Stephen Hong Sohn's Blog, page 48

Asian American Literature Fans – Megareview for March 23 2016

Asian American Literature Fans – Megareview for March 23 2016

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.

In this post, reviews of: Kendare Blake’s Ungodly (TorTeen, 2015); Paul Kalanithi’s When Breath Becomes Air (Random House, 2016); Anne Opotowsky (Author) and Aya Morton’s (Illustrator) His Dream of Skyland (Walled City Trilogy, Part 1) (Gestalt Publishing, 2011); Quan Barry’s She Weeps Each Time You’re Born (Pantheon 2015).

A Review of Kendare Blake’s Ungodly (TorTeen, 2015).



The final installment of Kendare Blake’s Goddess War series appears here with Ungodly. We’ll use B&N’s website as always for our synopsis: “As ancient immortals are left reeling, a modern Athena and Hermes search the world for answers in Ungodly, the final Goddess War novel by Kendare Blake, the acclaimed author of Anna Dressed in Blood. For the Goddess of Wisdom, what Athena didn't know could fill a book. That's what Ares said. So she was wrong about some things. So the assault on Olympus left them beaten and scattered and possibly dead. So they have to fight the Fates themselves, who, it turns out, are the source of the gods' illness. And sure, Athena is stuck in the underworld, holding the body of the only hero she has ever loved. But Hermes is still topside, trying to power up Andie and Henry before he runs out of time and dies, or the Fates arrive to eat their faces. And Cassandra is up there somewhere too. On a quest for death. With the god of death. Just because things haven't gone exactly according to plan, it doesn't mean they've lost. They've only mostly lost. And there's a big difference.” As followers of this series already know: gods and heroes are reincarnated time and time again in Blake’s version of the storyworld. Cassandra takes top billing, as she is tasked to be the destroyer of gods. By the third book, Cassandra is angry because her paramour, Apollo, is killed. She is able to kill Hera at the end of the second book (and spoilers are forthcoming) but other antagonists still survive, including Ares and Aphrodite. The third book sees some alliances shift and the parties scattered. Athena must team up with Ares and Aphrodite in the Underworld, especially when Ares is able to use some quick wits to save Athena’s mortal love Odysseus. Hermes is hanging out with Henry (Hector) and Andie (Adromache), while they figure out how to defeat Achilles, who is now teamed up with the book’s major big bad The Three Fates (the Moirae). Finally, Cassandra and Calypso want to find out where Hades is, but first they have to travel to Los Angeles to find Thanatos, who will be sure to have useful information. This final installment is no doubt the strongest of all three books because Blake knows that she has to bring the storylines together. The first two suffered from the inevitable peaks and troughs that come with stretching out a plot over three books, but here, all paths must inevitably converge and then be highlighted in a climactic battle. Will Cassandra be able to kill all the gods? Will Henry defeat Achilles? Will Athena and Odysseus be able to find love beyond the underworld? Such questions can only be answered by reading this decadent conclusion. There are lines that will be sure to cause some cringes in the audience, but Blake’s narrator is quite self-aware of some of the ridiculousness going on, especially with references to movies like Flatliners. I give major kudos to Blake for exploring a different version of narrative perspective that deviates from the first person storytelling offered in the Girl of Nightmares series. Fans of Blake’s YA work will be pleased to know she’s already got something cooking that will be coming out of HarperTeen later this year. Though I didn’t find this series as strong as Blake’s debut duology, there’s enough mischief and mayhem to keep readers of the paranormal romance/ YA genre quite pleased and looking forward to Three Dark Crowns (which seems to be moving Blake in the direction of witchcraft).

Buy the Book Here:

http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/ungodly-kendare-blake/1120919171

A Review of Paul Kalanithi’s When Breath Becomes Air (Random House, 2016).


