Editor: Nicholas Clark

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 sohnucr@gmail.com
Nicholas Clark, PhD Student in English, at nclar004@ucr.edu

comments

A Review of Esmé Weijun Wang’s The Collected Schizophrenias (Graywolf 2019).

Posted by: xiomara

A Review of Esmé Weijun Wang’s The Collected Schizophrenias (Graywolf 2019).
By Stephen Hong Sohn



I absolutely ADORED this essay collection. I still don’t know if I understand exactly what the essay is, but it doesn’t matter, so much as this creative nonfiction-type publication is one that really foregrounds the complicated nature of mental illness. We’ll let B&N give us some background information, as per usual:

“An intimate, moving book written with the immediacy and directness of one who still struggles with the effects of mental and chronic illness, The Collected Schizophrenias cuts right to the core. Schizophrenia is not a single unifying diagnosis, and Esmé Weijun Wang writes not just to her fellow members of the ‘collected schizophrenias’ but to those who wish to understand it as well. Opening with the journey toward her diagnosis of schizoaffective disorder, Wang discusses the medical community’s own disagreement about labels and procedures for diagnosing those with mental illness, and then follows an arc that examines the manifestations of schizophrenia in her life. In essays that range from using fashion to presenting as high-functioning to the depths of a rare form of psychosis, and from the failures of the higher education system and the dangers of institutionalization to the complexity of compounding factors such as PTSD and Lyme disease, Wang’s analytical eye, honed as a former lab researcher at Stanford, allows her to balance research with personal narrative. An essay collection of undeniable power, The Collected Schizophrenias dispels misconceptions and provides insight into a condition long misunderstood.”

This description does a great job of giving an overview of the work, which tackles of lot of different topics. The big takeaway from me is that the psychiatric field still has a lot of work to do to diagnose and to medicate those suffering from various forms of schizoaffective disorders. The title is Wang’s nod to the various manifestations that schizoaffective disorder can take and the journey she had to take as a patient to that diagnosis. The problem, as it becomes very clear, with something like schizoaffective disorders is that there is no one proven way to treat such conditions and associated issues. As Wang finds out, she has a form of schizoaffective disorder that is not really treatable via pharmacological methods, so she has to accept the fact that she may face more psychotic episodes. What is so compelling about Wang’s work is that she clarifies what goes on when these psychotic episodes do occur: Wang may realize that she is facing a delusion, but nevertheless cannot be sure. As the boundaries of one’s reality start to evaporate, daily actions become virtually impossible: why live, for instance, if you think you’re already dead, if you truly believe you’re beyond the grave (as occurs when Wang suffers from Cotard’s delusion). Despite the challenges that emanate from schizoaffective disorders, Wang continues to write, and it is clear that this commitment to some form of art is important to any sense of stability she can maintain. An exquisite essay collection, one to read (and to assign) alongside Chee’s How to Write an Autobiographical Novel and T. Kira Madden’s Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls.

Buy the Book Here: https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-collected-schizophrenias-esm-weijun-wang/1130180615

Review Author: Stephen Hong Sohn
Review Editor: Nicholas Clark

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 sohnucr@gmail.com
Nicholas Clark, PhD Student in English, at nclar004@ucr.edu

comments

A Review of Angie Kim’s Miracle Creek (Sarah Crichton Books, 2019).

Posted by: xiomara

A Review of Angie Kim’s Miracle Creek (Sarah Crichton Books, 2019).
By Stephen Hong Sohn

Angie Kim’s Miracle Creek (Sarah Crichton Books, 2019) has been one of my favorite reads so far this year. Let’s let B&N give us some background:

“In rural Virginia, Young and Pak Yoo run an experimental medical treatment device known as the Miracle Submarine—a pressurized oxygen chamber that patients enter for therapeutic ‘dives’ with the hopes of curing issues like autism or infertility. But when the Miracle Submarine mysteriously explodes, killing two people, a dramatic murder trial upends the Yoos’ small community. Who or what caused the explosion? Was it the mother of one of the patients, who claimed to be sick that day but was smoking down by the creek? Or was it Young and Pak themselves, hoping to cash in on a big insurance payment and send their daughter to college? The ensuing trial uncovers unimaginable secrets from that night—trysts in the woods, mysterious notes, child-abuse charges—as well as tense rivalries and alliances among a group of people driven to extraordinary degrees of desperation and sacrifice. Angie Kim’s Miracle Creek is a thoroughly contemporary take on the courtroom drama, drawing on the author’s own life as a Korean immigrant, former trial lawyer, and mother of a real-life ‘submarine’ patient. Both a compelling page-turner and an excavation of identity and the desire for connection, Miracle Creek is a brilliant, empathetic debut from an exciting new voice.”

