Stephen Hong Sohn's Blog, page 42

AALF Mega-review for May 7, 2018

Posted by: stephenhongsohn

AALF Mega-review for May 7, 2018

To begin, as per usual, I note that AALF uses maximal ideological inclusiveness (following Colleen Lye’s conception of this term) to define Asian American literature. Thus, we review any writers working in the English language of Asian descent. We also review titles related to Asian American contexts without regard to authorial descent. We also consider titles in translation pending their relationship to America, broadly defined. Our point is precisely to cast the widest net possible.

With apologies as always for any typographical, grammatical, or factual errors. My intent in these reviews is to illuminate the wide-ranging and expansive terrain of Asian American and Asian Anglophone literatures. Please e-mail ssohnucr@gmail.com with any concerns you may have.

In this post, reviews of:

(1) Shobha Rao’s Girls Burn Brighter (Flatiron Books, 2018).

(2) Clarissa Goenawan’s Rainbirds (Soho Press, 2018).

(3) Meika Hashimoto’s The Trail (Scholastic, 2017).

(4) Mary H.K. Choi’s Emergency Contact (Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers, 2018).

(5) An Na’s The Place Between Breaths (Atheneum/Caitlyn Dlouhy Books (March 27, 2018)

(6) Chandra Prasad’s Damselfly (Scholastic Press, 2018)

(7) Flora Ahn’s Pug Pals: Two’s a Crowd (Scholastic Press, 2018).

A Review of Shobha Rao’s Girls Burn Brighter (Flatiron Books, 2018).

Well, this novel is yet another relentlessly depressing, but wonderfully written work. After Shobha Rao’s truly stellar story collection, I had expected much from her debut novel Girls Burn Brighter (Flatiron Books, 2018). Girls Burn Brighter certainly does not disappoint, but it’s also not for the faint of heart. I’ve already read some other reviews that castigate the work for flatness of the male characters and for being melodramatic, but I don’t think these critiques do much to contextualize the fact that Rao isn’t just creating a fictional world. Perhaps, that’s what is so weighty about having to read this work: you realize it’s not entirely imaginary. So let’s let B&N provide us with some background at this point: “Poornima and Savitha have three strikes against them: they are poor, they are ambitious, and they are girls. After her mother’s death, Poornima has very little kindness in her life. She is left to care for her siblings until her father can find her a suitable match. So when Savitha enters their household, Poornima is intrigued by the joyful, independent-minded girl. Suddenly their Indian village doesn't feel quite so claustrophobic, and Poornima begins to imagine a life beyond arranged marriage. But when a devastating act of cruelty drives Savitha away, Poornima leaves behind everything she has ever known to find her friend. Her journey takes her into the darkest corners of India's underworld, on a harrowing cross-continental journey, and eventually to an apartment complex in Seattle. Alternating between the girls’ perspectives as they face ruthless obstacles, Girls Burn Brighter introduces two heroines who never lose the hope that burns within.” The survival instinct that each possesses is certainly the reason why both Poornima and Savitha manage to even make it to the novel’s conclusion. The amount of abuse that each endure is hard to describe. In this way, the novel is not unlike something like Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life, as you see the utter depravity in which these lives are mired. Poornima’s marriage will be more like a prison sentence, and Savitha will find herself in the darkest bowels of human trafficking. There were times I simply had to pause, put the book away and take a break simply because the narrative trajectory only went further down from a position that I already thought was the nadir. For instance, Savitha, believing that her only way out of the brothel is to be sold off to a rich customer with a penchant for amputees, assents to having one of her hands removed. But, she discovers, after this procedure has already been completed, that the customer has changed his mind and that she will not, in fact, be sold to him. This event is one of a long string of occurrences Savitha faces, as she attempts to find some measure of agency in a world dominated by incredibly abusive men. There is a kind of narrative payoff, if we want to put it that profanely, concerning this kind of contextual darkness: we will want so desperately for Savitha and Poornima to find a way back to each other. There must be a kernel of happiness for these two young women, respectively maimed and burned, but somehow retaining their light of resistance. If there is a question concerning the fictional representation, it is this very spirit of survival that each retains, given how much they must endure. So tortuous was this particular issue that I found myself haunted long after the last, very unclosed page. I looked over at the clock, and it read 3:20 a.m., but I didn’t actually fall asleep until 6:30.

Buy the Book Here:

https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/girls-burn-brighter-shobha-rao/1125902419

A Review of Clarissa Goenawan’s Rainbirds (Soho Press, 2018).

So, this title was one that immediately intrigued based upon marketing descriptions. B&N provides with this engaging passage: “Set in an imagined town outside Tokyo, Clarissa Goenawan’s dark, spellbinding literary debut follows a young man’s path to self-discovery in the wake of his sister’s murder. Ren Ishida has nearly completed his graduate degree at Keio University when he receives news of his sister’s violent death. Keiko was stabbed one rainy night on her way home, and there are no leads. Ren heads to Akakawa to conclude his sister’s affairs, failing to understand why she chose to turn her back on the family and Tokyo for this desolate place years ago. But then Ren is offered Keiko’s newly vacant teaching position at a prestigious local cram school and her bizarre former arrangement of free lodging at a wealthy politician’s mansion in exchange for reading to the man’s ailing wife. He accepts both, abandoning Tokyo and his crumbling relationship there in order to better understand his sister’s life and what took place the night of her death. As Ren comes to know the eccentric local figures, from the enigmatic politician who’s boarding him to his fellow teachers and a rebellious, captivating young female student, he delves into his shared childhood with Keiko and what followed. Haunted in his dreams by a young girl who is desperately trying to tell him something, Ren realizes that Keiko Ishida kept many secrets, even from him.” This description does a decent of giving us the basic background of the story. The work is what we might call a “Tokyo-based” noir, as Ren ultimately becomes a kind of unofficial detective. Goenawan absolutely captures the mood of noir: there is a darkness and quirkiness to the fictional world that makes most characters a possible suspect. One of my problems with mysteries though is that I become absolutely consumed by the whodunit aspect of the plot. I was probably too driven by finding out who had killed Keiko, why she was killed, and how Ren was going to track this killer down. And, here, I’m going to offer up my spoiler warning—so, do not read on unless you want to found out what happens—because Goenawan chooses to deny readers with any sort of reveal. The novel thus seems to be a red herring in a way, more of a meditation on Ren’s desire to find meaning in his life in the wake of his sister’s death. It’s well apparent that he’s been in a number of problematic romantic relationships, and the rupture point related to his sister’s exile from his family provides Ren with a stronger sense of why Keiko felt like she could never return home. The minor characters are quite colorful, especially Goenawan’s construction of a Japenese schoolgirl (named Seven Stars), who functions as a Lolita-type figure and who attempts to broker a kind of seduction of Ren (who himself has become a teacher at her high school). The other eccentric figure is Ren’s first landlord, a politician whose wife has become mute. Ren, in a move that seems a little bit morbid, ends up renting the very room his sister once lived in and even takes on a part-time position at the school she was teaching at. Ren’s shadowy relationship with his sister perhaps reaches its apotheosis when readers discover that he also followed his sister’s footsteps in the pursuit of a degree in literature. But this sort of mirroring is ultimately essential because it gives us a very definitive sense of Ren’s incredible sense of melancholy: it was always his sister who had been his protector, so the quest that ensues is one in which he feels, at least at first, that he can mete out justice, especially if the police cannot find her killer. Though the conclusion leaves a little bit to be desired and the plot ultimately stumbles (at least from my perspective and in relation to the whodunit), Goenawan’s certainly talented as a writer; the novel’s immensely readable, intensely atmospheric.

Buy the Book Here:

https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/rainbirds-clarissa-goenawan/1126551443#/

A Review of Meika Hashimoto’s The Trail (Scholastic, 2017).

Meika Hashimoto’s The Trail (Scholastic, 2017) was one that intrigued me because the premised reminded me of some of my most beloved children’s books: E.L. Konigsburg’s The Mixed-Up Files of Ms. Basil E. Frankweiler, Jean Craighead George’s My Side of the Mountain, Gary Paulsen’s Hatchet, and Gertrude Chandler Warner’s The Boxcar Children series. When I was a kid, I was absolutely captivated by these stories of children who endured in the wilds or on their own, in one way or another. We’ll let B&N provide us with some basic contextual information: “Toby has to finish the final thing on The List. It's a list of brave, daring, totally awesome things that he and his best friend, Lucas, planned to do together, and the only item left is to hike the Appalachian Trail. But now Lucas isn't there to do it with him. Toby's determined to hike the trail alone and fulfill their pact, which means dealing with the little things -- the blisters, the heat, the hunger -- and the big things -- the bears, the loneliness, and the memories. When a storm comes, Toby finds himself tangled up in someone else's mess: Two boys desperately need his help. But does Toby have any help to give? The Trail is a remarkable story of physical survival and true friendship, about a boy who's determined to forge his own path -- and to survive.” Hashimoto’s middle grade novel is a spirited account of Toby’s quest, but the problem is that he’s decided to complete the previously mentioned List on his own. You might call Hashimoto’s novel the middle grade version of Cheryl Strayed’s memoir Wild, as they both involve someone on a sort of identity-based journey that takes place on the Appalachian Trail. What is so compelling about these narratives are the built-in challenges. For instance, Toby must make certain campsites and shelters before sundown, while battling the elements. In addition, once he loses his water filter, he must figure out a way to acquire potable water. Fortunately, the popularity of the Appalachian Trail is Toby’s best weapon: there are others he meets along the way that inevitably provide him with support. Perhaps, what is most poignant about Hashimoto’s tale is the fact that people on the Appalachian Trail all have their own personal struggles, a fact that becomes evident as Toby journeys further and onward. For Toby, coming to terms with the loss that imbues his life means understanding that others are facing their own versions of the List. In the interactions that Toby has with others, he is able to find the strength to move beyond the literal things on the List and determine that the value is in the spirit of what his friendship to Lucas meant. In this sense, Hashimoto’s work provides young readers with a wonderful lesson.

Buy the Book Here:

https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-trail-meika-hashimoto/1125409452#/

A Review of Mary H.K. Choi’s Emergency Contact (Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers, 2018).

Work wise, it’s been one of the busiest times of my life! I have mostly been making due with about forty five minutes to an hour of reading time before I fall asleep, so I’m managing to still read two to three new works a week. The latest one I picked off the “to be reviewed” shelf was none other that Mary H.K. Choi’s debut Emergency Contact (Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers, 2018). Let’s let B&N provide us with some basic contexts: “For Penny Lee high school was a total nonevent. Her friends were okay, her grades were fine, and while she somehow managed to land a boyfriend, he doesn’t actually know anything about her. When Penny heads to college in Austin, Texas, to learn how to become a writer, it’s seventy-nine miles and a zillion light years away from everything she can’t wait to leave behind. Sam’s stuck. Literally, figuratively, emotionally, financially. He works at a café and sleeps there too, on a mattress on the floor of an empty storage room upstairs. He knows that this is the god-awful chapter of his life that will serve as inspiration for when he’s a famous movie director but right this second the seventeen bucks in his checking account and his dying laptop are really testing him. When Sam and Penny cross paths it’s less meet-cute and more a collision of unbearable awkwardness. Still, they swap numbers and stay in touch—via text—and soon become digitally inseparable, sharing their deepest anxieties and secret dreams without the humiliating weirdness of having to see each other.” This description is lacking in many ways. First, it doesn’t articulate that Penny is Korean American and has been raised by a single mother who just happens to be very beautiful, so beautiful in fact that men are constantly trying to date her. Penny’s introverted nature thus stands in stark contrast to her vivacious, pulchritudinous, fashion forward mother. The title is a nod to the fact that Penny and Sam have a random encounter in which she literally bumps into him, while he’s in the middle of having something like a panic attack. Fortunately, Penny is able to remain calm and helps get Sam to the emergency room. Despite the fact that they barely know each other at that point, having only been introduced to each other through Penny’s college roomie Jude (who was also once Sam’s step-niece), they forge a very unique text-based friendship as each other’s titular “emergency contacts.” As they begin to grow ever closer to each other, each character wonders whether or not it’s better to move their friendship into the material sphere, with the possibility that they’d interact with each other in the same time and space (rather than only virtually). But there are some complications: Sam has a girlfriend who has returned, and she’s pregnant! Second, Penny’s unsure of how her roomie Jude will react to the fact that Penny’s able to get more of Sam’s attention than Jude is, a problem insofar as Jude is constantly trying to get Sam to meet up with her just to catch up. But Choi’s greatest asset is not anything related to the plot actually: it’s the third person narrative style, which is absolutely rife with wit and acerbic tonality. I was actually quite surprised by this third person narrative voice, one that sometimes departed from the actual characterizations offered on the page. This particular storyteller is one that is able to make this teen romance transcend some of the more conventional aspects of the courtship plot. In any case, one does wonder about the long-term potential of this partnership between Penny and Sam. As Penny and Sam find themselves inexorably drawn to each other, the cynic in me questions their financial viability in the future. But that’s of course going far beyond what’s provided in this specific narrative, so I’ll attempt to rein in these presumptions about some unscripted tomorrow and hope for the best. That’s, after all, what courtship plots are all about…

Buy the Book Here:

https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/emergency-contact-mary-h-k-choi/1126511895#/

A Review of An Na’s The Place Between Breaths (Atheneum/Caitlyn Dlouhy Books (March 27, 2018)

This book has been on my to-read list for quite some time, as I am a big fan of An Na’s young adult novel, A Step from Heaven, a rather searing account of a dysfunctional immigrant family. An Na returns to some similar issues and themes in The Place Between Breaths (Atheneum/Caitlyn Dlouhy Books (2018), though perhaps with a little bit less success. We’ll let B&N provide us with some basics, as per usual: “Sixteen-year-old Grace is in a race against time—and in a race for her life—even if she doesn’t realize it yet...She is smart, responsible, and contending with more than what most teens ever should. Her mother struggled with schizophrenia for years until, one day, she simply disappeared—fleeing in fear that she was going to hurt those she cared about most. Ever since, Grace’s father has worked as a recruiter at one of the leading labs dedicated to studying the disease, trying to lure the world’s top scientists to the faculty to find a cure, hoping against hope it can happen in time to help his wife if she is ever found. But this makes him distant. Consumed.

Grace, in turn, does her part, interning at the lab in the gene sequencing department daring to believe that one day they might make a breakthrough...and one day they do. Grace stumbles upon a string of code that could be the key. But something inside of Grace has started to unravel. Could her discovery just be a cruel side effect of the disease that might be taking hold of her? And can she even tell the difference? Unflinchingly brave, An Na has created a mesmerizing story with twists and turns that reveal jaw-dropping insights into the mind of someone struggling with schizophrenia.” Let me start off with some spoilers, because this kind of novel requires an unreliable narrator, so again, please avoid reading ahead unless you want key plot details revealed. At some point, the reader begins to realize the fact that Grace “has started to unravel,” but these moments occur in such a way as to create a large amount of confusion. At various points, I actually had to read and re-read earlier sections to get a handle on what was going on. To a certain extent, you have to applaud Na for going all the way with her depiction of mental illness, but the experience has some obvious risks, as it ultimately causes the narrative to lose logical coherence. On the one hand, you get why this coherence cannot be sustained, but on the other, the reader is just plain confused. At one point, Grace’s father is alive, then he’s dead. The gap in between one moment and another can be abrupt, so the challenge becomes finding the right balance between verisimilitude and the reader’s sense of equanimity. At some point, it might have been useful for Na to consider another narrative perspective, perhaps a third person that moves us outside the incredibly chaotic world offered up by Grace’s schizophrenic interiority. After having read Mira T. Lee’s Everything Here is Beautiful, which treads the same ground, I would have appreciated the occasional reprieve from the tumult of that undulating interiority. Perhaps, the most intriguing element to this narrative is the laboratory culture. There is a sense of a pecking order and a larger political agenda around specific research teams and their valuable projects. From Grace’s point of view, the concern remains the desire to help find a cure or at least some sort of useful psychopharmacological therapy for those suffering from schizophrenia. But at some point, it becomes quite clear that the hope is not that these laboratory breakthroughs will help someone like Grace’s mother but that Grace herself may be in need of such medical advancements. Na must obviously be applauded for taking on such a difficult topic and presenting it with such aesthetic force, but the reading experience is not for the faint of heart. Expect to be occasionally lost.

Buy the Book here:

https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-place-between-breaths-an-na/1124742612

A Review of Chandra Prasad’s Damselfly (Scholastic Press, 2018)

I haven’t read a book penned by Chandra Prasad since Death of the Circus, published out of the cool indie press Red Hen. She’s also the author of On Borrowed Wings and Breathe the Sky as well as an anthology based upon the creative work of mixed race writers (called Mixed, of course). We’ll start off with the editorial description offered by B&N: “Their survival is in their own hands... Samantha Mishra opens her eyes and discovers she's alone and injured in the thick of a jungle. She has no idea where she is, or what happened to the plane taking her and the rest of the Drake Rosemont fencing team across the Pacific for a tournament. Once Sam connects with her best friend, Mel, and they find the others, they set up shelter and hope for rescue. But as the days pass, the teens realize they're on their own, stranded on an island with a mysterious presence that taunts and threatens them. Soon Sam and her companions discover they need to survive more than the jungle... they need to survive each other. This taut novel, with a setting evocative of Lord of the Flies, is by turns cinematic and intimate, and always thought-provoking.” I’m glad I didn’t read this overview before diving into the novel because I would have been unduly influenced by the comparison to Lord of the Flies. In any case, the description mentions that not everyone from the plane actually survives. Two of the their teammates are found dead; the pilot is also presumed to have been killed, though only parts of his body can be located. The gruesome beginning segues into a survival narrative, as the high schoolers must find a way to live off of the land. Fortunately, Mel has some experience backpacking and camping, and they use her know-how to find food, build shelter, and even make a fire. But internal fissures begin to form between the queen B character and mean girl, Rittika, as well as her posse, which are comprised of her twin brother Rish; Chester,;as well as her b-girl squad comprised of Avery and Betty. On the other side, there’s the heroic Pablo, the withdrawn and artistic Anne Marie and of course Sam and her bestie Mel. Tensions begin to rise when the crew discovers that they are not alone on the island and believe that they may be in danger. The problems get multiplied when Rittika actively attempts to usurp Mel’s leadership, while using her charisma to rally her followers to ostracize Anne Marie. Prasad has got an iron grip on the right tonality for this narrative; you can’t help but finish the work in one sitting. The one gripe I had, at least from my own personal response to the characters, was that I found Rittika’s attitude to be incredibly one-note. I couldn’t help but root against her, and I desperately desired some more complex motivation for her. At one point, she seems to espouse openly supremacist viewpoints, trying to institute the importance of the goldens—that is, those of mixed and racially different backgrounds—over the pales, the white-identified characters. It was very difficult to find any redeeming qualities to her. In any case, the narrative concludes in an extremely unsatisfying manner. After reading the last chapter, I desperately searched online to find out if there was going to be a sequel. Indeed, it became obvious that in the final pages, there would be no way for Prasad to wrap things up, but as of April 10, 2018, there are no listings for another in what could be a longer series. In any case, you’ll be riveted, which is perhaps the important thing.

Buy the Book Here:

https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/damselfly-chandra-prasad/1125912780

A Review of Flora Ahn’s Pug Pals: Two’s a Crowd (Scholastic Press, 2018).

So, this title is one of those works that are aimed for the “middle grade” crowd, which are readers 7-10 years old. I always have difficulty finding many texts penned by Asian American writers for this audience. The tendency is either to write (and illustrate in some cases) for ages below (kindergarten and preschool age) or above (young adult and the teen groups). It was thus a real pleasure to read (and review) Flora Ahn’s Pug Pals: Two’s a Crowd (Scholastic Press, 2018), especially because I love dogs. I always joke that I don’t actually get a dog because I worry that I’ll never interact with any other humans again haha (all time thus being spent with the adorable pooch). In any case, let’s let B&N give us the general overview: “Two pugs. One beloved toy bunny. What could go wrong? Sunny's new little sister, Rosy, is getting her paws into everything. When Rosy takes Sunny's favorite toy, Mr. Bunny, and loses him, Sunny is barking mad. But when Rosy sets off on her own to find and rescue Mr. Bunny, Sunny starts to worry. Rosy's never been outside by herself before. Sunny will have to gather all the canine courage she has and go after them -- before Rosy and Mr. Bunny are both lost fur-ever!” This description does gloss over the fact that the two pugs initially do not get along. Sunny doesn’t want to share her home space with any other pug. So, at first, Sunny acts a little bit distant and cold to Rosy, perhaps secretly hoping she won’t have to share her “humans.” So when Rosy does lose Mr. Bunny, Sunny has yet another reason to wish Rosy wasn’t around. Ahn stages a major plotting pivot once Rosy disappears: Sunny realizes that she’s tasked with overseeing Rosy and must take this responsibility seriously. What I thought was especially ingenious about how this work resolves is that it flips the script between humans and their pets. In this case, it is Rosy and Sunny who come to the rescue of a human, as they realize that Mr. Bunny might be needed by someone else. The rather heartwarming message will be a delight to the young readers it targets, who I can imagine might be perusing this illustrated work right next to their own pooch. On another note, I also really enjoyed the adorable pug cartoons that Ahn uses to help scaffold the story. There’s a way in which Ahn absolutely excels at giving the pug faces an emotional register that perfectly captures a given mood that was being conveyed through the text. The title suggests that Ahn’s work is going to be a series, so we’ll look forward to the next in the Pug Pals series!