This description tends to privilege the mystery aspect of the plot, which is certainly critical in driving the novel forward, but Kim’s work, I think, is more of a study in characterization. There are a number of different narrative perspectives. The only first person (that I can remember) is given to Young Yoo at the opening of the novel; the other chapters all alternate between a number of characters: there’s Elizabeth, a mother of an autistic child, Henry; there’s Teresa, who is taking care of her daughter Rosa, who has suffered from some brain damage; there’s Matt, who has been plagued with fertility issues (and who is married to a Korean American named Janine). I’m going to provide a requisite spoiler warning here. Once the explosion occurs, two are killed: Henry and another character, Kitt Kozlowski. A trial ensues with Elizabeth, Henry’s mother, as the ultimate suspect. She apparently had expressed that she wished her son had died, and she was known to be smoking cigarettes near the area where the Miracle Submarine’s oxygen tanks were located. The novel is so successful because Kim uses a very close third person perspective that patiently allows us to get into the minds and perspectives of these various characters. Kim also rarely leaves any character with a flatness, so much so that I was even a little bit skeptical of some late stage revelations, which seem to give one specific character a kind of heroic ethics. I do admit to finding Matt to be a particularly unsympathetic character, who acts with a type of casual thoughtlessness defined by a life of unacknowledged privilege. The novel is ultimately a kind of naturalistic tragedy, so you’re going to have to relegate yourself to a depressing, yet beautifully rendered narrative. Early on in the novel’s history, the original title was Miracle Submarine, which I thought was a more effective title than Miracle Creek, which merely takes the name of the town in which the Yoos reside. Besides this one minor quibble, I certainly recommend you pick up this work!

Buy the Book Here:

https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/miracle-creek-angie-kim/1129535163

Review Author: Stephen Hong Sohn
Review Editor: Nicholas Clark

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 sohnucr@gmail.com
Nicholas Clark, PhD Student in English, at nclar004@ucr.edu

 

 

comments

A Short Review of Nina Revoyr’s The Necessary Hunger and A Student of History (Akashic, 2019).

Posted by: xiomara

A Short Review of Nina Revoyr’s The Necessary Hunger (Akashic, Paperback Reprint, 2019) and Nina Revoyr’s A Student of History (Akashic, 2019).

By Stephen Hong Sohn

I’ll start first with the fact that Akashic made the no-brainer decision to re-publish Nina Revoyr’s The Necessary Hunger (Akashic, Paperback Reprint, 2019), which had fallen out of print for some time. I’ll give myself a shoutout to note that I did write briefly on this novel in my book Inscrutable Belongings: Queer Asian North American Fiction (Stanford University Press, 2018) as a set up to my longer reading of Wingshooters. Revoyr’s The Necessary Hunger is absolutely pioneering: it may be the first work by an out, queer Asian American writer to be published out of a major press AND for that work to include a major queer Asian American lesbian courtship plot. The interracial dynamics and high school sporting plot all make for an engaging work, one well worthy of retaining in print forever! But the main event of this review of Nina Revoyr’s A Student of History (Akashic, 2019). I believe A Student of History is Revoyr’s sixth publication! WOW (after The Necessary Hunger, Southland, The Age of Dreaming, Wingshooters, and Lost Canyon). I’ve always preferred Revoyr’s use of the first person. I still remember which novels that she uses first person in and which she does not. I wasn’t as big of a fan of Lost Canyon, her previous publication, just because it was in the third person, HAHA. In any case, A Student of History moves back into the first person. What I love about Revoyr’s use of the first person is that she makes the most of the subjective myopia (for lack of a better term) that comes with this kind of narrative perspective. There’s only so much one can know, and the limits to this knowledge are often what move the narrative forward. In any case, so let’s give some background information as per B&N:

“Rick Nagano is a graduate student in the history department at USC, struggling to make rent on his South Los Angeles apartment near the neighborhood where his family once lived. When he lands a job as a research assistant for the elderly Mrs. W--, the heir to an oil fortune, he sees it at first simply as a source of extra cash. But as he grows closer to the iconoclastic, charming, and feisty Mrs. W--, he gets drawn into a world of privilege and wealth far different from his racially mixed, blue-collar beginnings. Putting aside his half-finished dissertation, Rick sets up office in Mrs. W--'s grand Bel Air mansion and begins to transcribe her journals--which document an old Los Angeles not described in his history books. He also accompanies Mrs. W-- to venues frequented by the descendants of the land and oil barons who built the city. One evening, at an event, he meets Fiona Morgan--the elegant scion of an old steel family--who takes an interest in his studies. Irresistibly drawn to Fiona, he agrees to help her with a project of questionable merit in the hopes he'll win her favor. A Student of History explores both the beginnings of Los Angeles and the present-day dynamics of race and class. It offers a window into the usually hidden world of high society, and the influence of historic families on current events. Like Great Expectations and The Great Gatsby, it features, in Rick Nagano, a young man of modest means who is navigating a world where he doesn't belong.”

It’s interesting because I didn’t really see The Great Gatsby intertext as much as The Great Expectations one. For instance, Fiona Morgan is obviously the Estella figure. If only Rick knew that, he’d know to stay away, but that’s probably offering too many spoilers. By way of a quick digression: I actually wrote only half of this review after reading the novel, so I’m now returning to it after a two-month layoff, so my impressions have faded a bit. In any case, The Great Gatsby references also makes some sense because Rick’s work with Mrs. W-- moves him into the world of Los Angeles’s rich and powerful. In some sense, he is the outsider, so he observes from a positionality that is reminiscent of Nick Carraway in that novel. Still, I’d position Rick as the clear protagonist of this work. Revoyr also weaves in an interesting subplot/ issue related to Rick’s doctoral work. As he gets further enmeshed in the rarefied world of Mrs. W-- and her elite counterparts, Rick realizes that Mrs. W--’s private past might be the subject of some unique archival work. He doesn’t let Mrs. W-- into these intentions, though Rick’s dissertation advisor seems well on board with it. My biggest critique, an obviously minor one, was the depiction of this dissertation advisor, who seemed rather overly enthusiastic about this kind of research, and I wondered about the ethics of some of her advice. In any case, Revoyr’s use of the first person is always on point; you’re immediately aligned with Rick’s perspective, and you want to know how things will turn out. You want him to somehow triumph in this world of the elite, even as you know things are hurtling toward some ignominious finish. Finally, I’d just like to commend Revoyr as being one of the best “regional” writers in Los Angeles. Every single work of hers has either been set or partially set in Los Angeles, and yet each novel has taken the city from a different angle and plumbs those depths.

Buy the Books Here:

https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/a-student-of-history-nina-revoyr/1128402260#/

https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-necessary-hunger-nina-revoyr/1002110495?type=eBook#/

Review Author: Stephen Hong Sohn
Review Editor: Nicholas Clark

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 sohnucr@gmail.com
Nicholas Clark, PhD Student in English, at nclar004@ucr.edu

comments

A Review of Vivek Shraya’s Death Threat (Arsenal Pulp, 2019)

Posted by: xiomara

A Review of Vivek Shraya’s Death Threat (Arsenal Pulp, 2019).
By Stephen Hong Sohn



So, I’ve been a fan of Vivek Shraya’s work for awhile, having reviewed a couple of previous publications. I was totally enthused to see that he’d come out with a collaborative graphic narrative. I use the phrase collaborative because Shraya’s written this work, but it is illustrated by Ness Lee and it’s colored by two other artists. Let’s let the official page over at Arsenal Pulp provide us with a pithy description:

“In the fall of 2017, the acclaimed writer and musician Vivek Shraya began receiving vivid and disturbing transphobic hate mail from a stranger. Celebrated artist Ness Lee brings these letters and Shraya's responses to them to startling life in Death Threat, a comic book that, by its existence, becomes a compelling act of resistance. Using satire and surrealism, Death Threat is an unflinching portrayal of violent harassment from the perspective of both the perpetrator and the target, illustrating the dangers of online accessibility, and the ease with which vitriolic hatred can be spread digitally.”

I thought long about Shraya’s choice of title because the death threat is something that creates a terrain of ominous uncertainty. Indeed, the transphobic hate mail that Shraya received was a form of a death: that is, the message that Shraya continually received was that she was not female and that she should engage in a kind of curative ritual to return her to her supposed true state of being male. In this sense, the author of that message was advocating for a form of death: Shraya would not be able to claim her gender identity and lose a part of herself in the process. Naturally, Shraya is disturbed by this message to the point where she decides she has to write about it; she approaches Ness Lee, the artist of the collection, to produce the graphic narrative. In this way, Death Threat has a meta-narrative component, as readers get a chance to see the difficulties of putting the work together. One of Shraya’s major points in this process is to see how the artistic production does something else, transforms something like hate into a productive aesthetic object. The compelling ending sequence repeats an earlier set of panels, while providing readers with an open-ended conclusion, suggesting that the metamorphosis was not about returning to a “true” or biological notion of sex but rather to engage the process of this transphobia and turn it on its head, to remake it anew, and in the process, assert the right to define one’s own gender identity. In this sense, Shraya’s work speaks powerfully in this moment of continued violence toward what is considered the non-normative, strange, and ultimately queer. We have a long way to go but we can appreciate works such as Death Threat as a vigilant response and an inspiring engagement with the brutalities of hatred. Of course, I would be remiss if I didn’t also discuss Ness Lee’s stunning panels, many of which have a speculative component to them, certainly inspired by a kind of spiritual ambience. Lee’s character avatars are malleable, giving someone like Shraya a flexibility that enhances themes such as gender fluidity, trans discourses, and boundary breaking, that are all part and parcel of this work. The colors are also vibrant and spark off the page. Death Threat is certainly a wonderful graphic narrative, especially one that will pair well with something like Elisha Lim’s 100 Crushes, which unfortunately already looks like is out of print, and Mariko and Jillian Tamaki’s Skim!

Buy the Book Here:

https://arsenalpulp.com/Books/D/Death-Threat

Review Author: Stephen Hong Sohn
Review Editor: Xiomara Forbez
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 sohnucr@gmail.com
Xiomara Forbez, PhD Candidate in Critical Dance Studies, at xforb001@ucr.edu

comments

A Review of Maura Milan’s Ignite the Stars (Albert Whitman, 2018)

Posted by: xiomara

A Review of Maura Milan’s Ignite the Stars (Albert Whitman, 2018).
By Stephen Hong Sohn

First off, I just wanted to state that I had such a fun reading experience with Maura Milan’s Ignite the Stars (Albert Whitman, 2018). Let’s let the official page over at Albert Whitman give us some appropriate context:

“Everyone in the universe knows his name. Everyone in the universe fears him. But no one realizes that notorious outlaw Ia Cōcha is a seventeen-year-old girl. A criminal mastermind and unrivaled pilot, Ia has spent her life terrorizing the Olympus Commonwealth, the imperialist nation that destroyed her home. When the Commonwealth captures her and her true identity is exposed, they see Ia’s age and talent as an opportunity: by forcing her to serve them, they will prove that no one is beyond their control. Soon, Ia is trapped at the Commonwealth’s military academy, desperately plotting her escape. But new acquaintances—including Brinn, a seemingly average student with a closely-held secret, and their charming Flight Master, Knives—cause Ia to question her own alliances. Can she find a way to escape the Commonwealth’s clutches before these bonds deepen? In this exhilarating edge-of-your-seat sci-fi adventure—perfect for fans of The Lunar Chronicles—debut author Maura Milan introduces our world to a thrilling new heroine.”