Buy the Book Here:

https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/twos-a-crowd-flora-ahn/1126661761

AALF is maintained by a number of professional academics and scholars, including Paul Lai (pylduck@gmail.com), who is the social media liaison, expert, and active reviewer/ poster. Current, active as well previous reviewers have included (but are not necessarily limited to):

Sue J. Kim, Professor, University of Massachusetts, Lowell
Jennifer Ann Ho, Professor, UNC-Chapel Hill
Betsy Huang, Associate Professor, Clark University
Nadeen Kharputly, PhD, UC San Diego, Lecturer, Ethnic Studies
Annabeth Leow, Coterminal MA Student, Stanford University

Kai Hang Cheang, PhD Candidate, UC Riverside

Heejoo Park, PhD Student, UC Riverside

Asian American Literature Fans can also be found on other social networking sites such as:

Goodreads (with a bad heading because it is not Stephen Hong Sohn’s blog):

https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/1612536.Stephen_Hong_Sohn/blog

Twitter:

https://twitter.com/asianamlitfans?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor

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Review of The Interpreter, Edinburgh & When My Name was Keoko

Posted by: eeoopark

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 <The Interpreter>

Suki Kim’s debut novel, The Interpreter (2003), revolves around a murder mystery, but offers much more than that. The novel provides a gripping portrayal of interior lives of 1.5 generation immigrant children, who are prematurely brought into the morally ambiguous adult world as interpreters for their non-English speaking parents. Though narrated in the third person, the novel stays close to the psyche of its protagonist Suzy Park, a 29-year-old Korean American woman. In a perpetual state of mourning, she hides from life by drifting from one temporary job to another, and from one married man, Damian, to another, Michael. All that remains of her past is an anonymous person, who keeps sending a bouquet of white irises on the anniversary of her parent’s death.

Though it was Grace, the older sister, who had always been the family interpreter, Suzy realizes that she is cut out for the job of a freelance Korean interpreter. The limited omniscient narrator observes: “The key is to be invisible. She is the only one in the room who hears the truth, a keeper of secrets.” For a moment, it seems like Suzy, an Ivy League drop out and a self-designated “kept woman” has finally found a comfortable niche. However, she is compelled to become not only a keeper but also an investigator of secrets, when she runs into clients who may be connected to the murder of her parents at their vegetable and fruit store.

Loneliness is an emotion that strongly pervades throughout this novel. Though the jaded characters do not shed tears, it is constantly raining in the boroughs of New York and Long Island. Kim’s careful construction of the quiet but roiling emotional terrain of her protagonist Suzy is what makes this book so compelling for me. Despite the plot connected to unsolved murders and missing persons cases taking its time to pick up the pace, I could not put down the book and had to finish it red-eyed. I read The Interpreter during the summer when my goal was to get introduced to a wider range of Korean American fiction. So, I loved that Kim took a nuanced approach to intergenerational and intra-ethnic conflicts depicted in her work.

https://www.amazon.com/Interpreter-Novel-Suki-Kim/dp/0312422245

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<Edinburgh>

The cover of the reissue edition of Edinburgh by Mariner Books feature blue and red waves painted in rough brush strokes. It is simple, yet mesmerizing. And, when I finally read the lines below, I caught my breath: 

“Not blood spilled, but the essence of blood, the red heat, the transaction of all life. A gas passing from one color to the next, blue to red, even the act of breathing a certain alchemy, sure of itself and its result.”

*Spoiler Alert*

The main character of Alexander Chee’s debut novel, Edinburgh (2002), is Aphias “Fee” Zhe, a twelve-year-old boy whose father is of Korean descent and mother, of Scottish descent. Fee has a gifted voice and thus becomes a lead soprano in a boys’ choir in Maine. However, his sexual awakening coincides with his growing awareness of the choir master Big Eric’s victimization of those under his power. This burdens Fee with guilt that follows him through adulthood. Yet, this is not a coming-of-age story of one boy but many, some who do not live on to tell their stories. Fee and those who persist and survive become keepers of those unspoken words. The narrative voice switches halfway through the novel as if Fee is passing on a legacy, which is dark but tinged with possibility of recovery or intergenerational alliance.

Recently, I have read several novels that deal with child molestation that has catastrophic and reverberating effects on all those who are involved such as Arundhati Roy’s God of Small Things and Lois Ann Yamanaka’s Blu’s Hanging.  This made me contemplate on the jarring contrast created by beautiful prose and controversial content in a work of fiction. As Michael Spinella writes, “if a story about child molestation could ever be beautiful, [Edinburgh] comes very close to that unusual mark.” So, how do we fare as Edinburgh breaks our hearts into little pieces, and later into even tinier pieces? I will not spoil the ending here, but I’ll just say that it left me devastated for a while.

Another element that adds to the lyrical feel of Edinburgh is the recurring image of Lady Tammamo, a fox-spirit created from a blend of East Asian folklore. Chee mixes Japan’s Tamamo no Mae legend with Korea’s legends about Gumiho to create this mysterious figure. He said in an interview, “It was easy for me to imagine [Lady Tammamo] flying through the air and landing on an island off the coast of Korea… She didn’t strike me as the self-destructive type. She struck me as an enormously resourceful character.” Perhaps, it is Fee’s identification with Lady Tammamo, who falls in love with a human, that keeps him from self-destruction and enables him to live on.

https://www.amazon.com/Edinburgh-Alexander-Chee/dp/0544916123/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1523150601&sr=1-1&keywords=edinburgh

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<When My Name was Keoko>

I remember reading Linda Sue Park’s A Single Shard (2001) as a teenager. So, it was nice to pick up one of her books again for a light summer reading. Park is most known for her illustration of premodern Korea in her children’s novels. However, the novel I am about to review, When My Name Was Keoko (2002), deals with a more recent past. In author’s note, Park refers to a passage from Korea’s Place in the Sun by Bruce Cumings that kept haunting her: “In the South [of Korea], one particular decade – that between 1935 and 1945 – is an empty cupboard.” And, it is this “empty cupboard” she fills with voices of her characters.

When My Name Was Keoko alternates between the perspectives of two siblings, Sun-hee and Tae-yul, which lends gravity to the escalating conflict in Korea towards the end of Japan’s colonial rule. A war seen from a child’s point-of-view is not as black and white. Therefore, there are moments of surprising tenderness amidst such pain and sorrow.

Sun-hee is ten-years-old and the youngest member of the family. So, the book begins with her complaining about adults who keep secrets from her. Then, she lays out her plans to cleverly uncover those secrets without being noticed. Meanwhile, Tae-yul, almost eighteen-years-old, struggles between his heart’s desires and his duties as the eldest child and the only son of Abuji (“father”). Although the siblings do not remember a time when Korea (or Chosun) was independent, they bear witness to the most brutal period during 35 years of colonial governance. As the title and the cover image foreshadow, their real names are forcibly replaced by Japanese ones (Kaneyama Keoko and Nobuo), Roses of Sharon are uprooted from gardens, and documents printed in hangul are burned. Their coming of age stories are thus inextricable from the history of colonialism.

The most interesting aspect of this bildungsroman / historical fiction is that Sun-hee’s part is narrated in first-person past while Tae-yul’s is narrated in first-person present. I would probably have to think more about how this choice affects the narrative, but it does give each part a distinct tone. Moreover, the clear divide in the narrative alerts the readers to the harshly demarcated roles that these racialized and gendered Korean children must perform as colonized subjects.

Friendship between Sun-hee and Tomo, the son of a Japanese education officer, also stands out as the emotional center of the book. Park builds this relationship with care, and I believe it would not have been as subtle had the characters been slightly older. Tae-yul, for instance, has a crush on a Korean girl his age but does not pursue his romantic feelings as her father is a chin-il-pa collaborating with the imperial government.

One thing I am curious about is how the targeted audience would interpret this book. I am no longer a teenager. Moreover, I read along with the historical hindsight that the young protagonists do not have and therefore, do not elaborate in the book. For instance, when girls aged sixteen years and older are taken away to supposedly work at factories, I know what will become of their fate though both Sun-hee and Tae-yul never find out. In fact, the story of over 200,000 comfort women was unknown to the world until survivors broke their silence in 1991 to demand an apology. On a more personal level, the stories the author learned from her mother, whose name was Keoko, bear striking resemblance with those I heard from my own grandmother who would have been Sun-hee’s age in 1940s. For that reason, this is one of the works that strikes very close to home. When My Name Was Keoko will be interesting to compare with both children’s/YA and adult fiction that cover similar historical events.

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A Review of James Han Mattson’s The Lost Prayers of Ricky Graves (Little A, 2017).

Posted by: stephenhongsohn

 

A Review of James Han Mattson’s The Lost Prayers of Ricky Graves (Little A, 2017).

I was really excited to review this title, the debut of James Han Mattson, The Lost Prayers of Ricky Graves (Little A, 2017). Target.com gives us this editorial description here: “A heartbroken and humiliated Ricky Graves took the life of a classmate and himself. Five months later, the sleepy community is still in shock and mourning. Ricky’s sister, Alyssa, returns to confront her shattered, withdrawn mother and her guilt over the brother she left adrift. Mark McVitry, the lone survivor of the deadly outburst sparked by his own cruelty, is tormented by visions of Ricky’s vengeful spirit. Ricky’s surrogate older brother, Corky Meeks, grapples with doubts about the fragile boy he tried to protect but may have doomed instead. And Jeremy Little, who inadvertently became Ricky’s long-distance Internet crush despite never having met, seeks to atone for failing to hear his friend’s cries for help. For those closest to the tormented killer, shock and grief have given way to soul searching, as they’re forced to confront their broken dreams, buried desires, and missed opportunities. And in their shared search for meaning and redemption, Ricky’s loved ones find a common purpose: learning to trust their feelings, fighting for real intimacy in a world grown selfish and insincere, and fearlessly embracing all that matters most…before it’s gone from their lives.” The overview gives us only an anemic understanding of the novel’s complicated formal registers. It is told in shifting first person narration: we get turns from Ricky’s sister Alyssa; Ricky’s Man-Date chatting buddy, Jeremy Little; and Ricky’s high school classmates, Claire Chang and Mark McVitry. Narrative discourse is further enriched as Mattson chooses to include verbatim transcripts between Ricky and Jeremy that record what occurred during their Man-Date chats. Further still, Mattson embeds e-mail correspondences between Ricky’s mother and her favorite self-help author, Victoria Gorham. I was actually listening to an interview between Mattson and NPR when I was writing this novel, and I didn’t realize it was actually inspired by the Tyler Clementi incident. This origin point makes a lot of sense because the novel is very much about the fallout that stems from a prank that exposes Ricky’s desperation: he wishes to be recognized as a desiring and desirous queer subject. Mattson’s talents are especially on display when articulating the various ways that Ricky is denied a full subjectivity: not only by society, but by the local small-town culture in which he is enmeshed. Jeremy’s presence becomes only a temporary salve, something that you already know will fail to quell the rising sense of futility that Ricky feels. The novel manages to make perfect sense out of why a teenager like Ricky would commit such a violent act, but at the same time, you can’t help but feeling a little bit depressed by it all. On another level, as soon as I knew that the author identified as queer, I was hoping that we might actually get some queer Asian North American characters in the fictional world. Though Claire Chang is definitely Asian, she’s not written as queer (at least from the general frame of same-sex desire). I am often so hungry for these depictions because they tend to be few and far between, but nevertheless, the novel does an impressive job of rounding out Ricky’s life, even if we don’t get a section from his narrative perspective. Claire’s so-called Asian-ness stands out not only because she’s aware of her social difference, but also because of the small-town ethos that marks so much of the novel as white. Indeed, characters rarely mention anything related to ethnic difference precisely because they don’t have to, a fact that Claire understands all too keenly. In this sense, we can’t be surprised when she is one of the few characters that tries to find a way to get justice for Ricky, even though it could be argued that his act of homicide catastrophically negated any demands he might have retained for adjudication (and sympathy). In this way, her character is one of the more memorable ones, and I found myself returning to her narrative with much alacrity, over and above, say Jeremy Little, who I found to be a character too-filled with privilege, even as he is aware of that status.

 

Buy the Book Here:

 

https://www.amazon.com/Lost-Prayers-Ricky-Graves-Novel/dp/1503942473

 

https://www.target.com/p/lost-prayers-of-ricky-graves-hardcover-james-han-mattson/-/A-52914357

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A Review of Axie Oh’s Rebel Seoul (Tu Books, 2017).

Posted by: stephenhongsohn

A Review of Axie Oh’s Rebel Seoul (Tu Books, 2017).



Well I’ll say right off the bat that Axie Oh’s debut Rebel Seoul (Tu Books, 2017) is immensely readable. I’m not quite sure if there will be a sequel, but we’ll let B&N do some basic work for us, as per usual: “EAST ASIA, 2199. After a great war, the East Pacific is in ruins. In brutal Neo Seoul, where status comes from success in combat, ex-gang member Lee Jaewon is a talented pilot rising in the academy's ranks. Abandoned as a child in the slums of Old Seoul by his rebel father, Jaewon desires only to escape his past. When Jaewon is recruited into the most lucrative weapons development division in Neo Seoul, he is eager to claim his best shot at military glory. But the mission becomes more complicated when he meets Tera, a test subject in the government’s supersoldier project. Tera was trained for one purpose: to pilot one of the lethal God Machines, massive robots for a never-ending war. With secret orders to report on Tera, Jaewon becomes Tera’s partner, earning her reluctant respect. But as respect turns to love, Jaewon begins to question his loyalty to an oppressive regime that creates weapons out of humans. As the project prepares to go public amidst rumors of a rebellion, Jaewon must decide where he stands—as a soldier of the Republic, or a rebel of the people. Pacific Rim meets Korean action dramas in this mind-blowing, New Visions Award-winning science fiction debut.” This description doesn’t relay another crucial facet of the story: Tera is only one of multiple super secret projects that have been developed due to the war contexts that the novel is wrapped up within. The novel is also told from Jaewon’s first person perspective, so we see the events unfold through his eyes. Early on in the novel, Oh does a great job of setting up the stakes of this fictional world. In this highly militarized society, characters want to get the best occupational posts and to do so, they have to engage in dangerous simulation formats. Once Jaewon and some of his classmates end up in their military posts (and after the tragic deaths of one of their classmates), the stakes get a little bit higher precisely because of the supersoldier project. One of Jaewon’s rivals is assigned to Ama, who has telepathic powers. Jaewon, who was previously mentioned as being assigned to Tera, must be able to contain Tera’s fiery personality, a fact that his bosses know will keep his hands full. The element that I perhaps most enjoyed was the world-building that Oh employs when creating a different world order for the future. There are multiple factions struggling to gain power in Neo Soul, including a rebel organization called the United Korean League (UKL). In Oh’s Koreanized future, East Asia has been broken up into various regions; rebel organizations such as the UKL seek to go back to a national model that would restore the country’s unified past. One element that I was more ambivalent about was the twinned romance plots that Oh sets up between the supersoldiers and their male handlers. I’ve always found the romance plot in the YA paranormal fiction to be a bit of distraction, especially because there is already so much else going on. But, as I mentioned at the outset of this review, this work is particularly readable and we’ll hope, especially given all the detail provided in this installment, that Oh’s work is part of a longer series!

Buy the Book Here:

https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/rebel-seoul-axie-oh/1126459279#/

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Asian American Literature Fans – Megareview for December 20, 2017

Posted by: stephenhongsohn

 

Asian American Literature Fans – Megareview for December 20, 2017

 

AALF uses “maximal ideological inclusiveness” to define Asian American literature. Thus, we review any writers working in the English language of Asian descent. We also review titles related to Asian American contexts without regard to authorial descent. We also consider titles in translation pending their relationship to America, broadly defined. Our point is precisely to cast the widest net possible.

With apologies as always for any typographical, grammatical, or factual errors. My intent in these reviews is to illuminate the wide-ranging and expansive terrain of Asian American and Asian Anglophone literatures. Please e-mail ssohnucr@gmail.com with any concerns you may have.

 

Reviews are archived and reposted here:

 

https://www.facebook.com/asianamlitfans/

 

https://www.librarything.com/profile/asianamlitfans

 

In this post, reviews of Rajan Khanna’s Raining Fire (Pyr, 2017); Rachel Khong’s Goodbye, Vitamin (Henry Holt, 2017); Kendare Blake’s One Dark Throne (HarperTeen, 2017); Brian Lee O’Malley’s Snotgirl Vol. 1 (Image Comics, 2017); Ellen Oh’s Spirit Hunters (HarperCollins Children’s Division, 2017); Weike Wang’s Chemistry (Knopf, 2017); Sheba Karim’s That Thing We Call a Heart (HarperTeen, 2017); and Michelle Kuo’s Reading with Patrick: A Teacher, a Student, and a Life-Changing Friendship (Random House, 2017).

 

A Review of Rajan Khanna’s Raining Fire (Pyr, 2017).

 

I was elated to read the final installment in Rajan Khanna’s zombie trilogy. Raining Fire (Pyr, 2017) begins with as much pace as the previous books. We’ll let B&N do some work for us with its editorial description: “Ben Gold, former airship pilot has lost everything: his airship, his friends, and Miranda, the woman he loves. All that he has left is a thirst for revenge, a reckless plan to sate it, and some journal entries from Miranda to help ground him in the chaos. As he spirals out of control, he must survive old friends, new enemies, and of course Ferals, the mindless, violent victims of the global pandemic that shattered the world. Meanwhile, the Cabal, a group of scientists on the floating city of Valhalla, are using the disease as a weapon while the militant Valhallans continue their raiding and destruction across the continent. When raiders from Valhalla massacre a town of innocents, Ben finds a new purpose in doing anything he can to undermine their power. Ben must reunite with old friends and find new ones if he is to succeed. Can he overcome the forces arrayed against him in time to save himself—and maybe the world?” This description leaves out that the first half of the book is essentially a suicide plot: Ben is trying to find the most productive way of leaving that world. It makes sense to a certain extent: the world is infested by what is called The Bug, which turns humans into Ferals. In this period of post-apocalypse (called The Sick), the remaining humans have mostly turned on each other, with the worst of them named in the previous passage. Thus, the first half sees Ben reminiscing about a period of time before his father had turned Feral; he actually has one of his last remaining friends airlift him over to the exact location where his father was infected with The Bug. He’s on a death wish to find his father, perhaps to kill what remains of his father if he can find him (or it), and then kill himself, but once he arrives at the location (which is a Temple), there is a raid going on not far from him. His preservation instincts kick into high gear, and he attempts to save the group. Though he is successful in helping them out, he eventually is captured by slavers, who work for the Valhallans. Ultimately, Ben is freed when there happens to be an assault on the slavers’ location. At this point, Ben receives critical information that gives him a purpose and a final mission. What I have appreciated about Khanna’s work is that he always gives Ben what seems to be an impossible situation that he somehow gets himself out of. In this way, Ben reminds me of a postapocalyptic version of MacGyver. He seems to have nine lives. The concluding sequence might stretch some credulity, as Ben’s many injuries never ultimately slow him down. If there is one minor critique I have of this work, it’s actually something related to the production process. First, Miranda’s journal entries are written in a typescript/ font that I had a problem reading. Second, the font sizing for Ben’s section I also thought were way too small. I guess I am getting old and need reading glasses, but still: I compared the font sizing against other standard sized paperbacks, and I definitely think it could have been increased by a point or two. But, back to the main point: obviously, fans of this series will need to buckle down and sit through the font sizing and cursive scribble. We’ll all be anticipating what Rajan Khanna will be cooking up next!

 

Buy the Book Here:

 

https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/raining-fire-rajan-khanna/1124986408?ean=9781633882737#productInfoTabs

 

 

A Review of Rachel Khong’s Goodbye, Vitamin (Henry Holt, 2017).

 

So, I’d seen this title listed on amazon for awhile. For some reason, the first time I read the title, I thought it said Goodbye, Vietnam.  WHOOPS! The book is nothing related to Vietnam anything. In any case, Rachel Khong’s debut Goodbye, Vitamin (Henry Holt, 2017) is another wonderfully unexpected find for me this year. We’ll let B&N provide us some brief contexts: “Freshly disengaged from her fiancé and feeling that life has not turned out quite the way she planned, thirty-year-old Ruth quits her job, leaves town and arrives at her parents’ home to find that situation more complicated than she'd realized. Her father, a prominent history professor, is losing his memory and is only erratically lucid. Ruth’s mother, meanwhile, is lucidly erratic. But as Ruth's father’s condition intensifies, the comedy in her situation takes hold, gently transforming her all her grief. Told in captivating glimpses and drawn from a deep well of insight, humor, and unexpected tenderness, Goodbye, Vitamin pilots through the loss, love, and absurdity of finding one’s footing in this life.” This description is pretty terrible actually. Ruth’s father is not just losing his memory, he’s suffering from later stage Alzheimer’s disease. Ruth quits her job in order to come home and help take care of him, but the circumstances are not ideal. When Ruth had left for college about a decade earlier, he had begun drinking again. He would later engage in an affair. These events leave Ruth’s mother in a state of fragility; Ruth’s little brother, by this time, has developed hard feelings about his father and doesn’t want much to do with him. But Ruth didn't have to deal with these events, so she goes home with a little bit less to worry about than her other family members. At the same time, Ruth is still nursing a broken heart, which creeps up now and again in her spirited first person narration. What becomes evident, as the novel goes on, is that the diary-like entries offers us a glimpse into another formal impulse: Ruth is trying to capture his father in much the way he used to capture her when she was just a child. She wants to memorialize him in a manner that honors all of his complexity, warts and all. She certainly accomplishes this task, making this novel one that may cause you to shed a tear or two. With its compact length, expect to finish this work in one sitting, and leave a Kleenex box nearby just in case. There will be a moment when you realize: oh, she’s become her father’s caretaker, just as he was once hers. With this reversal of fortune, Khong has us in her capable hands.

 

Buy the Book Here:

 

https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/goodbye-vitamin-rachel-khong/1124568883#productInfoTabs

 

 

A Review of Kendare Blake’s One Dark Throne (HarperTeen, 2017).

 

Kendare Blake’s One Dark Throne is her follow-up to Three Dark Crowns, part of what is now a planned quartet (though originally a duology). It seems as though that the popularity of Blake’s initial installment encouraged the publisher to extend her contract through four books instead of two (much like what happened with Sabaa Tahir’s An Ember in the Ashes). I’m not complaining, even though I’d much rather prefer reading the whole series in one sitting rather than to have to wait one or two years for each new offering. In any case, One Dark Throne continues the major storyline in book 1: there’s a kind of contest going on involving three queens, only one of which can survive to rule the isle of Fennbirn. Once a generation, a set of three girls are born; each individual is born with a specific gift, raised by a specific house or community based upon that gift; then, once these three girls come of age, they are set in a contest to see who is the most powerful and thus most fit to rule. In this case, there is Katharine, who is a poisoner; Arsinoe, who is supposed to be a naturalist; and Mirabella, who is an elementalist. There are other potential gifts, including the war gift and the oracle gift, but oracles are immediately put to death (as they go mad once their gift purportedly starts to develop) and the war gift hasn’t been seen in a possible queen in generations. So, here, I’ll begin to drop some spoilers that I didn’t mention in my review of the first book, hoping that you’d pick it up. So, at the conclusion of the first book, we discover that Arsinoe was never a naturalist, which explains why her gift never developed; she’s actually a poisoner. The conclusion also sees Katharine somehow survive a fall into the pit where queens are often put to death, once they have lost a contest or duel. She’s changed somehow, but it’s unclear how, except for the fact that she’s suddenly way better at her poisoning skills and she’s more assertive than she used to be. Finally, there’s Mirabella, who seems to be the most powerful of the three, but she’s also the one is least intent on bloodshed and sibling-killing until the final events of book 1. As the queens are pitted against each other, we begin to see new alliances form. Mirabella, for instance, comes to find out that Arsinoe did not actually try to kill her using a bear-familiar. Indeed, Mirabella begins to realize that there may be some sort of rapprochement possible with Arsinoe, but Katharine is ever intent on finishing the contest. Katharine’s ambition pushes the plot forward until the three are forced into a variety of events and festivals, in which queen-killing can take place. The success of this series—a huge improvement over what I considered to be the very lackluster Mortal Gods series—is the effective balance between romance and action. This particular installment also improves upon the first because of the subtle mystery concerning Katharine: why is she now being called an “undead” queen and why has her demeanor changed so radically? The novel’s conclusion provides fitting closure to Katharine’s rise, but this Ascension Year (the year in which the new queen defeats the others) is complicated when we discover finally why Katharine is so different. The rather ambivalent conclusion obviously leads a billion open threads left over, leaving Blake plenty to mine for two future installments, but there’s at least one major character death that will cause readers some measure of distress.

 

Buy the Book Here:

 

https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/one-dark-throne-kendare-blake/1125398232

 

A Review of Brian Lee O’Malley’s Snotgirl Vol. 1 (Image Comics, 2017).

 

So, Brian Lee O’Malley’s Snotgirl Vol. 1 is actually a collaborative effort. O’Malley scribes this strange graphic narrative compilation, with Leslie Hung on illustrating efforts (as well as others on coloring duties etc). I use the word strange because I didn’t know what to make of this work. The plot follows the misadventures of Lottie Person, aka Snotgirl. She’s Snotgirl because she has a serious case of allergies; she’s constantly on medication, and she is always producing excessive mucous, which happens to fall out of her nose at the most inopportune moments. Because Lottie is also a fashion blogger—which means she has to worry about the way she looks all the time,—the presence of snot on any of her outfits could certainly lead to her social media downfall. She has to run a tight ship, which requires the help of an assistant as well as constant vigilance over her medical condition. But, when she is prescribed a new medication, things begin to go haywire. When she makes a new friend with someone she calls “Cool Girl,” she’s not quite sure when some bad things happen during a night out on the town. To put things in more detailed perspective: she finds herself in a bathroom stall, covered in snot. What happens after this point is unclear. Her friend may have slipped and fell, or Lottie might have pushed her down, but the end result seems unequivocal: Cool Girl’s dead, with her head cracked and blood bleeding everywhere. Snotgirl hightails it out there, soon suspecting that she will get arrested, but nothing ever happens. Eventually Cool Girl texts her back, and she’s thinking what we’re thinking: what the f*@#? In any case, so it seems as if the medication may be causing some sort of hallucinatory effects, or maybe Cool Girl’s dead and someone is trying to bait her. At around this point, another character is introduced: Detective John Cho (not the actor, just a character with the same name as the actor). John Cho seems to have a little infatuation with Snotgirl, so we’re waiting to see what his particular entry into the narrative will be, but it will probably have to do something with the fact that he knows that Snotgirl has lost some of her allergy pills, some of which were covered in blood the night of Cool Girl’s apparent or not-so-apparent death. In any case, I hadn’t read any of the official editorial overviews of the work before I dove in, so I was constantly surprised at the content and the characterization. One of the problems that I’ve been having more and more lately as a reader is whether or no I am supposed to sympathize or laugh at (perhaps both) a character. I didn’t find Lottie all that compelling as a character; she’s fixated on an ex-boyfriend, is worried more about her image than about the fact that she may have actually killed someone, and she doesn’t seem to have all that much going on with respect to knowing anything about the world around her beyond the resolution of the images that will be used to portray her on her social media platforms. One question always seems to come back at me: what’s the intention of the author/ creator when he/she/they make a construct that may in some ways grate against the audience that s/he/ they risks the reader’s attention? To be sure, one cannot necessarily bend the creative vision to an audience’s whims, but it makes me wonder about target readerships, and as I get further and further into my ripe old age, I am wondering if I am becoming less and less the ideal reader that any author would be writing for. Certainly, O’Malley and company’s production levels are first rate; the artwork is wonderful, but I wasn’t all in on the story or the characterization. I’m willing to give this series another go because I’m not sure what O’Malley’s larger endgame is and there may be a far more elaborate arc to this work, given the idiosyncrasies generated in the first issues. Jury’s still out.

 

For more information Snotgirl, go here:

 

https://imagecomics.com/comics/releases/snotgirl-vol.-1-tp

 

 

 

A Review of Ellen Oh’s Spirit Hunters (HarperCollins Children’s Division, 2017).

 

So, I’m absolutely excited by this new generation of YA writers (that include Paula Yoo, Mike Jung, Lydia Kang, and others), especially the Korean Americans who have recently really made an impact in this area. Ellen Oh is definitely part of this changing of the guard and adds to the pioneering work of writers such as Sook Nyul Choi and Marie G. Lee. She is definitely making a case to be part of this KA young adult pantheon, which most prominently includes Linda Sue Park  (recently of the Wing and Claw series that I have been enjoying) and An Na (who has another YA novel coming out this very year). This particular novel (after Oh’s Prophecy trilogy) follows the adventures of Harper Raine, who we discover has a very special relationship with the dead. Yes, folks, she sees dead people. In any case, let’s let B&N provide us with some context: “We Need Diverse Books founder Ellen Oh returns with Spirit Hunters, a high-stakes middle grade mystery series about Harper Raine, the new seventh grader in town who must face down the dangerous ghosts haunting her younger brother. A riveting ghost story and captivating adventure, this tale will have you guessing at every turn! Harper doesn’t trust her new home from the moment she steps inside, and the rumors are that the Raine family’s new house is haunted. Harper isn’t sure she believes those rumors, until her younger brother, Michael, starts acting strangely. The whole atmosphere gives Harper a sense of déjà vu, but she can’t remember why. She knows that the memories she’s blocking will help make sense of her brother’s behavior and the strange and threatening sensations she feels in this house, but will she be able to put the pieces together in time?” This description is pretty lacking. First off, the whole “We Need Diverse Books” campaign focuses not only on books with protagonists possessing backgrounds not often seen in the YA world, but also on the writers themselves who might hail from backgrounds not too dissimilar form these protagonists. In this case, Ellen Oh as a Korean American writer also happens to create a protagonist who hails from at least a partially similar background, which you wouldn’t really get from this description: Harper’s half-Korean by way of her mother. The centrality of this ancestry is made even more apparent when we discover that her grandmother is a mudang, which is a Korean term for a kind of shaman, who has the ability to challenge malevolent spirits and push them to cross over into the other side. The problem is that Harper’s mother isn’t on good terms with her own mother, so Harper’s ability to tap into this supernatural lineage isn’t even enabled until the concluding arc of the book. The novel’s far darker than I would have imagined for that particular age group, but I was absolutely enthused to see this mixed race protagonist. Indeed, as part of the diverse books initiative, this installment is particularly relevant for my personal life because my niece boasts the exact same biracial background as this particular protagonist. It’s probably the first that I can remember recommending on this level alone. In any case, the story itself is quite compelling, and I sat through it in one sitting. I’m also delighted that this book looks to be a series, as I will definitely want to see where Harper goes next with her abilities. Since she’s such a young character, I can’t imagine her going on ghost hunting type quests, especially given the fact that these spirits can be so harmful, but who knows, I’m sure the author will have some spectral surprises in store for us. Let’s just hope that Oh won’t make us wait too long.

 

 

Buy the Book Here:

 

https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/spirit-hunters-ellen-oh/1124860403#/

 

A Review of Weike Wang’s Chemistry (Knopf, 2017)

 

I absolutely adored this work, but part of the reason is that it fits what I prefer stylistically and pedagogically. The debut novel, Chemistry, by Weike Wang, reads like prose poetry; it’s very succinct and can be taught in the quarter system. The novel requires considerable attention despite its brevity because it’s quite atemporal and the narration, though in a very accessible first person perspective, is still quite opaque. For instance, the narrator doesn’t ever seem to be aware of why anyone would be interested in her; we rarely get a sense of the way she looks, and she tends toward making factual observations over subjective recountings. Her perspective is not surprising given that she’s a PhD student in chemistry. In any case, here’s a description from B&N: “Three years into her graduate studies at a demanding Boston university, the unnamed narrator of this nimbly wry, concise debut finds her one-time love for chemistry is more hypothesis than reality. She's tormented by her failed research--and reminded of her delays by her peers, her advisor, and most of all by her Chinese parents, who have always expected nothing short of excellence from her throughout her life. But there's another, nonscientific question looming: the marriage proposal from her devoted boyfriend, a fellow scientist, whose path through academia has been relatively free of obstacles, and with whom she can't make a life before finding success on her own. Eventually, the pressure mounts so high that she must leave everything she thought she knew about her future, and herself, behind. And for the first time, she's confronted with a question she won't find the answer to in a textbook: What do I really want? Over the next two years, this winningly flawed, disarmingly insightful heroine learns the formulas and equations for a different kind of chemistry--one in which the reactions can't be quantified, measured, and analyzed; one that can be studied only in the mysterious language of the heart. Taking us deep inside her scattered, searching mind, here is a brilliant new literary voice that astutely juxtaposes the elegance of science, the anxieties of finding a place in the world, and the sacrifices made for love and family.” This description reads as more uplifting than what I had experienced as a reader. The novel is quite ambivalent, at least in my opinion, about the possible life paths that the unnamed narrator will go on to follow. To be sure, the “heroine,” as she is called, is a survivor, something best articulated through her repeated references to her psychotherapy sessions. Her biological family, though having very high expectations of her, is still fractured in its own dysfunctional way. There is also a sort of “closet” going on in this work, as she never tells her parents the full extent of her relationship with her obviously white boyfriend. I use the phrase “obviously white” because his racial background is never explicitly marked and only emerges through a kind of comparative absence, rendered through his often disconcerting lack of knowledge concerning Chinese culture and customs. In some sense, it seemed evident from the get-go that this relationship would not stand the test of time: he just did not understand enough about her background and pushed her in ways that made it evident that he didn’t have the kind of sensitivity to nurture her complicated identities (as a woman, as a female scientist, as the daughter of Chinese immigrants). In any case, this narrative is perhaps best understood as a model minority takedown narrative, one that follows a long and rich tradition we have seen in Asian American literature. An editorial description compares this work to Celeste Ng’s Everything I Never Told you. Stylistically and thematically, these works could not be farther from each other (in many ways), but from the standpoint of the model minority problematic, these two novels do very similar, compelling work. One of the elements I ultimately found most fascinating about this novel is the relatively hardheaded, perhaps even deliberately self-occluding way that the narrator fails to understand the interest that she garners from the opposite sex. It’s clear very early on that her two primary male foils are quite interested in her, even as she doesn’t see any of their actions from that perspective. This narrator’s inability to mark this kind of intersubjective connection resonates more largely as a symptom related to the dangers she connects to forms of intimacy, perhaps previously mapped onto her by virtue of her dysfunctional parentage. One doesn’t want to be too psychoanalytical but the novel does introduce such a line of thinking especially given the many times that the narrator herself invokes the process of therapy. An intriguing work; let’s hope that Weike Wang has something already brewing for us soon. This novel counts as one of my best reads of 2017!

 

Buy the Book Here:

 

https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/chemistry-weike-wang/1124690761#productInfoTabs

 

 

A Review of Sheba Karim’s That Thing We Call a Heart (HarperTeen, 2017)

 

I was really excited to see that Sheba Karim has a new YA fiction out, as it’s been many moons since her debut Skunk Girl. I remember being encouraged to read that work when I believe erin Khue ninh wrote about it in her amazing book Ingratitude. Karim’s follow up That Thing We Call a Heart (HarperTeen, 2017) is one of those rarer YA books that do not have a paranormal element and focus more on the experience of ethnic and racial difference, especially as it impacts someone growing up as a teenager. The rather anemic editorial description over at B&N gives us some background: “Shabnam Qureshi is facing a summer of loneliness and boredom until she meets Jamie, who scores her a job at his aunt’s pie shack. Shabnam quickly finds herself in love, while her former best friend, Farah, who Shabnam has begun to reconnect with, finds Jamie worrying. In her quest to figure out who she really is and what she really wants, Shabnam looks for help in an unexpected place—her family, and her father’s beloved Urdu poetry. That Thing We Call a Heart is a funny and fresh story about the importance of love—in all its forms.” I suppose that this description does give us the basics. Most of the novel revolves around Shabnam mooning over Jamie, who, as suspicious readers like me quickly detect, is far too good to be true. He calls Shabnam “morning dew,” while constantly waxing on about how beautiful she is. Cue the virginity sharks circling Shabnam when Jamie begins to make sure there is wine available whenever they are alone together. In any case, the problem with their relationship, besides the fact that Jamie is obviously a don juan in training, is the fact that Shabnam has basically fallen head over heels in love, and their relationship is already conditioned to be temporary. That is, once the summer job at the pie shack is over, Jamie will be heading back to University of Wisconsin where he is an undergraduate student, while Shabnam will be a freshman over at University of Pennsylvania. Perhaps, the most important relationship, then, of this novel is not this ill-destined, obviously flawed romance, but the friendship that Shabnam holds with Farah. Underdeveloped in the novel, at least in my opinion, is exactly why their relationship eroded. Part of the issue here is that Karim restricts herself to Shabnam’s first person perspective, so we don’t get much perspective on Farah’s own desire to distance herself from Shabnam. The root of their estrangement seems to be the fact that Farah has starting wearing a hijab, which marks her as the subject of much curiosity and prejudice. Shabnam’s own internalized racism is apparent in her ambivalent feelings concerning Shabnam and the fact that she can barely handle having to oversee a visit with her great-Uncle who comes into town wearing gasp a turban. We get it: Shabnam is trying to find a way to navigate her Muslim identity (she’s Pakistani American by the way), while also fitting in, being cool, and even finding someone to love her (other than her parents). At the same time, Shabnam’s constant mooning over Jamie may get tiresome for some readers, who long for other more interesting hijinks that Karim includes. One of the more intriguing side plots is Shabnam’s appropriation of the Partition as a trope. That is, she makes up a story about her great-Uncle based upon the traumas of Partition, after her high school teacher asks her if that historical moment impacted her directly. Shabnam, seeking some attention, completely fabricates a tragic background for her great-Uncle, one involving a love-based courtship crossing Muslim-Hindu religious lines. Of course, the scary thing is that the story could be plausible: Shabnam doesn’t know what happened to her great-Uncle during partition because he doesn’t talk about it and her parents have said that they know it’s something quite traumatic. But Shabnam’s appropriation of Partition through her desire to gain a form of capital is an intriguing way by which to consider the more conservative methods that social context can be weaponized, especially in descending Asian American generations. The other random element is LOVED about this novel was the constant references to pastries: I’m a huge fan of pies, so their time at the pie shack cracked me up. Also, the other pastry referenced constantly is donuts, so I was all in for fried pieces of dough. I was constantly in envy of these characters because the donut shop in this particular fictional world sold many kinds with fillings I haven’t had the chance to have. I’m all about donuts with fillings, and I immediately found myself wanting to eat a boston crème donut!

 

Buy the Book Here:

 

http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/that-thing-we-call-a-heart-sheba-karim/1124362285?ean=9780062445704

 

 

A Review of Michelle Kuo’s Reading with Patrick: A Teacher, a Student, and a Life-Changing Friendship (Random House, 2017).

 

I read this memoir right after Rachel Khong’s Goodbye, Vitamin. As in: I read both of these books in the same day. This feat has rarely happened, but it’s a habit I picked up when I was studying for my MA exam. Sometimes, I find myself either unable to sleep or so engrossed in the process of reading that I won’t want to sleep. In any case, these fits are best timed with the summer schedule, after excessively long days attempting to retain my interest in copy editing. But I digress! Here are some contexts for you via B&N: “A memoir of race, inequality, and the power of literature told through the life-changing friendship between an idealistic young teacher and her gifted student, jailed for murder in the Mississippi Delta Recently graduated from Harvard University, Michelle Kuo arrived in the rural town of Helena, Arkansas, as a Teach for America volunteer, bursting with optimism and drive. But she soon encountered the jarring realities of life in one of the poorest counties in America, still disabled by the legacy of slavery and Jim Crow. In this stirring memoir, Kuo, the child of Taiwanese immigrants, shares the story of her complicated but rewarding mentorship of one student, Patrick Browning, and his remarkable literary and personal awakening. Convinced she can make a difference in the lives of her teenaged students, Michelle Kuo puts her heart into her work, using quiet reading time and guided writing to foster a sense of self in students left behind by a broken school system. Though Michelle loses some students to truancy and even gun violence, she is inspired by some such as Patrick. Fifteen and in the eighth grade, Patrick begins to thrive under Michelle’s exacting attention. However, after two years of teaching, Michelle feels pressure from her parents and the draw of opportunities outside the Delta and leaves Arkansas to attend law school. Then, on the eve of her law-school graduation, Michelle learns that Patrick has been jailed for murder. Feeling that she left the Delta prematurely and determined to fix her mistake, Michelle returns to Helena and resumes Patrick’s education—even as he sits in a jail cell awaiting trial. Every day for the next seven months they pore over classic novels, poems, and works of history. Little by little, Patrick grows into a confident, expressive writer and a dedicated reader galvanized by the works of Frederick Douglass, James Baldwin, Walt Whitman, W. S. Merwin, and others. In her time reading with Patrick, Michelle is herself transformed, contending with the legacy of racism and the questions of what constitutes a ‘good’ life and what the privileged owe to those with bleaker prospects.” This summary is pretty comprehensive. One of the impressions that left me a little bit uncomfortable and one that Kuo herself admits to is the rather radical gulf between herself and her students. As Kuo ascends to greater and greater heights, which includes the notable fact that she gets her law degree from Harvard, the trajectory of her students does not and cannot mirror her own. While the memoir ends on a somewhat optimistic note, the bigger question it leaves with is the power and efficacy of forms of what we might call “triage” teaching. It’s apparent that Kuo’s position, for instance, is not only necessary but quite crucial to the future success of her many at-risk students, but funding is soon pulled from the program. Any possible in-roads her successor might have made in a similar position are completely destroyed. The memoir leaves one wondering had the program that Kuo been a part of continued onward, perhaps there would have been stronger trajectories for these students. Kuo herself wonders about this possibility amid the many hours she spends in the jailhouse, giving Patrick homework and hoping that it’s not too late for him to turn his life around. The memoir also gives any educators pause about the impact that they can make in the classroom. It’s a question I often wonder, especially because so many of us are inspired by the Civil Rights discourse that it leads us to write dissertations with issues of social justice in mind. Certainly, an intriguing work to consider as part of a meta-pedagogical issue and one that I can see will be adopted in future courses for what will sure to be vibrant classroom discussions.

 

Buy the Book Here:

 

https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/reading-with-patrick-michelle-kuo/1125196979

 

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Asian American Literature Fans – Megareview for September 28, 2017

Posted by: stephenhongsohn

 

Asian American Literature Fans – Megareview for September 28, 2017

 

School is back in session, which means we’re all going to be reading, at least for our classes, right? In this post, reviews of:

(1)  Patty Yumi Cottrell’s Sorry to Disrupt the Peace (McSweeney’s, 2017).

(2)  David Mas Masumoto (with Nikiko Masumoto)’s Changing Season: A Father, A Daughter, A Family Farm (Heyday Books, 2016).

(3)  Omar El Akkad’s American War (Knopf, 2017).

(4)  Yiyun Li’s Dear Friend, From My Life I write to You in Your Life (Random House, 2017).

(5)  Sherman Alexie’s You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me: A Memoir (Little, Brown and Company, 2017)

(6)  Joy Kogawa’s Gently Toward Nagasaki: A Spiritual Pilgrimage, An Exploration Both Communal and Intensely Personal (Caitlin Press, Inc., 2017).

(7)  Tarun Shanker and Kelly Zekas’s These Ruthless Deeds (Swoon Reads, 2017).

(8)  Riley Redgate’s Noteworthy (Harry N. Abrams, 2017).

(9)  Jomny Sun’s Everyone's a Aliebn When Ur a Aliebn Too: A Book (Harper Perennial, 2017).

(10)                 Ausma Zehanat Khan’s Among the Ruins (St. Martin’s, 2017).

 

 

A Review of Patty Yumi Cottrell’s Sorry to Disrupt the Peace (McSweeney’s, 2017).