I haven’t read The Lunar Chronicles, so my points of references are related to narratives that verge on the space opera, ones filled with battle sequences and skirmishes in space. Readers will enjoy this book if they’ve ever really dug anything like Battlestar Galactica or Star Trek. I especially appreciated the strong political dynamics of the fictional world, and here I’ll provide my requisite spoiler warning: Brinn is part of a group called the Tawnies, who are essentially intergalactic refugees. Brinn is in the closet about her status as a Tawny and doesn’t let anyone else know at the Commonwealth military academy that she’s really got blue hair, a signature trait of that group. Knives, on the other hand, is someone who is quite ambivalent about his role in the military, especially after his sister dies in combat. Ia, on the other hand, has her hands full: how the hell is she going to get out of the military academy when it is essentially a fortress? What I thought was especially inventive about the novel was the twists in the plot that enabled all three characters to achieve quite a bit of character development. Ia’s evolution, in particular, was surprising to me. Usually, I have a sixth sense about where young adult fictions are moving, but I didn’t suspect where her particular plot was going to end up, and it sets up a very intriguing second book in this series (not sure if there will be an actual third). As with most of these books, I tend to find the romance plots distracting, but Milan does an excellent job of weaving in the “will they or won’t they” push-and-pull occurring between Ia and Knives, on the one hand, and Brinn’s search for inclusion, on the other. Finally, Milan’s true success is her sophisticated rendering of war, one that complicates the line between allies and enemies, heroes and villains. You’re never quite sure what side is best, which is perhaps the point.

Buy the Book Here:

https://www.albertwhitman.com/book/ignite-the-stars/

Review Author: Stephen Hong Sohn
Review Editor: Xiomara Forbez

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 sohnucr@gmail.com
Xiomara Forbez, PhD Candidate in Critical Dance Studies, at xforb001@ucr.edu

comments

A Review of Malaka Gharib’s I Was Their American Dream (Clarkson Potter, 2019)

Posted by: xiomara

A Review of Malaka Gharib’s I Was Their American Dream (Clarkson Potter, 2019).
By Stephen Hong Sohn

So, I wanted to pick something up that I could read over the course of one night instead of a couple of nights. In these circumstances, I often turn to graphic narratives. In this case, I read Malaka Gharib’s I Was Their American Dream (Clarkson Potter, 2019), which is an absolutely wonderful debut. I’m still going to start off with a major gripe: publication gods!? Why do you choose so often to NOT paginate graphic narratives?  Your educators would love to be able to teach such spirited, animated debuts, but alas, the lack of page numbers would make this work absolutely challenging to teach. Now that I’ve given you my one major gripe, let’s let B&N take it from here:

 “I Was Their American Dream is at once a coming-of-age story and a reminder of the thousands of immigrants who come to America in search for a better life for themselves and their children. The daughter of parents with unfulfilled dreams themselves, Malaka navigated her childhood chasing her parents' ideals, learning to code-switch between her family's Filipino and Egyptian customs, adapting to white culture to fit in, crushing on skater boys, and trying to understand the tension between holding onto cultural values and trying to be an all-American kid. Malaka Gharib's triumphant graphic memoir brings to life her teenage antics and illuminates earnest questions about identity and culture, while providing thoughtful insight into the lives of modern immigrants and the generation of millennial children they raised. Malaka's story is a heartfelt tribute to the American immigrants who have invested their future in the promise of the American dream.”

What I especially adored about this work was Gharib’s attentive and nuanced account of the asymmetries of a multicultural upbringing. Gharib’s not just Egyptian Filipino American but she also grows up in Cerritos, a city well known for its diversity. At one point, Gharib discusses going to Cerritos High School, which is coincidentally the place where I would go to for Korean school on Saturdays! What I can remember was the campus had a lot of gum stuck to the cement. But I digress! So Gharib’s mother is Filipina, while Gharib’s father is Egyptian. They get a divorce when Gharib is fairly young, and her mother soon remarries. Her father eventually moves back to Egypt. Gharib grows up with the direct influence of her Filipino extended family around her for about 9 months of year; she would go on to spend most summers in Egypt. Gharib spends much of her time ruminating on her interest in white/American culture, revealing what David L. Eng and Shinhee Han would call a form of “racial melancholia.” Over time, Gharib becomes much more aware of these inclinations, and this memoir’s reflective tonality is certainly what makes it so rich. One stylistic choice I found fascinating was how Gharib chose to render (at least generally so) her Filipino/a/x characters; they often boasted red hair! I sometimes teach a graphic novel course, where I ask the very pointed question: how can you be SURE that a character is actually Asian? This question brings into relief the stereotypical understandings we might hold when it comes to representation, and I love that Gharib dispels with some of the more traditional forms of depicting characters of Asian backgrounds. Gharib’s graphic novel can definitely be paired with the growing numbers of this form penned by Asian American writers, a group that includes Belle Yang’s Forget Sorrow, G.B. Tran’s Vietnamerica, and Thi Bui’s The Best We Could Do.