What a quirky, melancholic debut novel we have from Patty Yumi Cottrell, which is titled Sorry to Disrupt the Peace (McSweeney’s, 2017). We’ll let B&N do some work for us as per usual: “Helen Moran is thirty-two years old, single, childless, college-educated, and partially employed as a guardian of troubled young people in New York. She’s accepting a delivery from IKEA in her shared studio apartment when her uncle calls to break the news: Helen’s adoptive brother is dead. According to the internet, there are six possible reasons why her brother might have killed himself. But Helen knows better: she knows that six reasons is only shorthand for the abyss. Helen also knows that she alone is qualified to launch a serious investigation into his death, so she purchases a one-way ticket to Milwaukee. There, as she searches her childhood home and attempts to uncover why someone would choose to die, she will face her estranged family, her brother’s few friends, and the overzealous grief counselor, Chad Lambo; she may also discover what it truly means to be alive.” I think the element that will strike me as the most complicated issue that the novel brings up is actually related to narrative tone: I couldn’t always make sense of the narrator and protagonist, who at times comes off as abrasive and unrelenting and at others completely earnest and forthright. I couldn’t sometimes tell if we were dealing with an unreliable narrator or if the narrative itself was pitched in a semi-realistic world in which all the characters were somewhat caricatured or hyperbolic in their presentation. In any case, once Helen gets home and is settling in with her adoptive parents, it’s really clear that there’s incredible strain between her and these guardian figures. The narrator spends her time interviewing various people in order to find out if they knew anything about her brother, but she often causes them to be uncomfortable with her strange personality and in-your-face questions and musings. She seemed at times a little bit “tone deaf,” but there is a fairly incredible shift in both her character and the novel itself once the last fifty or so pages hit. I wasn’t sure what to make of the resolution, which certainly the reader needed, though for consistency’s sake did not necessarily match the tone that Cottrell began the novel with. Nevertheless, I appreciated Cottrell’s deft handling of suicide as a general topic, which shows both restraint and verve in the characterization (and development) of Helen’s brother. The other issue that the novel grapples with is issues of family and kinship, especially as they exist as a kind of conundrum for the Korean American adoptee. In this case, Helen and her brother both take very different approaches to their adoptive and biological families. Whereas Helen seems to have more an escapist approach, having little interest in seeking out her birth parents and wanting little to do with her adoptive parents once she has established her own life, Helen’s brother stays at home and also attempts to locate his biological family. This divergence presents us with an opportunity to consider this adoptee figure from multiple angles, allowing readers a chance to engage in the complicated dynamics of family constructions. Overall, an unconventional and auspicious debut!

 

Buy the Book Here:

 

https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/sorry-to-disrupt-the-peace-patty-yumi-cottrell/1124463825

 

A Review of David Mas Masumoto (with Nikiko Masumoto)’s Changing Season: A Father, A Daughter, A Family Farm (Heyday Books, 2016).

 

I’ve been acquainted with David Mas Masumoto’s work for some time, as he is the writer of a popular column that appears in the Fresno Bee and from which a number of his books are drawn. I hadn’t had a chance to read his latest, which is partially written with his daughter Nikiko Masumoto: Changing Season: A Father, A Daughter, A Family Farm (Heyday Books, 2016). This creative nonfiction also became the partial basis for a documentary; you can see the trailer here:

 

http://www.latimes.com/food/dailydish/83373344-157.html

 

Here, I am also employing an editorial description from kobo.com for the book itself: “How do you become a farmer? The real questions are: what kind of person do you want to be? Are you willing to change? How do you learn? What is your vision for the future? In this poignant collection of essays, Epitaph for a Peach author David Mas Masumoto gets ready to hand his eighty-acre organic farm to his daughter, Nikiko, after four decades of working the land. Declaring that ‘all of the gifts I have received from this life are not only worthy of sharing, but must be shared,’ Mas reflects on topics as far-ranging as the art of pruning, climate change, and the prejudice his family faced during and after World War II: essays that, whether humorous or heartbreaking, explore what it means to pass something on. Nikiko's voice is present, too, as she relates the myriad lessons she has learned from her father in preparation for running the farm as a queer mixed-race woman. Both farmers feel less than totally set for the future that lays ahead; indeed, Changing Season addresses the uncertain future of small-scale agriculture in California. What is unquestionable, though, is the family's love for their vocation--and for each other.” I think this description does a fine job of rendering the larger themes that are central and thread through the many essays. It’s generally difficult to hazard a real timeline because the essays or prose blocks are relatively short in their form, usually about 3 to 4 pages. What stands out is obviously Masumoto’s absolute adoration of his work, his commitment to organic farming, and the love he has for the genealogy that links him with multiple generations of agriculture. You also get a sense that Masumoto is being especially philosophical because he is seeing the cycles of change, the titular changing season as it were, as a metaphor for the fact that his life is limited. Never is this fact more apparent than in the concluding sequence, and we begin to see why Nikiko’s perspective is so important. Not only does she provide us with the continuing genealogy of the Masumoto farming, but she is also helping us detail how her father is becoming a little bit more frail, a little bit more prone to health problems. This process is one that Masumoto himself notes about his own father, detailing his father’s stroke and the change that it required in family caretaking. Nikiko’s education and schooling provide her with a perspective, too, that shows us where the future of the Masumoto farm may go, especially because there is a sense that agricultural production cannot ever be divorced from a larger political context. If there is any minor critique I have of this wonderfully compact creative nonfiction, it’s that I desperately desired more of Nikiko’s voice. Certainly, Masumoto himself is well-regarded not only as a farmer, but as a prose stylist. His writing is as lush and as flavorful as the peaches, raisins, and nectarines he harvests. There was a point where I was getting up every half an hour to get a snack, even though I wasn’t even hungry. This impulse was no doubt influenced by the constant references to variations of peach dishes: peach cobblers, pies, peach encrusted with panko bread crumbs, sweet peach dishes and savory peach dishes…. Man, I want some peaches right now. At the same time, the balance that Nikiko’s writing provides is intriguing; let’s hope that more future collaborations are in store.

 

Buy the Book Here:

https://heydaybooks.com/book/changing-season/

 

 

A Review of Omar El Akkad’s American War (Knopf, 2017).

 

So, this novel has definitely been on my to-read list this year. Let’s let B&N give us a pithy overview: “Sarat Chestnut, born in Louisiana, is only six when the Second American Civil War breaks out in 2074. But even she knows that oil is outlawed, that Louisiana is half underwater, and that unmanned drones fill the sky. When her father is killed and her family is forced into Camp Patience for displaced persons, she begins to grow up shaped by her particular time and place. But not everyone at Camp Patience is who they claim to be. Eventually Sarat is befriended by a mysterious functionary, under whose influence she is turned into a deadly instrument of war. The decisions that she makes will have tremendous consequences not just for Sarat but for her family and her country, rippling through generations of strangers and kin alike.” I have to admit: I sort of found this description to be lackluster. After all, Omar El Akkad’s debut novel American War has a fairly complicated backstory to it, involving a future in which the United States has broken up into various regions and remains at war. El Akkad was obviously channeling the possibility of what Civil War would look like if it broke out again; apparently, that war would be similarly fought along regionalist lines. But, it wasn’t always clear to me exactly what precipitated the problems between the various sectors and regions of the United States. Further still, there are many other empires and international conglomerates that seem to have formed in the time being that drive the plot in ways I could not fully understand. It may be that I was reading a little bit too quickly, but another issue that arises is that El Akkad juggles two very different scales in this book. The most prominent narrative involves the one in the description: Sarat Chestnut, our ostensible anti-heroine, becomes a kind of assassin trained by a mysterious, but well-connected man named Albert Gaines. Eventually, though, Sarat is captured and tortured under horrific circumstances; though she survives her ordeal, she is obviously very scarred, so much so that when an opportunity presents itself to throw America into chaos again, she is willing to brave that possibility precisely because she wants a very personal form of revenge. What is most compelling about the work is the careful attention that El Akkad gives to the many contours of Sarat’s damaged psyche: we still find we are willing to understand her actions, even when she takes the rather extreme measure to exact her own retribution. The final arc of the novel is perhaps the strongest because El Akkad shifts the narrative to the perspective of Sarat’s nephew. This first person viewpoint allows us to sympathize with Sarat, even as the novel hurtles toward its infectious climax. But, the larger historical and international forces shaping the antagonisms involving nation-states and other such entities sometimes recede into the background, even as Sarat’s stratagem obviously possess large-scale impacts. Thus, the local and personal reverberate against the transnational and global, but often in an unbalanced equilibrium. A compelling, if uneven debut.

 

 

Buy the Book Here:

 

https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/american-war-omar-el-akkad/1124650253

 

 

A Review of Yiyun Li’s Dear Friend, From My Life I write to You in Your Life (Random House, 2017).

 

I’ve been reading a lot of memoirs and creative nonfiction lately; I’ve been gravitating to them for some reason I can’t quite explain. One of the publications I have been most excited about is Yiyun Li’s Dear Friend, From My Life I write to You in Your Life (Random House, 2017). I have read all of Li’s four previous publications, two short story collections and two novels. I have taught selections from them in the past, but I was totally unprepared for the incredible difference in style and tone that would appear in this work. It’s probably something I should have been more cognizant of, especially since Li herself will remark that there is so often an incredible gap between a writer’s creative compositions and the personal letters and diary entries she might also produce. Much of this collection of essays deals with Li moving through the letters, diary entries, and ephemera composed by famous writers (especially Katherine Mansfield, Virginia Woolf, Ernest Hemingway, Marianne Moore, and others). Interwoven throughout these musings, Li also touches upon mental illness, her own suicide attempts, and her complicated trajectory as a transnational writer who decides to write in a non-native language. From a personal perspective, what struck me as most poignant was the ways in which Li is coming to terms with her desire to use writing as a method to deal with issues of attachment. With characters, as Li reminds us, there is no worry about how those characters will ultimately relate to you, because the actual writer has no actual place in that fictional world. In this sense, though she can tirelessly devote herself to the creation and to the contours of these characters, she does not have to worry about a mutual dynamic of care. This sort of relationship is one that fills her with incredible ambivalence and torture in the so-called actual world: how does one live without feeling attached, without having desire, Li wants to know? There is too much feeling one might have and so how does one mediate these feelings that so often have no place, cannot be returned? For Li, one answer is to write, but this answer often becomes crippling because she still must attend to the physical world around her. Li leaves much opaque about her personal life, especially her relationship to her husband and to her children, but we have to read between the lines here. Li, for instance, takes much inspiration from Marianne Moore, one of the few writers it seems that is as opaque in her poetry as she is in her personal writings. Li understands that there is a limit to how much she can share, how much she can start to break out of the reclusiveness apparent in writing, so this collection of essays seems to be a courageous, but still tentative foray into a world in which she must acknowledge her attachments and those who are attached to her. What I especially appreciate is Li’s frank depiction and nuanced consideration of suicidal thoughts, which she does not denigrate as somehow solely irrational. Li knows we live in a complicated, tortuous, but often also blissful, beautiful world. These incongruent facets no doubt become sometimes unbearable, intolerable even. If there is anything to understand about a writer’s psyche, it may be that her greatest art is also connected to her greatest sense of insecurity: this pristine, intricately wrought, insular fictional world that I can construct is the one that I do not have the power to formulate in my own. For Li, this dynamic is terrifying, but something that we hope, that is I, the “dear reader,” hopes she will come to navigate.

 

Buy the Book Here:

 

https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/dear-friend-from-my-life-i-write-to-you-in-your-life-yiyun-li/1123772308#/

 

 

 

A Review of Sherman Alexie’s You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me: A Memoir (Little, Brown and Company, 2017)

 

Wow! Well, I wish writers would always compose a memoir at some point, especially ones who are well known for their fiction (and their poetry in this case). B&N provides us with a pithy overview here: “When his mother passed away at the age of 78, Sherman Alexie responded the only way he knew how: he wrote. The result is this stunning memoir. Featuring 78 poems, 78 essays and intimate family photographs, Alexie shares raw, angry, funny, profane, tender memories of a childhood few can imagine--growing up dirt-poor on an Indian reservation, one of four children raised by alcoholic parents. Throughout, a portrait emerges of his mother as a beautiful, mercurial, abusive, intelligent, complicated woman. YOU DON'T HAVE TO SAY YOU LOVE ME is a powerful account of a complicated relationship, an unflinching and unforgettable remembrance.” So you might be wondering: what does Alexie’s memoir have to do with Asian American literature? Well, more than you might think. First off, I like to stray from the general guidelines once in awhile to explore allied works in the larger field of American literature. Second, one of Alexie’s most pivotal mentors is none other than Alex Kuo, who gets multiple mentions in the memoir. We’ve reviewed some of Alex’s work over here at AALF, so this kind of connection presents itself as an intriguing instance of a kind of cross-racial/ cross-ethnic connection, one that reminds me of the affiliations between the Aiiieeeee! boys and Ishmael Reed. In any case, the memoir is quite stunning: it reveals exactly why Alexie is a such a survivor. His father is an alcoholic, while his mother is someone that maintains her distance from Alexie. What becomes evident over the course of the memoir is that Alexie did not necessarily understand the ways in which his mother loved or might have loved him, and he goes about this memoir attempting to sort this issue out. It’s not a strict prose memoir, as mentioned by the editorial description. Indeed, as Alexie mentions in the work itself: the structure is something akin to the quilting his mother was fond of engaging in, and there is a recursiveness that is essential to a form of working through. As Alexie desires to move past his melancholic subjectivity, he places into larger contexts the outright poverty and destitution his family had faced. There are some incredibly poignant and devastating passages, rendered beautifully through Alexie’s always assured storytelling voice. For instance, there’s a vignette concerning a pair of moccasins that he loses during a period in which his mother leaves him and his siblings in the care of his aunt. His aunt had given him these moccasins to keep him from crying, but once she discovers that he has lost them—as a result of bullying no less—he is savagely beaten by her. The import of this moment is multiple. On the one hand, Alexie clarifies the ways in which life on the reservation was difficult, that physical abuse was actually the norm. At the same time, Alexie himself had already seemed to understand, even at that tender and youthful age, that there might be a world constituted in a different way, somewhere else. Wherever that was could not be made evident until Alexie had somehow managed to endure and to forge his career as a writer. So casting back into this traumatic instance, he—and by the extension, the readers—come to understand exactly why this experience left such deep psychic scars. Even then, he had refused to allow this type of treatment to be something he would normalize, and in doing so, he would forge an ethos that would carry him forward and beyond the communities that were most abusive to him. But this psychic fortitude has its limits; his storytelling almost seems to function in a way as a shield, and it is clear that something monumental breaks inside of him once his mother passes on. A brilliant, but devastating work.

 

 

Buy the Book Here:

 

https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/you-dont-have-to-say-you-love-me-sherman-alexie/1124300315

 

 

A Review of Joy Kogawa’s Gently Toward Nagasaki: A Spiritual Pilgrimage, An Exploration Both Communal and Intensely Personal (Caitlin Press, Inc., 2017).

 

Well, when I had heard that Joy Kogawa had finally published another volume of work, I was excited to see what topic she’d be covering in her newest book. Of course, Asian North Americanists best know Kogawa for her brilliant novel Obasan (as well as its sequel Itsuka). Kogawa is also author of a number of other publications, including a number of poetry collections, the children’s novel Naomi’s Road as well as the controversial novel The Rain Ascends.  It is the latter that is very much a part of the core of Kogawa’s latest, which explores Kogawa’s understanding of spirituality especially in light of her father’s own demons, which as we discover are related to his incestuous acts, many of which were perpetrated during his tenure as a of the church. Here is the description from the publisher’s site: “Gently to Nagasaki is a spiritual pilgrimage, an exploration both communal and intensely personal. Set in Vancouver and Toronto, the outposts of Slocan and Coaldale, the streets of Nagasaki and the high mountains of Shikoku, Japan, it is also an account of a remarkable life. As a child during WWII, Joy Kogawa was interned with her family and thousands of other Japanese Canadians by the Canadian government. Her acclaimed novel Obasan, based on that experience, brought her literary recognition and played a critical role in the movement for redress. Kogawa knows what it means to be classified as the enemy, and she seeks urgently to get beyond false and dangerous distinctions of ‘us’ and ‘them.’ Interweaving the events of her own life with catastrophes like the bombing of Nagasaki and the massacre by the Japanese imperial army at Nanking, she wrestles with essential questions like good and evil, love and hate, rage and forgiveness, determined above all to arrive at her own truths. Poetic and unflinching, this is a long-awaited memoir from one of Canada’s most distinguished literary elders.” What is intriguing about this description is that it completely avoids the emotional conflict at the center of this creative nonfiction’s work: how does Kogawa come to understand her father as a perpetrator? She wrestles deeply with this question, one that becomes ever more political especially because her childhood home becomes the subject of restoration efforts that divide local communities. Some, for instance, are intensely vocal that Kogawa’s home should not be considered a heritage site, especially given her father’s actions. Kogawa can’t seem to equate her father’s actions against her personal experiences: he seemed to be a tender, even quiet father, but over the course of the work, she comes to see that her father may have been hiding another facet of himself entirely from his family. What is courageous about Kogawa’s latest publication is her willingness to reveal her ambivalences. Early on, it becomes apparent that she is open to multiple sides of an argument. For instance, discourses surrounding nuclear proliferation and the use of nuclear energy continue to interest her, even ones that suggest that such energy use can still be harnessed in productive ways. This viewpoint causes strain in some of her friendships, but the point is: Kogawa is letting us know that she works a little bit more slowly. She needs to see the contours of an issue, a person, a discourse emerge over time because she commits wholeheartedly to a new way of thinking, a new mode of justice. It is perhaps this element of meticulous working through that is the most powerful. I have recently been able to read memoirs by writers such as Sherman Alexie and Yiyun Li, and continue to find that these works are sometimes ever more important to read because they help educators to teach their fictions with that much more nuance. And it is always a welcome moment when a literary giant such as Joy Kogawa graces us with her effortless, beautiful prose.

 

For more on the book go here:

 

http://caitlin-press.com/our-books/gently-to-nagasaki/

 

A Review of Tarun Shanker and Kelly Zekas’s These Ruthless Deeds (Swoon Reads, 2017).

 

Tarun Shanker and Kelly Zekas’s These Ruthless Deeds (Swoon Reads, 2017) is the second installment in a projected trilogy that began with These Vicious Masks. I’m not sure what the title of the last one will be, but it will have to start with the word “These.” Call me psychic. Bad joke aside: for fans of a cross between X-Men and Jane Austen, you’ve come to the right place. Our cast of merry characters has reassembled to take on the forces of possible evil. Our plucky heroine, Evelyn Wyndham, is back, and she’s unaware that her sister Rosamund is still alive (though a sort of clunky opening that could have been better prefaced). Evelyn eventually joins up with a group called the Society of Aberrations, which is lead by Captain Redburn (with the power to enhance or negate another mutant’s powers) and his brother (who can project teleportation discs). Evelyn, by the way, has the power to heal others. The Society includes Miss Grey, who has the power to locate other mutants trough dreaming; Oliver, a young man with the ability to move through solid matter (like a ghost); Sebastian Braddock, with the power to disease or to kill people; Mr. Kent, with the power to ask anyone a direct question that s/he must answer truthfully; and Miss Chen, with the power to make an object crumble into pieces. There are also satellite figures and powers, such as some young individuals in training: a telekinetic, an individual who can turn others into pigs, another with the ability to fly, and then, an individual who can control plants. For those that are familiar with the X-men, the Society of Aberrations seems like a perfect analogue to that group. In fact, the parallels are so strong, there’s even a version of Cerebro, the machine that allowed Professor X and others to locate other mutants. In this case, that power if given over to Miss Grey. But, the novel starts taking off once it becomes apparent that the Society of Aberrations has some questionable policies. For instance, at some point they go to India to apprehend a woman (Radhika Rao), with the power to control the weather (this fictional world’s version of Ororo Munroe, aka Storm). She’s considered a menace to society, so they’re just supposed to get her, so they can lock her up in a prison. Evelyn is totally like: WTF? And her point is well taken because Radhika has never killed anyone, so her imprisonment doesn’t seem have to a purpose, except if the secret head of the Society of Aberrations maybe isn’t so gallant as the Captain claims this figure to be. The stakes get even higher when Evelyn teams up with Mr. Kent and Oliver to free Radhika from prison. Though they are successful, their stratagem results in their friends and loved ones being targeted by the head of the Society, so Evelyn and her band of upstarts realize that if they work against the Society’s secret motives, then the lives of their families and loved ones will be in danger. Despite this form of blackmail, Evelyn realizes that she must get to the bottom of the Society’s motivations, which means she must unmask the leader, purportedly someone who doesn’t even have a superpower. This decision eventually leads to the final arc of the novel. Readers are, of course, burdened with a kind of cliffhanger, so we’re left as putty in the fingers of Shanker and Zekas, desperately hoping that the listing for the next book will soon appear. Comparisons to X-men will never die down for this particular book, given all of these links, but Shanker and Zekas really work to make the narrative and world-building unique; the courtship melodramas in particular really provide this work with a dramedic flair that enriches the reading experience. Yes, we want so much for Evelyn to find a way to be with Sebastian Braddock, even if he might be betrothed to Mae Lodge. At the same time, what about the dashing, ever faithful and supportive Mr. Kent, always with the wry and witty comment to keep things moving? I couldn’t help rooting for Mr. Kent all along the way and wonder where this particular triangle may move to in the 3rd book. Finally, Shanker and Zekas did have an extraordinary chance to really push this novel to the next level with the introduction of a character like Radhika Rao. I’m not quite sure if they were waiting to use her storyline more fully in the third book, but it’s entirely underdeveloped here. The discourse that she uses to critique the Society as a colonial aggressor is quite politically engaged obviously and begins to lift this book into a different register precisely because it so strongly resists the ahistoricity and abstraction that can be common to the paranormal/ young adult genres. We’ll hope that Shanker and Zekas can deliver at all levels in the final installment!

Buy the Book Here:

 

https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/these-ruthless-deeds-tarun-shanker/1123806912#/

 

 

A Review of Riley Redgate’s Noteworthy (Harry N. Abrams, 2017).

 

Riley Redgate is one of those mixed race Asian American authors who might slip through the cracks by virtue of the surname issue. These days you can’t count on surnames to provide you with a clear indication of descent; a last name might sound ethnic but it may be the case that the name has a cognate OR that the individual in question may have taken a married last name OR the individual may be of mixed race ancestry (amongst other possibilities). I just happened to be googling some interviews when I came across Redgate’s work. In any case, here is B&N with a pithy description for us: “It’s the start of Jordan Sun’s junior year at the Kensington-Blaine Boarding School for the Performing Arts. Unfortunately, she’s an Alto 2, which—in the musical theatre world—is sort of like being a vulture in the wild: She has a spot in the ecosystem, but nobody’s falling over themselves to express their appreciation. So it’s no surprise when she gets shut out of the fall musical for the third year straight. But then the school gets a mass email: A spot has opened up in the Sharpshooters, Kensington’s elite a cappella octet. Worshiped . . . revered . . . all male. Desperate to prove herself, Jordan auditions in her most convincing drag, and it turns out that Jordan Sun, Tenor 1, is exactly what the Sharps are looking for.”  Yea, so this passage provides us with the key plot conceit: Jordan Sun is cross-dressing in order to find her place at Kensington. What becomes evident is that Jordan’s desire to be claimed by a musical group is more largely a desire to find a type of family unit beyond her parents. Over the course of the narrative, readers will discover that Jordan comes from a poor background, an economic status that puts her place at Kensington continually in peril. Partway through the novel, her mother loses her job, the family qualifies for food assistance welfare programs, and even the fact that Kensington is covering tuition, room, and board does not necessarily guarantee her place there. Indeed, the fees related to textbooks and other such costs are not covered. But the real issue is of course: when will the Sharpshooters find out that the 8th member in their midst is a biological female teenager? Redgate is astute enough to consider the political ramifications of this kind of performance, especially in light of recent discourses related to trans identity and gender constructs. Jordan does consider her own privilege in this process, while also negotiating the thorny place of her bisexuality in this quest to find a refuge at Kensington. Of course, the stakes start to get complicated once Jordan does get unequivocally included in this band of teenage brothers: how long will it be before she is found out and what will the ramifications be when her ruse is discovered? While this dilemma certainly fuels narrative momentum, perhaps more salient to this novel is the problem of Jordan’s own positionality as an Asian American interested in the theater and performing arts. Her parents are leery of her career aspirations, which dovetail with the problems related to model minority dynamics. The novel complicates this issue by its exploration of class standing and the legacy of elite secondary institutions. Jordan’s admittance and presence at Kensington defies the longer tradition of the WASP-centered student body that this particular high school has long nurtured. If there is an endangerment that the novel considers, it is in relation to this kind of eccentric Asian American subject, the one who dares to embrace the fine arts despite a problematic class background. Redgate’s novel thus joins this rich tradition of Asian American narratives who undermine the model minority’s insidious overlay concerning racial progress and postracial discourses. At the same time, fans of the high school novel/ young adult fiction will find much of interest as Jordan attempts to master her position in an all male acapella group. We’ll see if Redgate has another installment in store of us!

 

 

Buy the Book Here:

 

https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/noteworthy-riley-redgate/1124357852#productInfoTabs

 

A Review of Jomny Sun’s Everyone's a Aliebn When Ur a Aliebn Too: A Book (Harper Perennial, 2017).

 

So, I was really intrigued by this title when I saw it listed because of the funktastic title and the spelling. As an professor who has taught some writing intensive classes, I just found the spelling aspect to be pretty hilarious. In any case, B&N gives us this useful description of the text:  “everyone’s a aliebn when ur a aliebn too is the illustrated story of a lonely alien sent to observe Earth, only to meet all sorts of creatures with all sorts of perspectives on life, love, and happiness, all while learning to feel a little better about being an alien—based on the enormously popular Twitter account, @jonnysun. Here is the unforgettable story of Jomny, a lonely alien who, for the first time ever, finds a home on our planet after learning that earthlings can feel lonely too. Jomny finds friendship in a bear tired of other creatures running away in fear, an egg struggling to decide what to hatch into, an owl working its way to being wise, a tree feeling stuck in one place, a tadpole coming to terms with turning into a frog, a dying ghost, a puppy unable to express itself, and many more. Through this story of a lost, lonely and confused alien finding friendship, acceptance, and love among the creatures of Earth, we will all learn how to be a little more human. And for all of us earth-bound creatures here on this planet, we can all be reminded that sometimes, it takes an outsider to help us see ourselves for who we truly are.” I didn’t realize that this graphic narrative is based upon a twitter account, so that was definitely news to me. The reading experience I had was unexpected. On the one hand, I did enjoy the strange tale, especially the creative use of spellings throughout, but I seem to have a similar reaction to any work that anthropomorphizes animals and other creatures. I sometimes have this nagging thought about why some animals get chosen to speak over others. In any case, one other important plot point is that the humans that the alien is actually looking for are completely misidentified, since he spends all of his time talking to things like trees, stumps, and animals. Over the course of his experiences, though, he realizes that there’s much more to his life than the stolid ways offered by his alien peers. I couldn’t help but wonder sometimes if there was an allegorical impulse behind this work, especially since I am always thinking of the “alien” as a stand-in for the Asian subject rendered as foreign, cold, unfeeling, and different. In any case, I suppose I can’t justify the model minority critique of the work, even if I can’t help but read the work in this elastic way. The drawings and sketching style lend themselves quite well to the lighthearted comedy that is threaded throughout; some may find the philosophical musings of the central character to be somewhat trite, but the graphic narrative is ultimately a fun, otherworldly journey.

 

Buy the Book Here:

 

https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/everyones-a-aliebn-when-ur-a-aliebn-too-jomny-sun/1124859519#/

 

A Review of Ausma Zehanat Khan’s Among the Ruins (St. Martin’s, 2017).

 

Ausma Zehanat Khan is already back with another welcome installment in the buddy detective series following Rachel Getty and Esa Khattak. This very exposition heavy novel requires some definite context, so we’ll let B&N take it away from here: “On leave from Canada’s Community Policing department, Esa Khattak is traveling in Iran, reconnecting with his cultural heritage and seeking peace in the country’s beautiful mosques and gardens. But Khattak’s supposed break from work is cut short when he’s approached by a Canadian government agent in Iran, asking him to look into the death of renowned Canadian-Iranian filmmaker Zahra Sobhani. Zahra was murdered at Iran’s notorious Evin prison, where she’d been seeking the release of a well-known political prisoner. Khattak quickly finds himself embroiled in Iran’s tumultuous politics and under surveillance by the regime, but when the trail leads back to Zahra’s family in Canada, Khattak calls on his partner, Detective Rachel Getty, for help. Rachel uncovers a conspiracy linked to the Shah of Iran and the decades-old murders of a group of Iran’s most famous dissidents. Historic letters, a connection to the Royal Ontario Museum, and a smuggling operation on the Caspian Sea are just some of the threads Rachel and Khattak begin unraveling, while the list of suspects stretches from Tehran to Toronto. But as Khattak gets caught up in the fate of Iran’s political prisoners, Rachel sees through to the heart of the matter: Zahra’s murder may not have been a political crime at all.” I was impressed by this rather pithy description, and I’m not sure I could have managed to complete one like it, as Khan sets herself up for a huge project once she embarks on setting the novel in two different national locations. The previous efforts, while having strong transnational currents, did not see our main investigators separated by half a globe. The momentum waxes and wanes due to the shifts in location and context, and Khan is often mired by the historical and cultural exposition required to materialize the force and gravity of the Iranian political climate, which is quite precarious for Khattak. Khattak must contend with a rotating cast of characters related to something called the Green Movement, which is a revolutionary group looking to overturn the Iranian regime. They are of course allied with Zahra, especially as she was working on documentary type work that criticizes autocratic and totalitarian developments. Concurrently, Rachel is in Canada working on the bits and pieces of the case that emerge there, which necessarily involve individuals related to museums and archives. Khan adds a nice flourish to this plot because Rachel is also working on rebuilding her relationship to her younger brother Zach. Readers will recall that Zach had disappeared for quite a long time amid dysfunctional family dynamics, so much of Rachel’s personal life appears wrapped around creating a new home for them both. The disparate strands and complicated cultural dynamics threaten the plot from spiraling a little bit out of control. Nevertheless, once some of the suspects start being fleshed out, Khan streamlines the plot and focuses finally on finding a way to reunify Getty and Khattak. If there is a big critique of this novel, it’s that it risks so much in leaving Getty and Khattak separated from each other for the majority of the events. They’re always better as a team, so the payoff, though being high, still can feel as though much had been withheld. As with Khan’s other works, the scope of the novel leaves us always feeling jarred by the limitations of the detective genre. Though there is an attempt to determine justice at least on an individual level, larger questions of political freedoms that mire those involved in the Green Movement linger, leaving us with that ominous never fully resolved noir-ish conclusion.

 

Buy the Book Here:

 

http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/among-the-ruins-ausma-zehanat-khan/1123683430

 

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Asian American Literature Fans – Megareview for July 18, 2017

Posted by: stephenhongsohn

 

Asian American Literature Fans – Megareview for July 18, 2017

 

In this post, reviews of Jeanette Arakawa’s The Little Exile (Stone Bridge Press, 2017); Rhadika R. Dhariwal’s The Tale of a No-Name Squirrel (Simon and Schuster for Young Readers, 2016); Rin Chupeco’s The Bone Witch (Sourceworks Fire, 2017); Hari Kunzru’s White Tears (Knopf, 2017); Sil Lai Abrams’s Black Lotus: A Woman’s Search for Racial Identity (Gallery Books, 2016); Fonda Lee’s Exo (Scholastic, 2017).

 

AALF uses “maximal ideological inclusiveness” to define Asian American literature. Thus, we review any writers working in the English language of Asian descent. We also review titles related to Asian American contexts without regard to authorial descent. We also consider titles in translation pending their relationship to America, broadly defined. Our point is precisely to cast the widest net possible.

With apologies as always for any typographical, grammatical, or factual errors. My intent in these reviews is to illuminate the wide-ranging and expansive terrain of Asian American and Asian Anglophone literatures. Please e-mail ssohnucr@gmail.com with any concerns you may have.

 

 

A Review of Jeanette Arakawa’s The Little Exile (Stone Bridge Press, 2017).

 

Jeanette Arakawa’s The Little Exile is a literary-cultural-historical gift, especially because it provides us with one of the rare accounts of the Japanese American internment from someone of the Nisei background. Typically, it has been the third generation writers (like Julie Otsuka and David Mura), who have been the ones to offer fictionalized/ creative nonfictional representations of that tragic moment in U.S. history, but lately, there’ve been more publications by Nisei writers, who have explored what they experienced during the internment. Arakawa’s The Little Exile joins recently published works such as Lily Havey’s Gasa Gasa Girl, Gene Oishi’s Fox Drum Bebop, and Hiroshi Kashiwagi’s Starting from the Loomis and Other Stories that come from the minds and lives of Nisei writers. Arakawa makes the interesting choice to fictionalize her work, at least in part through change in the protagonist’s name. The fictionalized autobiography is told from Marie Mitsui’s childlike perspective, and we see the internment unfold through her youthful eyes. Arakawa provides us with a generous exposition, as we learn about how the family’s life in San Francisco. As World War II looms and anti-Japanese sentiment grows, Marie’s family must move Stockton and later to the San Joaquin Campground before they are shipped off to Rohwer, Arkansas. I can’t recall too many other internment narratives set in Rohwer. Though some elements are similar to most internment narratives (such as the shoddy housing, the lack of privacy in the bathrooms, the problematic weather patterns, the questionable food), Rohwer’s swampy geographies offer a different environmental perspective from works set in more desert-like (e.g. Manzanar or Topaz) locations. There is much to praise about Arakawa’s work as an element of historical recovery. At the same time, the audience of this depiction is certainly directed at readers who have perhaps less knowledge or no knowledge about internment. Readers are able to be introduced to a less politicized perspective precisely because Arakawa chooses a child-protagonist, but the epilogue is especially crucial because it shows us how that figure progresses into someone who understands the injustices of the internment. The title is an interesting choice perhaps because it is an ironic invocation of the child’s experience during this period. Marie is certainly “little,” but the exile is gargantuan. One of the intriguing elements of the internment experience across multiple chapters is how subtle the traumas can seem: there’s a moment at the conclusion where it seems evident that the Mitsui family has finally achieved a level of stability after settling in Denver, Colorado. They are able to afford a home, something that they had never been able to achieve while they lived in San Francisco, but Marie and her brother implore her parents to move back to California, as everyone they know (from the internment period) also has seemed to move back. Marie’s father, in particular, tells the children that they would have to start over, but their response is a sort of shrug: we’ve been through the process before, they imply, and are comfortable risking it all because they know they’re survivors. How poignant, but also how brutal. And, so they decide to move again. This state of “little” exile, this mobility is not necessarily a skill borne out of talent or sacrifice, but one necessitated by the traumas sustained by internment. By way of a conclusion, this book comes out of Stone Bridge Press, a cool indie publisher that has already put out some other works by JA writers, including Linda Watanabe McFerrin’s Dead Love, which we reviewed WAY back in the day (by pylduck) (for those who are a little bit hungry for “brain”):

 

http://asianamlitfans.livejournal.com/118440.html

 

 

Buy the Book Here:

 

http://www.stonebridge.com/catalog/the-little-exile

 

A Review of Rhadika R. Dhariwal’s The Tale of a No-Name Squirrel (Simon and Schuster for Young Readers, 2016).

 

I definitely was intrigued when I first started this title because it reminded me of the covers of a number of children’s books that I used to read as a child that were based upon the lives of animals, novels like Bunnicula (and its sequels) and Ralph S. Mouse or Redwall. My favorite of all time was Watership Down. Rhadika R. Dhariwal’s debut The Tale of a No-Name Squirrel treads some similar ground in the way that she anthropomorphizes animals: these animals go to weddings, send out wedding invitations, and have spats about who didn’t get invited. The story’s perspective is centered on the titular “no-name” Squirrel who works as the “Petpost slave.” From here, let’s let B&N do some plotting work for us: “Solve riddles with Squirrel as he travels to the walled city of bees, the fireless tea plantation of mice, and treacherous desert full of tricksters in this beautifully written and creative debut adventure. Squirrel never expected to be anything other than a slave: the last animal slave in Bimmau. That is, until he is invited to a high profile wedding and takes a sip of the forbidden ceremonial wine, unlocking a mysterious riddle. The riddle reveals that there is a key which has the power to grant Squirrel his freedom (and a name!), but also could enslave anyone in Bimmau. Disastrous if it falls into the wrong hands! Squirrel and his friends find themselves in a race to find Brittle’s Key before the army of crows gets to him…and before the mysterious Colonel finds the key first.” The narrative conceit for Dhariwal is something akin to the mystery and detective novel: there’s a puzzle inside of Squirrel’s brain but he must unlock it. With the help of a canine ally named Des and a possible ally in a wily crow, there is a chance he may be able to unravel something called a “seclusion,” which is a memory ladder, which must be unlocked in the proper order and with the proper “ingredients.” Once one memory is unlocked, the next memory may then be unlocked, but each memory is itself a riddle (told in a kind of verse) that Squirrel and his allies must figure out. These riddles and their possible answers take Squirrel everywhere: to find a special honey, to trade flint stones for other precious goods, all the while he must hide from crow assassins and dastardly kitties. Despite such an inventive narrative, I must admit I had, for some odd reason, difficulty finishing the novel. At times, I was definitely pushed out by the author’s use of the word “slave” to describe the squirrel, as it definitively politicized the work in a way that I found distracting. Additionally, I couldn’t help but wonder about the narrative logic of anthropomorphization. Certain animals get to talk, while others get to be consumed by the other animals. For instance, Squirrel and his buddies are sometimes seen eating things like lobster, while at other points, they communicate directly with fish, so I wondered how and why Dhariwal determined the line between what animals get to speak and which animals get to be consumed. Does that mean that lobsters don’t get to talk, or is it that lobsters get to talk, but they are also allowed to be eaten? Is an animal eating another animal in this world a bad thing, or is it simply part of the proverbial “circle of life”? Perhaps, these sorts of questions remind us why children’s literature is precisely written for children, but since I have occasionally adopted children’s literature for my classes (including picture books), these questions I think remain important for thinking about how and why literature functions with audiences in mind and how those audience receptions alter how we discuss and understand the political and aesthetic aims of narrative. To be sure, I can imagine my youthful nieces and nephews finding much delight in Squirrel’s many adventures, even if I may not have the imaginative capacity to understand the consumption habits of these magically speaking creatures.

 

Buy the Book Here:

 

This YA paranormal title has been one I’ve been saving to read at the right time, since I was a big fan of Rin Chupeco’s first series that started with The Suffering. In any case, let’s let B&N do some work for us: “When Tea accidentally resurrects her brother from the dead, she learns she is different from the other witches in her family. Her gift for necromancy means that she's a bone witch, a title that makes her feared and ostracized by her community. But Tea finds solace and guidance with an older, wiser bone witch, who takes Tea and her brother to another land for training. In her new home, Tea puts all her energy into becoming an asha—one who can wield elemental magic. But dark forces are approaching quickly, and in the face of danger, Tea will have to overcome her obstacles...and make a powerful choice. Memoirs of a Geisha meets The Name of the Wind in this brilliant new fantasy series by Rin Chupeco!” Admittedly, I had to include the last tagline because I was confused by it. What about this particular YA was relatable to Memoirs of a Geisha besides the fact that Chupeco happens to be of Asian descent? I suppose it’s possible that the publicity copy author thought that the training sequences involving the main character and narrator, Tea, moving through the ranks of a social structure based upon magic in which women are able to wield runes and cast spells made it analogous to Golden’s novel. So, I suppose, then,, you can make some sort of very broadly applied comparison in which the geisha are comparable to the asha, these magician-women, especially since some of them become very capable dancers and artists. Nevertheless, the Orientalist publicity definitely turned me off to what was otherwise an incredibly pleasurable reading experience based largely upon some inventive world-building, on the one hand, and a compelling plot, on the other. To be sure, Chupeco understands the key genre conceits: Tea is originally a rather normal character from a normal city with a normal family, until, that is, she discovers that she can raise the dead, the dead being her brother. Second, her heartglass—a kind of magical object that holds the keys to one’s magical aptitudes—burns a color that marks her as someone aligned with the Dark, so she’s what everyone fears: the bone witch. The key genre conceits remind us that this ordinary-now-extraordinary young girl is going to face some big bad, which are dark beings that must be vanquished every couple of years in order to keep their evil energies and activities at bay. There are fewer and fewer Dark Witches, and Tea’s eventual mentor (we later find out) is dying, so her ascension through the ranks of the asha is ever more important. She finds a home in a new city in the House Valerian, where she is subject to endless trainings and lessons. Along the way, she is supported by her now-undead brother, Fox, who is her familiar and who accompanies her on various exploits. She further develops a romantic crush on, who else, the Prince! Throughout these training sequences and plot elements, Tea reveals her ever-increasing powers, so much so that she indeed advances through the asha structure more quickly than everyone else, leading her to a final quest sequence in which she must battle against a dragon creature that is terrorizing the city. Interspersed with the main plot are short inter-chapters, written in italics, that reveal that the entire novel is really a retrospective. By the final pages of this particular volume, we still haven’t caught up to what seems to be the diegetic present. There is a rather surprising final stage reveal that I was happily unprepared for, leaving quite a lot open about how we’re supposed to get from the point at which the novel ends to the time sequence noted in the inter-chapters. So, the things that impressed me the most were: (1) again, the world building and usage of creature monikers that I was mostly unfamiliar with and (2) the way that Chupeco is able to work with the motif of the necromancer and make it her own. Since I just finished Michelle Sagara’s necromancer series, I was very enthused at how different this particular series was. One of the publicity taglines compares this series to Tahir’s An Ember in the Ashes series, and I generally agree. It’s that mix of the familiar—the genre conceits of the YA paranormal romance, on the one hand—and the original—the unique elements of world building, on the other— that make this particular work one to add to your to-read list. You’ll likely finish in one sitting.

 

Buy the Book Here:

 

https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-bone-witch-rin-chupeco/1123725845

 

A Review of Hari Kunzru’s White Tears (Knopf, 2017).

 

So Hari Kunzru’s fifth novel White Tears (after The Impressionist, Transmission, My Revolutions, and Gods Without Men) is a total trip. I’m not sure even what happened at the end. If I think what happened actually happened, then this novel goes down as a very controversial addition to what some might call post-black cultural productions. It’s also a novel that I would have analyzed as part of my first book—a semi-shameless plug, but it is relevant—Racial Asymmetries because the novel is told from the first person perspective of a character whose ancestries presumably do not match Kunzru’s own. We’ll let B&N give us some context: “Two twenty-something New Yorkers. Seth is awkward and shy. Carter is the glamorous heir to one of America's great fortunes. They have one thing in common: an obsession with music. Seth is desperate to reach for the future. Carter is slipping back into the past. When Seth accidentally records an unknown singer in a park, Carter sends it out over the Internet, claiming it's a long lost 1920s blues recording by a musician called Charlie Shaw. When an old collector contacts them to say that their fake record and their fake bluesman are actually real, the two young white men, accompanied by Carter's troubled sister Leonie, spiral down into the heart of the nation's darkness, encountering a suppressed history of greed, envy, revenge, and exploitation.” Much of the opening of the novel establishes Carter and Seth’s embrace of “old time” music, as they attempt to find ways to reproduce the sound of a bygone era. Almost without fail, their obsessions take them to black artists and cultural producers, so there is immediately this question of racial appropriation at stake here, but Kunzru complicates the equation immediately by situating Seth and Carter at two ends of the class spectrum. In other words, whiteness is not unified. Carter is one of three heirs to a huge fortune, while Seth comes from a working class background. Anytime Seth tags along with Carter to any function involving Carter’s family, Seth is basically treated like an open wound that is festering. No one wants to give him any attention; no one comes near him. The only individual who seems to have a slightly more open attitude is Carter’s sister Leonie. The novel grows darker once Carter goes missing; authorities eventually discover him in a seedy part of New York, where he has sustained a severe head injury. He’d gone after a record collector with the hopes of finding a rare record, but he never returned. Carter’s injury is so severe that he’s in a coma, and there’s no indication that he’s going to waken any time soon.  Without Carter’s financial resources, Seth is immediately excommunicated from their shared housing space and expelled from the studio they were using. Seth realizes that if he’s to salvage any of his music projects, he must seek out the help of Leonie and perhaps find out who was behind Carter’s beating. Seth also realizes that he must divulge a crucial bit of information involving his past in which he used to go record hunting with a former coworker named Chester Bly. Their exploits once took them to Mississippi with the hopes of finding a mythical recording made by Charlie Shaw; they apparently find an older woman who harbors the record, but she is unwilling to sell it. From this point forward, the novel completely explodes, and I honestly have no idea what was actually going on, whwat was real and what was imagined. Indeed, Kunzru begins to take considerable freedom with narrative perspective to the point where I actually had to stop to re-read sections to figure out what was going on. Although one might argue that this kind of fragmentation might have been an editing problem, Kunzru is obviously keying us into an unreliable narrator, so the question becomes: what is reliable and what is unreliable about the discourse? From my perspective, the answer is a supernatural one and dovetails with the mystical narrative that Kunzru explored in his last work. This novel further makes me ponder the possibility of reparations in any form, particular in narrative form. What are concrete ways to address past injustices? The question seems especially problematic for this novel, as it must resort to fantastical plot elements just to allow the past to be addressed. Obviously, an immensely fascinating novel and one well worth teaching; I will consider assigning this one in future classes.