Buy the Book Here:

https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/i-was-their-american-dream-malaka-gharib/1128997057#/

Review Author: Stephen Hong Sohn
Review Editor: Xiomara Forbez

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 sohnucr@gmail.com
Xiomara Forbez, PhD Candidate in Critical Dance Studies, at xforb001@ucr.edu

comments

A Review of Grace Talusan’s The Body Papers (Restless Books, 2019)

Posted by: xiomara

A Review of Grace Talusan’s The Body Papers (Restless Books, 2019).
By Stephen Hong Sohn



Wow, this memoir/essay collection, Grace Talusan’s debut The Body Papers (Restless Books, 2019), is yet another one to add to what has been an extraordinary year in this genre. We’ll let B&N give us some context as per usual:

“Born in the Philippines, young Grace Talusan moves with her family to a New England suburb in the 1970s. At school, she confronts racism as one of the few kids with a brown face. At home, the confusion is worse: her grandfather’s nightly visits to her room leave her hurt and terrified, and she learns to build a protective wall of silence that maps onto the larger silence practiced by her Catholic Filipino family. Talusan learns as a teenager that her family’s legal status in the country has always hung by a thread—for a time, they were ‘illegal.’ Family, she’s told, must be put first. The abuse and trauma Talusan suffers as a child affects all her relationships, her mental health, and her relationship with her own body. Later, she learns that her family history is threaded with violence and abuse. And she discovers another devastating family thread: cancer. In her thirties, Talusan must decide whether to undergo preventive surgeries to remove her breasts and ovaries. Despite all this, she finds love, and success as a teacher. On a fellowship, Talusan and her husband return to the Philippines, where she revisits her family’s ancestral home and tries to reclaim a lost piece of herself. Not every family legacy is destructive. From her parents, Talusan has learned to tell stories in order to continue. The generosity of spirit and literary acuity of this debut memoir are a testament to her determination and resilience. In excavating and documenting such abuse and trauma, Talusan gives voice to unspeakable experience, and shines a light of hope into the darkness.”

This description does QUITE a bit of work for me here, so I don’t have to do much recounting of the memoir. What it doesn’t articulate is that the structure of the work is much like an essay collection in that the memoir doesn’t necessarily move in one direction. Each chapter is often topical. The memoir opens with a number of essays that deal with Talusan’s complicated relationship with her Filipino/a identity, the fact that she maintains an American privilege while in the Philippines, even as she so strongly identifies with her ethnic heritage. Her experiences in the Philippines are instructive: she inhabits the space in a different way. For instance, she finds it terrifying to cross streets, as so many drivers seem particularly aggressive. As the memoir moves forward, it does tackle the grave topic of sexual abuse. The weight and heft of the work changes dramatically at this point, precisely because Talusan is moving across many years of trauma. This process of working through is obviously painful but enables Talusan a chance to bring light to the complex dynamics of the Filipino/a American family. Eventually, it is evident that Talusan’s parents understand how important it is to support her, even if it means another kind of rupture in relation to the larger extended family. For Talusan, the site of the body is the site not only of identity, but of conflict, trauma, and ultimately reconstitution. I appreciated the thoughtful, incisive tonality throughout, and the work will no doubt receive attention through course adoptions and scholarly analysis.