 

Buy the Book Here:

 

http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/white-tears-hari-kunzru/1123950904#productInfoTabs

 

A Review of Sil Lai Abrams’s Black Lotus: A Woman’s Search for Racial Identity (Gallery Books, 2016).

 

So I’ve been more interested in reading memoirs lately and the latest was one I found while browsing amazon in one of my late night insomnia moments. Let’s let B&N provide us with some context: “A unique and exquisitely wrought story of one multiracial woman’s journey to discover and embrace herself in a family that sought to deny her black heritage, Sil Lai Abrams shares her story in Black Lotus: A Woman’s Search for Racial Identity—an account that will undoubtedly ignite conversation on race, racial identity, and the human experience. Author and activist Sil Lai Abrams was born to a Chinese immigrant mother and a white American father. Out of her family, Sil Lai was the only one with a tousle of wild curls and brown skin. When she asked about her darker complexion, she was given vague answers. At fourteen, the man she knew her entire life as her birth-father divulged that Abrams was not his biological child, but instead the daughter of a man of African descent who didn’t know she existed. This shocking news sparked a quest for healing that would take her down the painful road to reclaim her identity despite the overt racism in her community and her own internalized racism and self-hatred. Abrams struggled with depression, abuse, and an addiction that nearly destroyed her. But eventually she would leave behind the shame over her birthright and move toward a celebration of her blackness. In Black Lotus, Abrams takes you on her odyssey filled with extreme highs and lows and the complexities of not only the black experience, but also the human one. This vivid story reexamines everything you think you know about racial identity while affirming the ability of the human spirit to triumph over tragedy. Ultimately, Black Lotus shines a light on the transformative power of truth and self-acceptance, and the importance of defining your personal identity on your own terms.” This memoir was extraordinary for the simple fact of Abrams’s will to survive and to carve out her own life, despite the many hurdles that were placed in her path. The biggest issue that comes out of this work is the damage wrought by parents, who simply are not ready for the process of raising a family. Abrams must contend with a familial life that is, as has been described, shrouded in secrets and equivocation. She does not know the identity of her biological father until well into her teens. By that point, her biological mother, for various reasons, is not in her life anymore, and she is being raised by the man she assumed is her biological father. Complicating matters is that Abrams does not always get along well with her stepmother, a situation that increases in tension as Abrams gets older and more rebellious. She begins experimenting with drugs and alcohol, eventually running away from home at numerous points. As Abrams reaches adulthood, she puts more of the dots together, understanding that much of her life replicates the path of her own mother and that her addictions carry with them a strong genetic component. Armed with this knowledge, Abrams is able to begin to separate herself from the more destructive influences of her family, eventually raising a child and getting sober. One of the more illuminating discourses that the memoir brings up appears in relation to passing. At some point in her teens, Abrams realizes that she’s passing as white, a choice she makes not only because of racist attitudes harbored by her own parents, but also by the cultural milieu in which she finds herself. When Abrams is finally able to get away from her home by embarking on a career as a model in New York City, she is able to embrace her black identity in a way that she never had before. At the same time, Abrams’s mixed race background complicates her identifications. Further into the memoir, she seeks a rapprochement with her estranged mother, understanding that her Chinese ethnic background was also critical to her life. In this sense, Abrams attempts to embrace the many aspects of her multiracial identity. The concluding arc of the memoir offers no easy resolutions for the many tragedies and trials that end up occurring, but Abrams’s tenacity to survive always remains ever present, grounding this memoir and moving it powerfully forward.

 

Buy the Book Here:

 

http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/black-lotus-sil-lai-abrams/1123131217

 

A Review of Fonda Lee’s Exo (Scholastic, 2017).

 

I’ve been behind on quite a bit of young adult fiction, which is admittedly out of character. As reward for a long day researching or writing, I typically indulge in this genre. My latest decadent adventure has been Fonda Lee’s Exo (Scholastic, 2017). Lee is also author of another young adult Zeroboxer, which I have not yet had a chance to read. We’ll let B&N provide us with some requisite context: “It's been a century of peace since Earth became a colony of an alien race with far reaches into the galaxy. Some die-hard extremists still oppose their rule on Earth, but Donovan Reyes isn't one of them. His dad holds the prestigious position of Prime Liaison in the collaborationist government, and Donovan's high social standing along with his exocel (a remarkable alien technology fused to his body) guarantee him a bright future in the security forces. That is, until a routine patrol goes awry and Donovan's abducted by the human revolutionary group Sapience. When Sapience realizes who Donovan's father is, they think they've found the ultimate bargaining chip. But the Prime Liaison doesn't negotiate with terrorists, not even for his own son. Left in the hands of terrorists who have more uses for him dead than alive, the fate of Earth rests on Donovan's survival. Because if Sapience kills him, it could spark another intergalactic war. And Earth didn't win the last one...” I was a little bit disappointed by this editorial description, as it doesn’t even name the alien species that has ostensibly taken over earth. These aliens are called the zhree, and they are the ones who have introduced the exocel technology. The zhree, as we discover, are one of at least two alien races that are operating around Earth. Eventually the zhree are able to come to a sort of rapprochement with humans, but not all humans want to collaborate with the zhree. Sapience, in particular, wants Earth to be free of any alien influence, including the use of exocel technology, and they will use any means to accomplish their goals. Thus, they are labeled as terrorists. Donovan is kidnapped by Sapience, an event begins the major plotting of the novel. Eventually Donovan is freed, but in the process of his captivity, he discovers that his long lost mother is none other than one of the leaders of the revolutionary group. Lee puts us effectively in Donovan’s shoes at this point. On the one hand, Donovan is a clear loyalist; he appreciates the zhree and the technology that has enhanced his body. He considers Sapience a dangerous insurgent group. On the other, he needs to find a way to reason with Sapience, if only because his mother’s fate is intertwined with many of their dangerous activities. What I appreciate about this work is that it does diverge from some of the more tired young adult speculative tropes. For instance, our main character is a teenage male, who is never marked as ordinary. Instead, it’s very clear from the outset that he’s a pretty gifted individual, with a privileged background. The novel does get hampered by the requisite romance plot, but that’s part of the generic territory, so we’ll have to forgive Lee for these indulgences here. Additionally, Lee accomplishes admirable world building, especially with the intriguing differences that appear between zhree and the humans. The effect of the zhree on human culture is apparent in the ways that humans are reorganized into tribal affiliations, something that is called “in erze.” Unfortunately, it’s unclear as to whether or not there will be more opportunity to delve into the world she’s generated here because she has a very long novel (that seems to be part of a series) that’s coming out of a major imprint. This novel is called Jade City, which is due out in November. We’ll look forward to this next publication, while also hoping that Exo might have yet more installments. I’m especially interested to see where a sequel might go with respect to the ongoing tensions between the zhree and other alien races, and how humans remain caught in-between.

 

Buy the Book Here:

 

http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/exo-fonda-lee/1124034614#productInfoTabs

 

 

 

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Asian American Literature Fans – Megareview for May 21, 2017

Posted by: stephenhongsohn

 Asian American Literature Fans – Megareview for May 21, 2017

It’s Asian Pacific American Month! Last year, I attempted a review writing challenge that nearly broke me. But I’m going to try again. I’ve been a little smarter about it this time, because I banked some of the reviews already (but not all). In any case, as per usual, I’m hoping to be matched in my challenge by a total of 31 comments (from unique users) by May 31st. We didn’t quite reach that goal last year, but maybe we can this year. An original post by a user will count as “five comments,” so that’s a quick way to get those numbers up. 

Challenge tally: me = 31 reviews; “you” = 7 comments (thanks Kai Cheang for his post and to eeoopark/ pylduck for a comment)… Come on folks! You can do it!  

I’ve completed the challenge this year!!

AALF uses “maximal ideological inclusiveness” to define Asian American literature. Thus, we review any writers working in the English language of Asian descent. We also review titles related to Asian American contexts without regard to authorial descent. We also consider titles in translation pending their relationship to America, broadly defined. Our point is precisely to cast the widest net possible.

With apologies as always for any typographical, grammatical, or factual errors. My intent in these reviews is to illuminate the wide-ranging and expansive terrain of Asian American and Asian Anglophone literatures. Please e-mail ssohnucr@gmail.com with any concerns you may have.

A Review of Jason Shiga’s Demon: Volume 1 (First Second, 2016).

 

I was totally stoked to see that Jason Shiga had a new graphic novel coming out, especially one with an intriguing title: Demon: Volume 1. We’ll let the official MacMillan page provide us with some important context: “No matter how hard he tries, Jimmy Yee cannot die. A noose around his neck, a razor across his wrist, and even a bullet to his head all yield the same results: he awakes from each suicide attempt, miraculously unharmed, in his shabby room at the Sunbeam Motel. Has he gone mad? Or has he truly died and found himself in hell? Jimmy is willing to tear the world down around him to get at the truth. Highly analytical and utterly unscrupulous, he is uniquely suited to unraveling this bizarre mystery.” So, first off, I’m going to have to provide spoilers, because it’s impossible to discuss the narrative unless I can provide the central reveal. Apparently, Jimmy Yee believes he is a demon, and his demonic capability allows him to take the form of the closest person to him when he dies in a particular body. This thesis would explain Jimmy’s experience waking up in a motel room, even after he has killed “himself.” This revelation is reliant upon an intriguing graphic narrative conceit: that we are seeing the panels created from Jimmy’s own presumptive perspective. That is, he believes he is at first waking up in the same body every single time, but he, in fact, has woken up in the body of the person in the next motel room. He doesn’t have access to a mirror before he kills himself, and apparently, he doesn’t take time to notice that his body might not be the same body as the time before. So, we have to give Shiga a little bit of room to suspend our disbelief (or consider the possibility that Jimmy’s thesis is entirely wrong) in order to allow for the possibility that Jimmy is body jumping. Eventually, it becomes clear that there is a larger issue at hand related to body jumping, and that Jimmy may not even be the only person who is able to do so. But the graphic novel ends before we can get too much further into this larger “conspiracy” related to body jumping, and why there is someone after Jimmy for his abilities. I’m not necessarily sold on the decision to split graphic narratives into multiple volumes. There doesn’t seem to be much logic around this move, except that it generates more income for publishers. Otherwise, I’m intrigued enough to see where Shiga’s next installment goes, even if I think it could probably have been condensed into fewer volumes HAHA. As per usual, Shiga relies upon a sketchy cartoon style to make this particular graphic novel come to life. He’s more on par with someone like MariNaomi than Adrian Tomine, who strikes a more realist tone to his images. The dark humor is probably best signature of Shiga’s work, as it has been something that appears in all of his prior works in some form or another.

 

For more on the book and purchase links, go here:

 

http://us.macmillan.com/demonvolume1/jasonshiga

 

A Review of Jason Shiga’s Demon Volume 2 (First Second, 2017) and Demon Volume 3 (First Second, 2017).

 

I read Shiga’s sequels to the first Demon in one sitting. I should probably have waited for the fourth and presumably final installment to come out before reviewing these titles, but they basically retain the outrageous hijinks found in the first installment.

 

The second focuses more specifically on the titular demon, Jimmy Yee, and his quest to be reunited with his daughter Sweetpea and the individuals responsible for the car crash that almost claimed his life. As readers have already discovered (if they read the first installment), Jimmy is a demon. Whenever he dies, he takes the body of the person closest to him. Shiga continually uses this power to both morbid and comic effects. Early on in this work, Jimmy’s still figuring out the extent of his powers and basically experimenting on himself. In one sequence, for instance, he kills himself next to a monkey enclosure and discovers that his body jumping powers are human specific. But the majority of this particular entry in the Demon series is really about Jimmy reuniting with his daughter, so he has to get past a bunch of officials who already are aware of his power and the fact that his daughter, too, has inherited the demon trait from him. There is apparently a governmental organization intent on cloning the powers of the demon not surprisingly related to the fact that it would allow this institution vast powers to control offices not only in the United States but also across the world. So, capturing Jimmy and his daughter is of paramount concern, as they attempt to perfect the “demonizer.” Certainly, this plot is ridiculous, but compared against the many movies we see today, I suppose we can’t fault Shiga too much for it. If there is any critique I had of this kind of work, it’s that I sometimes didn’t even understand what was going on in the panels because I wasn’t sometimes sure who Jimmy was anymore or who Sweetpea was anymore since they presumably died and had taken on the body of someone else, sometimes someone outside of the panel plane. Shiga solves this problem only to a certain extent: so long as the person who just died and the next body are nearby, the “demon” always retains his own head at least to himself. In other words, while his psyche jumps to the next body, the demon sees himself in mirrors as himself, while others see him as the person the demon has jumped into. So, at least continuity across panels is ultimately created because the reader can see the demon as he sees himself. Nevertheless, Jimmy and Sweetpea die so many times and often with such rapidity, I still found myself a little bit disoriented.

 

The third installment is perhaps the most speculative of the bunch, as we’ve moved about a century into the future. Jimmy and Sweetpea have been in hiding, for fear that someone will find out about their existence and work to exploit their admittedly unique powers. This future is not so exciting: lattes now cost something like $80 and a night of sushi would be enough to bankrupt most millionaires (I’m being a little bit hyperbolic here, but not completely). Jimmy and Sweetpea exist in a sort of existential bind: what do they do with their time since they’re basically immortal? Cocaine seems to be a nice way to waste endless years, which is something they snort, but this kind of plotting is all just a red herring: major antagonists from previous installments still exist, but the re-tread of previous plotting can seem tired. Shiga is prepared for the reader to be experience a little bit of ennui, which is why the ludicrousness achieves record levels in this work. Shiga definitely put tremendous thought into the problems of keeping a demon contained within a prison. As one of the major antagonists reappears from the earlier works, he must attempt to keep Sweetpea circumscribed in a finite area through the tactical use of obstacles and specific types of human bodies. Obviously flouting politically correctness, Shiga, for instance, employs conjoined twins as one of the useful detriments to the demon’s powers. As such, the courtyard of the prison housing Sweetpea contains numerous conjoined twins, which would necessarily create a significant challenge for a demon, who would have to find ways to deal with psychic transference within the same body, thereby slowing body jumping down. The levels of ingenuity here are obviously grotesque, but with a work like this one, Shiga went all in. My one minor quibble with this particular entry is that I wish Shiga had done more work with the panels, especially in the futuristic era. Shiga’s cartoon-ish style, I think, works best for the topic given its craziness, but at times, I wouldn’t have minded a sweeping panel even in Shiga’s signature sketch styling that gave a more panoramic view of the future, something along the scale of a vista you might even seen in Shaun Tan’s work.

 

There is one particular scene (I can’t recall if it was in Volume 2 or Volume 3) that will perhaps remain one of the most jarring I have ever witnessed and read in a graphic novel (and that includes the scenes of cannibalism in Liu’s Monstress) that both made me laugh out loud and cringe so deeply inside I think the neighbor across the street probably heard me. I would be willing to bet that anyone whose read the series knows the sequence I am talking about. I would still rank it behind the scene from the 9th episode of Fortitude Season 2, but the outrageousness is still pretty on par. This series is not for the faint of heart, and Shiga knows it. This series is undoubtedly offensive, but it’s also immensely readable: it’s like that catastrophically bad roller coaster sequence in Final Destination 3: it’s going to be gruesome, but somehow you can’t look away.

 

Buy the Books Here:

 

http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/demon-volume-2-jason-shiga/1123426274

 

http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/demon-volume-3-jason-shiga/1124116019

 

 

A Review of Thi Bui’s The Best We Could Do (Harry N. Abrams, 2017).

 

It’s hard not to want to compare Thi Bui’s The Best We Could Do (Harry N. Abrams, 2017) to G.B. Tran’s Vietnamerica, so I’ll try to avoid doing so. As a note, both are FABULOUS, so don’t let that comparison draw you away from either. Bui’s graphic memoir focuses on a kind of familial recovery narrative. The graphic memoir opens with the birth of Bui’s son, a cause for much celebration, but also of reflection. The difficult labor is one in which her own mother cannot stand to be in the same room, despite the fact that Bui’s mother gave birth to six children of her own. At first, it’s obviously unclear why Bui’s mother might have been so affected by Bui’s long delivery period, but the narrative unfolds to clarify the problems of conception that have been tied to the family given its traumatic history, one inevitably altered and disrupted by the course of the war. Bui, in particular, becomes the chronicler of family history, compelled to look back and figure out why the rupture between her mother and father became so deep, one that lead to an eventual divorce. As the readers discover, Bui’s father had to endure a rocky upbringing involving unstable guardianship. By the time Bui’s father meets the woman who will be his wife, the stage is already set for more turmoil given his background. Bui’s mother, by contrast, grows up in more idyllic circumstances, but the obvious rise of conflict in Vietnam will soon alter her life’s course as well. The initial years of marriage are placed under incredible strain due to the rising conflict in Vietnam. Obviously, things only get worse as 1975 approaches. Once South Vietnam falls and the Americans have evacuated, Bui’s family remains in Vietnam, waiting for the right opportunity to leave. They eventually secure passages on a boat, but there is no guarantee that they’ll be found at sea. Here, the narrative treads the ground of some other works that have shown how perilous that particular sea bound passage can be, but fortunately for Bui’s family, they are able to make it to a refugee camp with relatively little complications. Bui’s family eventually chooses to settle in the United States. Though their lives take many more years to come to any sense of security, the family’s hardscrabble background positions them well enough to navigate the tricky terrain of American acculturation. What Bui’s graphic narrative does so well is that it does not remain rooted in sentimentality. The recovery narrative that spurs Bui in the first place is never quite completed in some sense, and she’s well aware that her decision to delve into her family’s past cannot help many of the ruptures nor will it necessarily bring her family closer together. But, what is obviously crucial for Bui is that it gives her a stronger sense of context and a much larger appreciation for her parents as survivors. My one minor critique of this exceptional memoir is its framing conceit around the reproductive future. While I can certainly understand the critical importance of intergenerationality in the transnational family saga, it did make me wonder about what kind of tomorrow is available for the migrant child who chooses not to enter into the heteronuclear social structure for one reason or another. Finally, I was incredibly happy to see that the entire memoir is PAGINATED, which means I will be sure to adopt this work for future courses!

 

For more on the book, go here:

 

http://www.abramsbooks.com/product/best-we-could-do_9781419718779/

 

 

 

A Review of Ed Lin’s Incensed (Soho Press, 2016).

 

Ed Lin’s Incensed (Soho Press, 2016) is part of the Taipei Night Market series that began with Ghost Month (2014). Our first person storyteller and armchair detective, Jing-nan, is back for more Taiwan-based hijinks. Let’s let B&N provide us with some contexts here: “In Taiwan, the Mid-Autumn Festival is a time for prioritizing family. When 25-year-old Jing-nan’s gangster uncle, Big Eye, asks a favor, Jing-nan can’t exactly say no, especially because two goons are going to follow him around to make sure he gets it done right. The favor is this: Big Eye’s 16-year-old daughter, Mei-ling, has a biker boyfriend from the wrong side of the tracks—in Big Eye’s gangster opinion—and Big Eye wants Jing-nan to bring her to Taipei, away from the bad influences, and straighten her out. It doesn’t take Jing-nan long to discover Mei-ling is even more trouble than the average bratty, rebellious teenager. She’s been spoiled rotten and doesn’t know how to take no for an answer. She has her father’s thugs wrapped around her finger and quickly becomes the miniature dictator of Jing-nan’s life. But Mei-ling is also hiding a secret—one that puts her in harm’s way. If Jing-nan wants to save his cousin from her own demons, he has to figure out the truth, even if it tears his family apart—again.” The other thing I’d add to this editorial description is that Lin surrounds his main characters with a supporting cast that beefs up the comedic tonalities of the novel. Additionally, while Jing-nan has to balance his caretaking act alongside keeping his girlfriend Nancy satisfied. As Jing-nan continues to find success through his Night Market food stall (called Unknown Pleasures in a nod to the album name by Joy Division), Nancy sometimes rails against what she perceives to be a kind of apolitical attitude Jing-nan espouses. Crucial to this novel is the global movement around queer equality. Nancy’s activist connections, for instance, are trying to champion for more social and cultural recognition of Taiwanese queers and LGBT communities, a stance that certainly puts her at odds with many of her peers. Jing-nan must face up to some of his homophobic tendencies in order to support Nancy’s causes, while also coming to the realization that he must embrace a more cosmopolitan attitude in the way he understands his own family. If there was a letdown for me concerning this novel, it occurs with respect to the mystery and thriller elements. The book seemed marketed in this vein, but this type of plotting device does not even occur probably until well over half the novel is already over, so I think it wasn’t quite right to publicize this novel through those generic conceits. The other thing to note is that you should NOT read this novel if you’re hungry. Lin goes all in with “food pornography,” especially because the narrator is a purveyor of trendy and tasty dishes. Often times, the characters would be at some sort of new, hip establishment trying out a savory, delectable dish. Reading this novel right before bedtime became difficult simply due to the fact that I had to retain control over my desire to start snacking. Finally, one of the biggest strengths of this novel is the delicate way that Lin portrays Jing-nan’s complicated affiliations and loyalties. Despite understanding that his uncle is quite crooked, there is a sort of filiality that he feels he must maintain. This pressure no doubt emerges precisely because Jing-nan cannot claim very many people as part of biological family structures. For better or for worse, Big Eye and Mei-ling are the closest he has to that kind of family, so he suffers under this obligation. It remains to be seen whether or not there will be another installment in the Night Market series, but it seems evident that Jing-nan may have to make a choice between staying true to his sense of personal ethics and maintaining ties to his gangster Uncle. As always, Lin’s comic tonality makes this reading experience one that brings forth both intrigue and laughter.