Buy the Book Here: https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-body-papers-grace-talusan/1128996904

Review Author: Stephen Hong Sohn
Review Editor: Xiomara Forbez

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 sohnucr@gmail.com
Xiomara Forbez, PhD Candidate in Critical Dance Studies, at xforb001@ucr.edu

comments

A Review of Catherine Chung’s The Tenth Muse (Ecco, 2019).

Posted by: xiomara

A Review of Catherine Chung’s The Tenth Muse (Ecco, 2019)
By Stephen Hong Sohn

I’ve been spending a lot of nights in hospitals lately, doing the thing of eldercare work. One of the fortunate by-products of this time is more chances to read, especially later at evening when I’ve hit an insomnia snag. Thankfully, I have books like Catherine Chung’s The Tenth Muse (Ecco, 2019) to keep me company. For those of you not familiar with Chung’s work, you should immediately read this novel and her prior publication, the critically overlooked Forgotten Country. Chung’s at her first person best in this particular narrative, giving us an absolutely immersive perspective with an indelible character whose background is unlike perhaps any other we’ve seen in fiction before. We’ll let B&N take it away from here:

“An exhilarating, moving novel about a trailblazing mathematician whose research unearths her own extraordinary family story and its roots in World War II From the days of her childhood in the 1950s Midwest, Katherine knows she is different, and that her parents are not who they seem. As she matures from a girl of rare intelligence into an exceptional mathematician, traveling to Europe to further her studies, she must face the most human of problems—who is she? What is the cost of love, and what is the cost of ambition? These questions grow ever more entangled as Katherine strives to take her place in the world of higher mathematics and becomes involved with a brilliant and charismatic professor. When she embarks on a quest to conquer the Riemann hypothesis, the greatest unsolved mathematical problem of her time, she turns to a theorem with a mysterious history that may hold both the lock and the key to her identity, and to secrets long buried during World War II. Forced to confront some of the most consequential events of the twentieth century and rethink everything she knows of herself, she finds kinship in the stories of the women who came before her, and discovers how seemingly distant stories, lives, and ideas are inextricably linked to her own. The Tenth Muse is a gorgeous, sweeping tale about legacy, identity, and the beautiful ways the mind can make us free.”

The most compelling thing about this particular novel is the protagonist-narrator and her life as a mathematics scholar. Chung gives her a very elaborate backstory, which ultimately takes this character to Europe seeking out her complicated parentage, but the foundation of this novel is always the grit and visionary attitude that Katherine possesses as an independent minded and brilliant mathematics thinker and theorist. I’ll provide some requisite spoiler warnings here, as I’m going to discuss some of the major plot reveals concerning her ancestry. Readers discover about halfway through the novel that her adoptive parents were never even an actual couple. Her adoptive mother, we find out, was a comfort woman, and was brought into Katherine’s life due to the fact that this woman sought out a potential new start for her life through the chance to mother Katherine. This plan does not end up working, and Katherine is raised by her adoptive father. When Katherine embarks on a career in mathematics in a time when women are not seriously regarded in the field, she also begins to open the door to finding out more about her genealogy. She ends up falling in love with her dissertation advisor, an equally brilliant mathematician named Peter Hall, but as she struggles to carve out her own career, she ends up leaving him for a fellowship in Europe. The time in Europe also enables her to seek out contacts that might hold more clues to her biological parentage. Eventually she discovers that both her parents were aspiring and talented math theorists; her mother is Jewish, while her father (of Chinese descent), due to his romance with Katherine’s mother, is inextricably tangled with the problematic milieu of the World War II period. While the novel is concerned so much with this genealogical background, what sometimes loses some clarity is the incredible talents of Katherine as a career-oriented woman and exceptional scholar. The concluding arc sees Chung choose to compress decades of Katherine’s life, the very decades that I, as a reader, was perhaps most interested in. Despite this one minor quibble, Chung’s feat of imagination must be well applauded: this character is fully realized, multidimensional and certainly one we can be inspired by in these turbulent times.

 Buy the Book Here:

https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-tenth-muse-catherine-chung/1128811666#/

Review Author: Stephen Hong Sohn
Review Editor: Xiomara Forbez

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 sohnucr@gmail.com
Xiomara Forbez, PhD Candidate in Critical Dance Studies, at xforb001@ucr.edu

comments