 

Buy the Book Here:

 

http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/incensed-ed-lin/1123237298#productInfoTabs

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

comments

Asian American Literature Fans – Megareview for May 21, 2016

Posted by: stephenhongsohn

 Asian American Literature Fans – Megareview for May 21, 2016

It’s Asian Pacific American Month! Last year, I attempted a review writing challenge that nearly broke me. But I’m going to try again. I’ve been a little smarter about it this time, because I banked some of the reviews already (but not all). In any case, as per usual, I’m hoping to be matched in my challenge by a total of 31 comments (from unique users) by May 31st. We didn’t quite reach that goal last year, but maybe we can this year. An original post by a user will count as “five comments,” so that’s a quick way to get those numbers up. 

Challenge tally: me = 31 reviews; “you” = 7 comments (thanks Kai Cheang for his post and to eeoopark/ pylduck for a comment)… Come on folks! You can do it!  

I’ve completed the challenge this year!!

AALF uses “maximal ideological inclusiveness” to define Asian American literature. Thus, we review any writers working in the English language of Asian descent. We also review titles related to Asian American contexts without regard to authorial descent. We also consider titles in translation pending their relationship to America, broadly defined. Our point is precisely to cast the widest net possible.

With apologies as always for any typographical, grammatical, or factual errors. My intent in these reviews is to illuminate the wide-ranging and expansive terrain of Asian American and Asian Anglophone literatures. Please e-mail ssohnucr@gmail.com with any concerns you may have.

A Review of Jason Shiga’s Demon: Volume 1 (First Second, 2016).

 

I was totally stoked to see that Jason Shiga had a new graphic novel coming out, especially one with an intriguing title: Demon: Volume 1. We’ll let the official MacMillan page provide us with some important context: “No matter how hard he tries, Jimmy Yee cannot die. A noose around his neck, a razor across his wrist, and even a bullet to his head all yield the same results: he awakes from each suicide attempt, miraculously unharmed, in his shabby room at the Sunbeam Motel. Has he gone mad? Or has he truly died and found himself in hell? Jimmy is willing to tear the world down around him to get at the truth. Highly analytical and utterly unscrupulous, he is uniquely suited to unraveling this bizarre mystery.” So, first off, I’m going to have to provide spoilers, because it’s impossible to discuss the narrative unless I can provide the central reveal. Apparently, Jimmy Yee believes he is a demon, and his demonic capability allows him to take the form of the closest person to him when he dies in a particular body. This thesis would explain Jimmy’s experience waking up in a motel room, even after he has killed “himself.” This revelation is reliant upon an intriguing graphic narrative conceit: that we are seeing the panels created from Jimmy’s own presumptive perspective. That is, he believes he is at first waking up in the same body every single time, but he, in fact, has woken up in the body of the person in the next motel room. He doesn’t have access to a mirror before he kills himself, and apparently, he doesn’t take time to notice that his body might not be the same body as the time before. So, we have to give Shiga a little bit of room to suspend our disbelief (or consider the possibility that Jimmy’s thesis is entirely wrong) in order to allow for the possibility that Jimmy is body jumping. Eventually, it becomes clear that there is a larger issue at hand related to body jumping, and that Jimmy may not even be the only person who is able to do so. But the graphic novel ends before we can get too much further into this larger “conspiracy” related to body jumping, and why there is someone after Jimmy for his abilities. I’m not necessarily sold on the decision to split graphic narratives into multiple volumes. There doesn’t seem to be much logic around this move, except that it generates more income for publishers. Otherwise, I’m intrigued enough to see where Shiga’s next installment goes, even if I think it could probably have been condensed into fewer volumes HAHA. As per usual, Shiga relies upon a sketchy cartoon style to make this particular graphic novel come to life. He’s more on par with someone like MariNaomi than Adrian Tomine, who strikes a more realist tone to his images. The dark humor is probably best signature of Shiga’s work, as it has been something that appears in all of his prior works in some form or another.

 

For more on the book and purchase links, go here:

 

http://us.macmillan.com/demonvolume1/jasonshiga

 

A Review of Jason Shiga’s Demon Volume 2 (First Second, 2017) and Demon Volume 3 (First Second, 2017).

 

I read Shiga’s sequels to the first Demon in one sitting. I should probably have waited for the fourth and presumably final installment to come out before reviewing these titles, but they basically retain the outrageous hijinks found in the first installment.

 

The second focuses more specifically on the titular demon, Jimmy Yee, and his quest to be reunited with his daughter Sweetpea and the individuals responsible for the car crash that almost claimed his life. As readers have already discovered (if they read the first installment), Jimmy is a demon. Whenever he dies, he takes the body of the person closest to him. Shiga continually uses this power to both morbid and comic effects. Early on in this work, Jimmy’s still figuring out the extent of his powers and basically experimenting on himself. In one sequence, for instance, he kills himself next to a monkey enclosure and discovers that his body jumping powers are human specific. But the majority of this particular entry in the Demon series is really about Jimmy reuniting with his daughter, so he has to get past a bunch of officials who already are aware of his power and the fact that his daughter, too, has inherited the demon trait from him. There is apparently a governmental organization intent on cloning the powers of the demon not surprisingly related to the fact that it would allow this institution vast powers to control offices not only in the United States but also across the world. So, capturing Jimmy and his daughter is of paramount concern, as they attempt to perfect the “demonizer.” Certainly, this plot is ridiculous, but compared against the many movies we see today, I suppose we can’t fault Shiga too much for it. If there is any critique I had of this kind of work, it’s that I sometimes didn’t even understand what was going on in the panels because I wasn’t sometimes sure who Jimmy was anymore or who Sweetpea was anymore since they presumably died and had taken on the body of someone else, sometimes someone outside of the panel plane. Shiga solves this problem only to a certain extent: so long as the person who just died and the next body are nearby, the “demon” always retains his own head at least to himself. In other words, while his psyche jumps to the next body, the demon sees himself in mirrors as himself, while others see him as the person the demon has jumped into. So, at least continuity across panels is ultimately created because the reader can see the demon as he sees himself. Nevertheless, Jimmy and Sweetpea die so many times and often with such rapidity, I still found myself a little bit disoriented.

 

The third installment is perhaps the most speculative of the bunch, as we’ve moved about a century into the future. Jimmy and Sweetpea have been in hiding, for fear that someone will find out about their existence and work to exploit their admittedly unique powers. This future is not so exciting: lattes now cost something like $80 and a night of sushi would be enough to bankrupt most millionaires (I’m being a little bit hyperbolic here, but not completely). Jimmy and Sweetpea exist in a sort of existential bind: what do they do with their time since they’re basically immortal? Cocaine seems to be a nice way to waste endless years, which is something they snort, but this kind of plotting is all just a red herring: major antagonists from previous installments still exist, but the re-tread of previous plotting can seem tired. Shiga is prepared for the reader to be experience a little bit of ennui, which is why the ludicrousness achieves record levels in this work. Shiga definitely put tremendous thought into the problems of keeping a demon contained within a prison. As one of the major antagonists reappears from the earlier works, he must attempt to keep Sweetpea circumscribed in a finite area through the tactical use of obstacles and specific types of human bodies. Obviously flouting politically correctness, Shiga, for instance, employs conjoined twins as one of the useful detriments to the demon’s powers. As such, the courtyard of the prison housing Sweetpea contains numerous conjoined twins, which would necessarily create a significant challenge for a demon, who would have to find ways to deal with psychic transference within the same body, thereby slowing body jumping down. The levels of ingenuity here are obviously grotesque, but with a work like this one, Shiga went all in. My one minor quibble with this particular entry is that I wish Shiga had done more work with the panels, especially in the futuristic era. Shiga’s cartoon-ish style, I think, works best for the topic given its craziness, but at times, I wouldn’t have minded a sweeping panel even in Shiga’s signature sketch styling that gave a more panoramic view of the future, something along the scale of a vista you might even seen in Shaun Tan’s work.

 

There is one particular scene (I can’t recall if it was in Volume 2 or Volume 3) that will perhaps remain one of the most jarring I have ever witnessed and read in a graphic novel (and that includes the scenes of cannibalism in Liu’s Monstress) that both made me laugh out loud and cringe so deeply inside I think the neighbor across the street probably heard me. I would be willing to bet that anyone whose read the series knows the sequence I am talking about. I would still rank it behind the scene from the 9th episode of Fortitude Season 2, but the outrageousness is still pretty on par. This series is not for the faint of heart, and Shiga knows it. This series is undoubtedly offensive, but it’s also immensely readable: it’s like that catastrophically bad roller coaster sequence in Final Destination 3: it’s going to be gruesome, but somehow you can’t look away.

 

Buy the Books Here:

 

http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/demon-volume-2-jason-shiga/1123426274

 

http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/demon-volume-3-jason-shiga/1124116019

 

 

A Review of Thi Bui’s The Best We Could Do (Harry N. Abrams, 2017).

 

It’s hard not to want to compare Thi Bui’s The Best We Could Do (Harry N. Abrams, 2017) to G.B. Tran’s Vietnamerica, so I’ll try to avoid doing so. As a note, both are FABULOUS, so don’t let that comparison draw you away from either. Bui’s graphic memoir focuses on a kind of familial recovery narrative. The graphic memoir opens with the birth of Bui’s son, a cause for much celebration, but also of reflection. The difficult labor is one in which her own mother cannot stand to be in the same room, despite the fact that Bui’s mother gave birth to six children of her own. At first, it’s obviously unclear why Bui’s mother might have been so affected by Bui’s long delivery period, but the narrative unfolds to clarify the problems of conception that have been tied to the family given its traumatic history, one inevitably altered and disrupted by the course of the war. Bui, in particular, becomes the chronicler of family history, compelled to look back and figure out why the rupture between her mother and father became so deep, one that lead to an eventual divorce. As the readers discover, Bui’s father had to endure a rocky upbringing involving unstable guardianship. By the time Bui’s father meets the woman who will be his wife, the stage is already set for more turmoil given his background. Bui’s mother, by contrast, grows up in more idyllic circumstances, but the obvious rise of conflict in Vietnam will soon alter her life’s course as well. The initial years of marriage are placed under incredible strain due to the rising conflict in Vietnam. Obviously, things only get worse as 1975 approaches. Once South Vietnam falls and the Americans have evacuated, Bui’s family remains in Vietnam, waiting for the right opportunity to leave. They eventually secure passages on a boat, but there is no guarantee that they’ll be found at sea. Here, the narrative treads the ground of some other works that have shown how perilous that particular sea bound passage can be, but fortunately for Bui’s family, they are able to make it to a refugee camp with relatively little complications. Bui’s family eventually chooses to settle in the United States. Though their lives take many more years to come to any sense of security, the family’s hardscrabble background positions them well enough to navigate the tricky terrain of American acculturation. What Bui’s graphic narrative does so well is that it does not remain rooted in sentimentality. The recovery narrative that spurs Bui in the first place is never quite completed in some sense, and she’s well aware that her decision to delve into her family’s past cannot help many of the ruptures nor will it necessarily bring her family closer together. But, what is obviously crucial for Bui is that it gives her a stronger sense of context and a much larger appreciation for her parents as survivors. My one minor critique of this exceptional memoir is its framing conceit around the reproductive future. While I can certainly understand the critical importance of intergenerationality in the transnational family saga, it did make me wonder about what kind of tomorrow is available for the migrant child who chooses not to enter into the heteronuclear social structure for one reason or another. Finally, I was incredibly happy to see that the entire memoir is PAGINATED, which means I will be sure to adopt this work for future courses!

 

For more on the book, go here:

 

http://www.abramsbooks.com/product/best-we-could-do_9781419718779/

 

 

 

A Review of Ed Lin’s Incensed (Soho Press, 2016).

 

Ed Lin’s Incensed (Soho Press, 2016) is part of the Taipei Night Market series that began with Ghost Month (2014). Our first person storyteller and armchair detective, Jing-nan, is back for more Taiwan-based hijinks. Let’s let B&N provide us with some contexts here: “In Taiwan, the Mid-Autumn Festival is a time for prioritizing family. When 25-year-old Jing-nan’s gangster uncle, Big Eye, asks a favor, Jing-nan can’t exactly say no, especially because two goons are going to follow him around to make sure he gets it done right. The favor is this: Big Eye’s 16-year-old daughter, Mei-ling, has a biker boyfriend from the wrong side of the tracks—in Big Eye’s gangster opinion—and Big Eye wants Jing-nan to bring her to Taipei, away from the bad influences, and straighten her out. It doesn’t take Jing-nan long to discover Mei-ling is even more trouble than the average bratty, rebellious teenager. She’s been spoiled rotten and doesn’t know how to take no for an answer. She has her father’s thugs wrapped around her finger and quickly becomes the miniature dictator of Jing-nan’s life. But Mei-ling is also hiding a secret—one that puts her in harm’s way. If Jing-nan wants to save his cousin from her own demons, he has to figure out the truth, even if it tears his family apart—again.” The other thing I’d add to this editorial description is that Lin surrounds his main characters with a supporting cast that beefs up the comedic tonalities of the novel. Additionally, while Jing-nan has to balance his caretaking act alongside keeping his girlfriend Nancy satisfied. As Jing-nan continues to find success through his Night Market food stall (called Unknown Pleasures in a nod to the album name by Joy Division), Nancy sometimes rails against what she perceives to be a kind of apolitical attitude Jing-nan espouses. Crucial to this novel is the global movement around queer equality. Nancy’s activist connections, for instance, are trying to champion for more social and cultural recognition of Taiwanese queers and LGBT communities, a stance that certainly puts her at odds with many of her peers. Jing-nan must face up to some of his homophobic tendencies in order to support Nancy’s causes, while also coming to the realization that he must embrace a more cosmopolitan attitude in the way he understands his own family. If there was a letdown for me concerning this novel, it occurs with respect to the mystery and thriller elements. The book seemed marketed in this vein, but this type of plotting device does not even occur probably until well over half the novel is already over, so I think it wasn’t quite right to publicize this novel through those generic conceits. The other thing to note is that you should NOT read this novel if you’re hungry. Lin goes all in with “food pornography,” especially because the narrator is a purveyor of trendy and tasty dishes. Often times, the characters would be at some sort of new, hip establishment trying out a savory, delectable dish. Reading this novel right before bedtime became difficult simply due to the fact that I had to retain control over my desire to start snacking. Finally, one of the biggest strengths of this novel is the delicate way that Lin portrays Jing-nan’s complicated affiliations and loyalties. Despite understanding that his uncle is quite crooked, there is a sort of filiality that he feels he must maintain. This pressure no doubt emerges precisely because Jing-nan cannot claim very many people as part of biological family structures. For better or for worse, Big Eye and Mei-ling are the closest he has to that kind of family, so he suffers under this obligation. It remains to be seen whether or not there will be another installment in the Night Market series, but it seems evident that Jing-nan may have to make a choice between staying true to his sense of personal ethics and maintaining ties to his gangster Uncle. As always, Lin’s comic tonality makes this reading experience one that brings forth both intrigue and laughter.

 

Buy the Book Here:

 

http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/incensed-ed-lin/1123237298#productInfoTabs

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Asian American Literature Fans – Megareview for May 17, 2017

Posted by: stephenhongsohn

 Asian American Literature Fans – Megareview for May 17, 2017

It’s Asian Pacific American Month! Last year, I attempted a review writing challenge that nearly broke me. But I’m going to try again. I’ve been a little smarter about it this time, because I banked some of the reviews already (but not all). In any case, as per usual, I’m hoping to be matched in my challenge by a total of 31 comments (from unique users) by May 31st. We didn’t quite reach that goal last year, but maybe we can this year. An original post by a user will count as “five comments,” so that’s a quick way to get those numbers up. 

Challenge tally: me = 26 reviews; “you” = 6 comments (thanks Kai Cheang for his post and to eeoopark for a comment)… Come on folks! You can do it!

AALF uses “maximal ideological inclusiveness” to define Asian American literature. Thus, we review any writers working in the English language of Asian descent. We also review titles related to Asian American contexts without regard to authorial descent. We also consider titles in translation pending their relationship to America, broadly defined. Our point is precisely to cast the widest net possible.

With apologies as always for any typographical, grammatical, or factual errors. My intent in these reviews is to illuminate the wide-ranging and expansive terrain of Asian American and Asian Anglophone literatures. Please e-mail ssohnucr@gmail.com with any concerns you may have.

So this post focuses on books that are coming out of Penguin and Associated Imprints. I occasionally group these books together because they are all eligible to request under their CFIS program. Information for the CFIS program can be found here:

 

 

http://www.penguin.com/services-academic/cfis/

 

 

Instructors are eligible for five free exam copies per year; this service is perhaps the best exam copy service of all major publishers!

 

In this post, review of all Penguin titles (and Associated Imprints): Sarah Kuhn’s Heroine Complex (Daw Books, 2016); Sabaa Tahir’s A Torch Against the Night (Razorbill, 2016); Krys Lee’s How I Became A North Korean (Viking, 2016); Marina Budhos’s Watched (Wendy Lamb Books, 2016); Michelle Sagara’s Grave (2017); Mohsin Hamid’s Exit West (Riverhead, 2017); Katie Kitamura’s A Separation (Viking, 2017); Marie Lu’s The Midnight Star (G.P. Putnam’s Sons Books for Young Readers).

 

 

A Review of Sarah Kuhn’s Heroine Complex (Daw Books, 2016).

 

Well, I’ve been spending very long days revising critical writing, which is a kind of task that requires so much focus that the only thing I can manage to do after that, is to cozy up to a novel, potentially something more on the lighter side. After one such split infinitive filled day, I chose Sarah Kuhn’s Heroine Complex (Daw Books, 2016), which was precisely the right choice. At first, given the title and the cover, I thought the book was a young adult fiction, but about half way through, an explicit sex scene made it quite clear I was not in that territory. This novel is something more like a paranormal romance, but with a comic tone. Indeed, what sets this book apart from many others is Kuhn’s focus on the wit of its protagonist, Evie Tanaka, a mixed race Japanese American, who must learn to become something other than a sidekick to her best friend and superhero buddy known best by a superhero stage name: Aveda Jupiter. Evie is a firecracker: she drops joke-bombs constantly, referencing (questionable) popular culture like the television series 90210 (the original mind you) and songs like “Eternal Flame” by the Bangles. Evie even has the guts to call a song by The Backstreet Boys a power ballad. Yes, my friends. She’s got guts. Aveda, like Evie, is Asian American. Aveda’s “real name” is Annie Chang, which cracked me up, because I went to school with a girl named Annie Chang, who also happened to be Chinese American. Evie’s originally part of Aveda Jupiter’s superhero posse and entourage, folks who help with things like publicity (a lesbian named Lucy) and technological outreach (a handsome, nerdy, and super analytical guy named Nate and healing spells (Aveda Jupiter’s high school crush, a guy named Scott). Evie also has to find time to take care of her younger teenage sister Bea, especially because their absentee Dad is traipsing all across the world with his yogini Lara. The novel is set in San Francisco, and world building is required because a select number of individuals have developed minor superpowers. Scott, Aveda, and Evie all possess some magical might that has developed from portals that come from the Otherworld, a place that also includes demons. Once this portal opens, others begin to open up, and individuals like Aveda make it a point to become superheroes in order to stop the tide of demons who come through. With comic flair, Kuhn makes it so that these demons can only enter our world through imprinting on the first Earth object that they see. In the opening gambit of the novel, this first object is a cupcake (because we’re in a bakery), and these demons make it so that cupcakes have fangs and are trying to drain the life out of their human victims. When Aveda develops a serious leg injury and a serious zit outbreak, she encourages Evie to take on her persona in order to cover for her until she feels better, but once Evie becomes the substitute, other mayhem occurs. First, Evie’s powers become revealed to the world at large: she’s able to somehow invoke fire starting capabilities, though she does not know how to control her flame creating skills. Second, this new fire power makes Aveda gain lots of new followers on social media, so Aveda realizes that she has to keep Evie in her place until she can devise a plan to that would allow her to also develop fire powers once she gets back on her literal feet. But more trouble begins to brew when Evie notices a strange pattern in the way that the latest demons coming through the portal act: they seem to be more sentient, they seem to be more complex, as if they are evolving into something else. But I’ll leave the plotting here to discuss other things, like the fact that at first, I thought I was going to hate the romance plot element. Nate, the handsome, technological expert with the bod of a beefcake and who becomes Evie’s “orgasms-only” buddy begins to come off as something too good to be true. In other hands, this trope is hardwired into the paranormal romance. Indeed, the fact of the paranormal romance, especially in young adult fictions, is that this nerdy dude with the heart of gold and the body of gold is actually somehow destined for our not-so-ordinary extraordinary heroine, but Kuhn gives us lots of surprises in the concluding arc not only with Nate, but other characters as well. Even Aveda, who I found incredibly annoying, manages to find a measure of redemption because Kuhn knows how to generate some measure of charaterological development, thus moving this novel above and beyond many others in a similar genre and aimed for a similar audience. Only time will tell whether or not there will be a sequel, but signs suggest that there could be one, given the conclusion. Finally, I will say that as a once-upon-a-time reader of the X-Men comics, it is so refreshing to see a novel about superheroes written by an Asian American. It is truly a new era. When I was first reading those comics, you had the strangest storylines occasionally come up: for instance, there was a British mutant with purple hair named Betsy Braddock, who will later randomly get kidnapped, only to return to the X-Men team looking like an Asian ninja. You later find out that her psyche got swapped into another body or something like that and that she wasn’t really Asian in the first place, but the whole storyline was so bizarre: didn’t the other characters realize that just because the person who came back to the team had purple hair didn’t mean she was the same person? Didn’t they realize that she was Asian? LOL. I probably have some plot elements wrong, because it’s been literally two decades since I read that one, but I remember at that time I was so confused. Looking back on it, I wonder about whether or not that storyline might have been different if an Asian American writer was behind the helm. An Asian American artist may have been on staff around that time (Jim Lee), but I can’t remember. Fortunately, we’re in a new era, and comic books are being developed by writers and artists in tandem, many of whom are Asian American. Further still, we’re getting novels like the ones that Kuhn has written here in which we can see that Asian Americans are worthy of their own complicated, complex superhero plots, ready to save the world while defeating demons in the form of cupcakes. Yum.

 

Buy the Book Here:

 

http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/heroine-complex-sarah-kuhn/1122789420#productInfoTabs

 

 

A Review of Sabaa Tahir’s A Torch Against the Night (Razorbill, 2016).

 

Sabaa Tahir’s debut, An Ember in the Ashes, was my favorite young adult fiction I read last year purely based upon the entertainment factor. I was convinced that she’d have a difficult time replicating the success she had with that narrative. I’m glad I was definitively wrong. The sequel is just as exciting and plot-driven as the first, and with all the requisite genre necessities that come with the paranormal romance, so fans of this kind of reading will not be disappointed. Our favorites return from the original, especially our primary character: Elias, the melancholic Mask, and Laia, the Scholar who seeks to break her brother out of the maximum security prison known otherwise as Kauf. Elias and Laia are on the run from the Empire, trying to find a way to get to Kauf. They eventually meet up with Keenan, a Scholar working for the Rebellion, and Izzi, who had been working with Laia when Laia was functioning as an undercover “slave” for the Commandant (in the first book). The other major plotline involves Helene, who has become the Blood Shrike and is forced to do the dirty work of the newly crowned emperor and winner of the Trials (from the first book), Marcus. Helene’s quest is to bring back Elias and have him publicly executed. At every turn, her job seems to be made more difficult. Elias’s mother, the evil Commandant, is undermining her authority, while assigning a spy (named Harper) to work as part of her guard detail. Of course, Tahir knows her genre tropes: each character must have their own love triangle. While Elias and Keenan battle for Laia’s affections in one subtle way or another, Helene tries to figure out how she can avoid having to kill Elias, even if it means he gets to be with Laia. Oh, the torment! In any case, this novel is in many ways as bleak as the first one. Hordes of scholars are being butchered, and even the tribespeople, who sort of function as middlemen, cannot assume they are safe. Tahir also adds much more texture to the fictional world, as we discover crucial information about one of the primary evil, magical figures known as the Nightbringer and how he is connected to a spiritual plane that is presided over by the mysterious SoulCatcher. So, I definitely had to try to ration myself with this book, forcing myself to put it down every night, but on the third night, I gave up, and just read it to the finish. I especially appreciated how this book seems to function as a stand-alone. That is, there’s enough of a set-up, exposition, climax and resolution for me to feel as though this book wasn’t just a stepping-stone to a climactic final volume. Strangely enough, I always assumed this book would be a trilogy, though there were indications online that this series was supposed to be a Duology. Now, there are rumblings that this series is meant to have at least four books, and I’m not complaining at all, except for the 2018 anticipated release date of the next book. Two years? Ijustcant.

 

Buy the Book Here:

 

http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/a-torch-against-the-night-sabaa-tahir/1122653618

 

A Review of Krys Lee’s How I Became A North Korean (Viking, 2016).

 

So, Krys Lee moves out of the first publications club with her debut novel How I Became A North Korean (Viking, 2016). Lee is also author of the superbly melancholic collection Drifting House. The “I” of the title is perhaps the most intriguing element of this work, as it details another “form” of the passing narrative. Though we’ve typically reserved “passing” for racial registers, this novel offers a form based upon ethno-linguistic identifications. There are three narrators in this novel, involving alternating first person voices. As B&N tells it: “Yongju is an accomplished student from one of North Korea's most prominent families. Jangmi, on the other hand, has had to fend for herself since childhood, most recently by smuggling goods across the border. Then there is Danny, a Chinese-American teenager whose quirks and precocious intelligence have long made him an outcast in his California high school. These three disparate lives converge when they flee their homes, finding themselves in a small Chinese town just across the river from North Korea. As they fight to survive in a place where danger seems to close in on all sides, in the form of government informants, husbands, thieves, abductors, and even missionaries, they come to form a kind of adoptive family. But will Yongju, Jangmi and Danny find their way to the better lives they risked everything for?” Yongju and Jangmi are both North Koreans who are “forced” into harrowing crossings into China. Danny is actually an ethnic Korean, but part of a family who had lived in the border region of China (they are called “joseon-jok”). He and his father have moved the United States, but Danny’s mother still lives in the Chinese border region. The novel’s narrative threads move together once Danny travels back to China in the wake of what his father thinks is a failed suicide attempt. Once there he discovers that his mother is engaging in an extramarital affair. Confused and traumatized by this knowledge, Danny goes into a kind of hiding, where he meets up with North Korean teens, who are on the run from border patrol and any other entities. They eke out a meager living in the mountains, but for Danny, his becoming “North Korean” allows him a fraternity he never had. Jangmi eventually settles with them for a short time, before she leaves them behind (and stealing most of their important supplies). Jangmi’s storyline is perhaps the most tragic given that she is forced into various kinds of human trafficking. Yongju connects most with Jangmi in this way because his own little sister and mother are likely sent into human trafficking sectors. The concluding arc seems all three reunited under the auspices of a missionary group, but this time together is very strained. They see their time with the missionaries as just another form of imprisonment, and they eventually crack under their sequestration. The crux of this novel is clearly Danny’s presence, as he is the one who eventually is able to secure their release from missionary detention, but his narrative is quite exceptional. Indeed, Danny’s willingness and voluntary “passing” as a North Korean more largely suggests that freedom cannot be won without incredible luck and good fortune. The larger contexts with which the novel dovetails reminds us that there are not going to be entities that will function to secure one’s release under political asylum, which makes the eventual last page of the novel resound with a kind of Hollywood uplift. Fortunately, given all that these characters have gone through, we will want this brief moment of happiness for these characters. This novel would be very interesting to teach alongside something like Suki Kim’s Without You There is No Us, as these cultural productions present two very different sides of North Korean culture and contexts.

 

 

Buy the Book Here:

 

http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/how-i-became-a-north-korean-krys-lee/1123107416

 

A Review of Marina Budhos’s Watched (Wendy Lamb Books, 2016).

 

I have enjoyed reading Marina Budhos’s YA fictions in the past, so it was a treat to see that she had published a new work. In Watched, Marina Budhos fictionally depicts the plight of Muslim Americans/ South Asian Americans in the period following 9/11, especially under increased scrutiny by homeland intelligence agencies. Budhos, for those not entirely familiar, is the author of numerous works, including but not limited to The Professor of Light, Ask me No Questions, and Tell Us We’re Home. The official site provides us with this description of the work: “Naeem is far from the ‘model teen.’ Moving fast in his immigrant neighborhood in Queens is the only way he can outrun the eyes of his hardworking Bangladeshi parents and their gossipy neighbors. Even worse, they’re not the only ones watching. Cameras on poles. Mosques infiltrated. Everyone knows: Be careful what you say and who you say it to. Anyone might be a watcher. Naeem thinks he can charm his way through anything, until his mistakes catch up with him and the cops offer a dark deal. Naeem sees a way to be a hero—a protector—like the guys in his brother’s comic books. Yet what is a hero? What is a traitor? And where does Naeem belong? ” The basic premise is that Naeem is a troubled high school kid, who seems to be on the border of developing into a delinquent. His murky friendship with a peer named Ibrahim leads him to getting arrested for shoplifting, but once he is at the police station he is given an option: he can be charged for theft or he can work for the police as a kind of informant, spying upon any Muslim-related activities. Of course, Naeem doesn’t necessarily take that option immediately: he realizes what is being asked of him. He rightly feels as though he is betraying his own religious community by spying on them, placing them under surveillance and encroaching on their religious freedoms. At the same time, he doesn’t want to disappoint his hardworking parents, who run a small shop and are already on the edge of bankruptcy. When he sees a potential financial opportunity in this spy work, he reluctantly takes it on. For Naeem, home life is complicated by the fact that he is only ten years younger than his stepmother, the person who his father remarried after Naeem’s mother died (when Naeem was five). He’s struggling with school and discovers that he won’t be graduating with his high school class; he is forced to take summer school classes in order to catch up. So, when the police officers him offer a deal instead of being charged, being a “watcher” seems to be the best possible option. Budhos’s work is definitely one that could be taught and is part of a wonderful set of cultural productions that explore the complicated subject position of the Muslim American/ South Asian American in the period following 9/11. I would definitely pair this work alongside others, such as Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist and Ayad Akhtar’s Disgraced. Of course, intriguingly, Budhos also joins a rather large set of spy/ surveillance fictions that include Chang-rae Lee’s Native Speaker, Susan Choi’s Person of Interest, and Ha Jin’s A Map of Betrayal. I also very much appreciated that Budhos brings a kind of sophistication to the young adult genre that relies more upon character development than more of the formulaic plot elements such as the requisite teen romance.
 

Official Site (with purchasing information):

 

http://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/249905/watched-by-marina-budhos/9780553534184/

 

A Review of Michelle Sagara’s Grave (2017).

 

Michelle Sagara’s Grave finally concludes the Queen of the Dead series that began with Touch. I use the word “finally” because Sagara herself has stated that the final installment in this series was one of the most difficult books she ever wrote. She apparently went through many drafts and had thrown away multiple versions of the book. At some point a couple of years ago, I remember seeing listings of Grave on Amazon but there would never be a list date. I didn’t understand why until Sagara herself addressed the issue in her acknowledgments. The first in the series was published in 2012. With YA trilogies, it’s often typical for a series to complete in 3-4 years; there have even been cases where I have seen two from the same series published at opposite ends of the same year. In any case, the rapidity in the publishing cycle is in some sense necessary: readers are forgetful. I belabor my introduction because I was such a reader. When I cracked open Grave, I had practically forgotten all of the events in the series: all I could remember was that there was a main necromancer-figure who was constantly in danger of being killed. Emma, as I was reminded, had such powerful abilities that she rivaled the Queen of the Dead, who had been in a kind of underworld drawing on the energies of those who had passed and not allowing them to cross over into the afterlife. I didn’t remember that book two saw some tragic events. Emma’s best friend Allie is almost killed by a reanimated dead person (Merrick Longland); Allie’s brother is shot and left for dead; and her cadre is on the run, which includes her other friend Amy Snitman and others such as Eric (another reanimated dead person), Chase (a necromancer-hunter), Chase’s mentor Ernest, Emma’s brother Michael, among others. By this time, Emma has bound some dead to her, which include a former necromancer named Margaret. Obviously, this final installment leads us to the cataclysmic encounter between Emma and the Queen of the Dead, who we come to understand was once a kind of necromancer herself. As a child, Reyna, AKA Queen of the Dead, was trained to become a necromancer by her austere mother (later known as the magar); Reyna also has a little sister named Helmi. Reyna’s also in love with a boy named Eric (the same Eric who is helping Emma at the beginning of this novel). Reyna’s family is tortured and killed for being witches, but Reyna does not die and uses her power as a necromancer to exercise revenge and to reanimate all of her dead loved ones. In this process, she closes the door that allows the dead to cross over into the afterlife. She draws upon their power to create an underworld, a dead city, devoted to preserving her love for Eric, while continuing to draw upon the powers of the newly dead. She creates a Citadel built literally on the souls and energies of the dead who are trapped in its walls, its floors, and its supporting structures. So, Emma’s task is set before: destroy this Evil Queen. If there’s a problem with this particular novel, it’s just that there’s not much going on until that final battle. Basically, the scoobie gang all head down to the Citadel and have to wait around until the Evil Queen makes her appearance. In the meantime, Emma has to learn a couple of skills, like how to use necromantic circles that can protect who is situated inside, while also getting the blessing of the Evil Queen’s mother through the bestowal of a lantern that’s meant to draw the attention of the dead. Of course, Sagara’s point is not to keep the Evil Queen so evil; as the novel draws toward this inexorable battle, it becomes apparent that Reyna went into full Evil Queen mode because she wanted a place where she could be eternally connected with Eric and her family, who had been slaughtered. She was willing to enslave anybody who had died in order to preserve her very twisted version of love. The series might not be for everyone (after all, it’s pretty dark when you think about a city made out of the souls of the dead who aren’t able to cross over into the light) but if you’ve been faithful to the first two installments, the third is a must.

 

Buy the Book Here:

 

http://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/314790/grave-by-michelle-sagara/9780756409074/

 

 

A Review of Mohsin Hamid’s Exit West (Riverhead, 2017).

 

So, Mohsin Hamid’s fourth novel, Exit West (Riverhead, 2017), has been one I’ve been saving for at the right time. I’m always impressed by Hamid’s verve as a fiction writer; none of his novels ever read the same. He always seems to be pushing himself in some way aesthetically and Exit West is no different. We’ll let Publishers Weekly provide us with some viewpoints first: “Hamid’s (The Reluctant Fundamentalist, How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia) trim yet poignant fourth novel addresses similar themes as his previous work and presents a unique perspective on the global refugee crisis. In an unidentified country, young Saeed and burqa-wearing Nadia flee their home after Saeed’s mother is killed by a stray bullet and their city turns increasingly dangerous due to worsening violent clashes between the government and guerillas. The couple joins other migrants traveling to safer havens via carefully guarded doors. Through one door, they wind up in a crowded camp on the Greek Island of Mykonos. Through another, they secure a private room in an abandoned London mansion populated mostly by displaced Nigerians. A third door takes them to California’s Marin County. In each location, their relationship is by turns strengthened and tested by their struggle to find food, adequate shelter, and a sense of belonging among emigrant communities. Hamid’s storytelling is stripped down, and the book’s sweeping allegory is timely and resonant. Of particular importance is the contrast between the migrants’ tenuous daily reality and that of the privileged second- or third-generation native population who’d prefer their new alien neighbors to simply disappear.” This review does a great job of giving us the basics of the novel. What’s most interesting is Hamid’s strongest deviation from realist fiction through the metaphorical use of the “doorway.” The “safely guarded doors” clearly relate to the figurative experience of migration. As with Hamid’s last novel, the author seems less interested in specifics than in a fable-istic approach to storytelling. In this case, we’re never sure what country Saeed and Nadia are actually from, possibly some location in South Asia, West Asia or the Middle East. The benefit of this type of storytelling is that it’s obviously far more accessible to a wider audience, but at the same time, we also lose the specificity of context and history, especially concerning Saeed and Nadia’s home country. As an interesting analogue, Hamid does choose to name other locations that exist beyond the doorways, including the aforementioned Mykonos, London, and Marin County. It becomes evident, too, that the historical trajectory of the novel is further into the past than one might think, especially because it seems as though Nadia and Saeed arrive in Marin County before its become gentrified. As with Hamid’s many other novels, romance in this text, especially of the heterosexual variety, is incredibly complicated and pointed. Of the two, Nadia is definitely the more level-headed of the bunch; she is also definitely more jaded and closed off. Saeed is more idealistic, a dreamer that at first effectively balances the relationship through his quick smiles and hope for the future.  Amid the exilic migrations, Nadia and Saeed attempt to maintain the purity of the feelings they developed in their home country when they were first courting each other, but over time, their connection seems to erode. Hamid’s characterization perhaps suggests that they were never meant to be together over the long haul, but one can’t help but wonder what chance their relationship ever had with all of these constant movements.

 

Buy the Book Here:

 

http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/exit-west-mohsin-hamid/1123912669#productInfoTabs

 

A Review of Katie Kitamura’s A Separation (Viking, 2017).

 

I was SUPER DUPER excited about this novel because I am a huge fan of Katie Kitamura’s second novel, Gone to the Forest, which still (at least to my knowledge) has not received any critical attention. I had a really polarized reaction to this work, somewhat like my experience reading both Jung Yun’s Shelter and Rowan Hisayo Buchanan’s Harmless Like You. In this specific case, I immediately found the story compelling in its complex characterization of the issues at hand, but also found the characters themselves to be so dreadful that I found them difficult to want to read about. The titular separation is narrated from the perspective of an unnamed narrator, who travels to Greece to find her husband (named Christopher). Presumably, she’s gone there to ask for an official divorce, so that she can take her own relationship to the next level, with a man named Yvan (who once was a friend of her husband’s). Christopher is in Greece because he’s researching a book that will be based upon mourning rituals. The narrator travels to the hotel where Christopher is staying; the flight is set up by Christopher’s own mother Isabella, who has been asking the narrator about what Christopher is up to. Above all, the narrator wishes for discretion, so she tells Isabella nothing about the separation, but travels to Greece at her behest, and finally arrives in Gerolimenas, a coastal village that has seen better days. The hotel is full of intriguing characters, including the receptionist, who seems to have had a romantic dalliance with Christopher, who in turn we discover is sort of a lothario. Christopher is at first nowhere to be found, so the narrator creates a kind of unofficial disguise (and cover) for herself and decides to stay a couple of days until he shows up. She expects he’s just gone to another part of the island while researching for the book. And here, I suppose I should provide a spoiler warning, because the novel hinges around another revelation that requires the narrator to reconsider her relationship not only to her husband but to her live-in lover Yvan. In some ways, once the novel moves into the second half, I began wondering about the allegorical nature of this work. The narrator, we discover, is a translator. She spends much of her perspective often musing about other characters, their motivations, even making up whole narratives concerning their lives that cannot always be substantiated. Her mode of speculation is in some sense a mirroring of the challenges she finds in translation, the leap between what is known and what can be reformulated through language. We begin to understand how little power she has over her husband, the circumstances of his disappearance, and ultimately, the unraveling of their marriage, even as she commands the central narrative space. She’s not what I would consider to be an unreliable narrator, but there’s still something aloof about her, a distance that makes it difficult to empathize with her, even as her observations about her life, about the Greek village and its inhabitants, about her in-laws get ever more pointed and achingly on-target. The novel leaves the readers suspended in the inadequacies of our terminologies related to rupture, especially as they become connected to our social norms and our desire to maintain a specific image of ourselves in relation to others. As the narrator must confront the fact that her separation will never be, in many ways, ever truly finalized, this state of limbo does not always make for the most compelling narrative resolution. We already know that what we know is ever-always partial, and Kitamura’s brilliantly accurate narrative stylings can sometimes echo with too much reverb in this landscape, a fictional world filled with subtly violent mirrors, one nuanced distortion piling atop another.

 

Buy the Book Here:

 

http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/a-separation-katie-kitamura/1123839503?ean=9780399576102

 

A Review of Marie Lu’s The Midnight Star (G.P. Putnam’s Sons Books for Young Readers).

 

Marie Lu’s The Midnight Star is the conclusion to The Young Elites trilogy, which has been a sort of X-Men meets Italian-ish social contexts. We’ll let the folks over at B&N provide a little bit of context for us: “Adelina Amouteru is done suffering. She’s turned her back on those who have betrayed her and achieved the ultimate revenge: victory. Her reign as the White Wolf has been a triumphant one, but with each conquest her cruelty only grows. The darkness within her has begun to spiral out of control, threatening to destroy all she's gained. When a new danger appears, Adelina’s forced to revisit old wounds, putting not only herself at risk, but every Elite. In order to preserve her empire, Adelina and her Roses must join the Daggers on a perilous quest—though this uneasy alliance may prove to be the real danger.” So, the alliances of the prior book remain: Adelina is primarily working with Magiano, as she takes over new territories and lands. She’s taking a Machiavellian approach to her rule, which is tempered by Magiano’s suggestions that she provide the occasional gesture of kindness. Meanwhile, the elites are dying, and one of the first to show serious signs of sickness is none other than Adelina’s sister Violetta, who by this time, has holed up with Raffaele and the other Daggers. Raffaele surmises that all of the young elites and those who have been marked by the blood fever are evidence that there is a divine impurity ruining the world. In order to prevent the destruction of all that they know, they must journey to the land of the Gods in order to give back their powers, but this quest requires Adelina and the other Daggers to put aside their rivalries and mistrust. They even must align themselves with mortal enemies such as Teren Santoro, while traveling far to gain the support of Maeve Corrigan, the Queen of the Beldain. As Raffaele suggests, they must find enough young elites with a variety of magical orientations in order to gain entry into the Underworld. Without the help of those like Santoro, they will have no chance. Lu’s conclusion is certainly emotionally powerful. I couldn’t help tearing up when the final pages occurred, though I was a bit underwhelmed by a common narrative conceit that I’ve been seeing in many young adult paranormal fictions. I won’t spoil what that is, but suffice it to say that such storylines ultimately tug on the heartstrings in such a way as to feel a little bit manipulative. The other element that seemed a little bit of a letdown was the resurrection of Enzo, which ends up being more of a plot device than anything substantial. Given the kind of romantic triangle Lu so painstakingly plotted in the first two books, this development was certainly anticlimactic. In any case, fans of Lu will be delighted to discover that she already has a new title in development called War Cross, which is tentatively set to be published in 2017 and is apparently about teenage bounty hunters. Color me intrigued.

 

 

Buy the Book Here:

 

http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-midnight-star-marie-lu/1123274331

 

 

 

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