So, I recall reading a piece in the New York Times written by Paul Kalanithi, which explored issues of death and dying. Kalanithi, a neurosurgeon, was diagnosed with metastatic stage 4B lung cancer, meaning that his cancer was terminal. For Kalanithi, it was a matter of time. I’ve been interested in Kalanithi’s memoir because it strikes very close to home. My mother was diagnosed with metastatic endometrial cancer that was also in stage 4B. My mother has already had bouts in which she was close to death (at least on three separate occasions that I can recall); she also had a complete hysterectomy, sustained challenging chemotherapy treatments that left her drained of energy and stamina. So, when I heard Kalanithi’s memoir was being published, I immediately wanted to review it. The memoir was published posthumously, and the epilogue (written by Kalanithi’s wife Lucy) reminds us that an individual who is dying can never quite complete their work in any sense. There is just not enough time, and of course, we never know the circumstances of the death unless someone else writes about it. Perhaps, what is most crucial about Kalanithi’s memoir is the issue that he brings up with respect to philosophy and the meaning of life, which seems to come down to something related to striving. That is, even while dying, even in our states of disintegration (as we age, find our bodies failing us, diseases that confound us, our memories that get more spotty), we still strive for something, find meaning in something, and thus make our lives meaningful in some particular way. For Kalanithi, this aspect of striving functions as the underlying current of cohesion that appears throughout the memoir. He details the struggles with physical therapy to regain the energy and the stamina necessary to stand in the operating room for many hours. He and his wife still plan to have a baby despite the fact of his prognosis. He continues to connect with his patients, and his colleagues, while developing a strong bond with his cancer physician. Throughout his waning days, perhaps what is most remarkable is Kalanithi’s spirit of curiosity that never dissipates despite whatever is thrown at him. The epilogue provided by Kalanithi’s wife Lucy is particularly compelling precisely because it details the final days of Kalanithi’s life; she further attempts to insert her own perspective on Kalanithi’s personality. Indeed, on some level, she seems concerned that readers may miss how funny and how humorous Kalanithi was, that somehow a part of him could be stripped from the narrative. Lucy’s mission to rectify some tonality in Kalanithi’s narrative is perhaps a larger issue related to memoirs in general: all that is left is some sort of partial, edited trace, but what a profound trace this is.

Buy the Book Here:

http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/when-breath-becomes-air-paul-kalanithi/1121955571

A Review of Anne Opotowsky (Author) and Aya Morton’s (Illustrator) His Dream of Skyland (Walled City Trilogy, Part 1) (Gestalt Publishing, 2011).



I haven’t been reading as many graphic narratives as much lately, so it was a real pleasure to dig into the high quality pages (and high production values) found in Anne Opotowsky (Author) and Aya Morton’s (Illustrator) His Dream of Skyland, which is part of a trilogy. The first two have been published, and I will eventually be getting to the second installment, but let’s get a plot summary going of this particular work. We’ll let the World Comic Book Review take it away from here: “In 2011, the creative team of Anne Opotowsky and Aya Morton produced a thick volume entitled “his dream of skyland”. Set in 1950s colonial Hong Kong, the story follows the meandering adventures of the hapless Chinese postal worker, Song. Hopelessly in love with a bemused prostitute and with his bumbling father in jail, Song decides to try to deliver dead letters – correspondence with no proper address, sometimes sitting around in the post office for years, but capable of delivery with some detective work and a glimmer of proactively. Delivering dead letters seems to be an eccentric but harmless preoccupation, but in doing so Song brings both joy and sadness to their various recipients, and comes to navigate the notorious and legendary Walled City of Kowloon. It is a place that recognises no authority and which in the hands of the creative team is imbued with a shadowy personality. The Walled City is like a tiger with a full belly: watchful, and idly dangerous. A helpful and beautifully rendered glossary at the end of the volume assists readers not familiar with Cantonese culture nor British colonialism. It’s an engaging and skilful endeavour, and ideal for readers with an interest in Hong Kong history.” One element that this description doesn’t mention is the close relationship that Song holds with his mother, who is a kind of diviner and occultist. Their connection provides him the stability he needs, as he tries to make a life in the shadow of his father’s absence. His job sorting letters further gives him some fulfillment, and he sees the delivery of the dead letters as a challenge and perhaps a metaphor for the desire to find more meaning in his life.  Perhaps what is most crucial (at least for me) in this review is the historical tapestry that Opotowsky  and Morton bring to life. Though I do know some facts about Asian American history and even some diasporic Asian contexts, I didn’t know much about the walled city, a place that has been in existence for over a century and was the recent target of urban gentrification, but during the period that Opotowsky and Morton focus on, the Walled City is a true potpourri of squatters, gamblers, scrabblers, and itinerant populations. So Song’s investment is delivering these dead letters to this area might at first seen strange, but the Walled City seems to operate with its own set of rules and creates the perfect milieu for Song to engage unexpected relationships and even friendships. But the Walled City is filled with questionable dealings, and the graphic novel invokes issues related to human trafficking and child exploitation. Amid Song’s quest to deliver dead letters, he also begins to discover the potential dangers in developing a strong attachment to this strange, but no less dynamic part of the colony. Perhaps, the most notable element that brings this graphic narrative to such vivid life is Morton’s sweeping visuals that take up space on large pages and provide the right form for this kind of story, one that involves many colorful characters who deserve their own full pictorial space. This graphic novel makes you wish that more were published on such panoramic pages, as this work is the kind you can return to again and again to find more hidden in the margins of a panel.



Buy the Book Here:

http://www.gestaltcomics.com/shelf/graphic-novels/his-dream-of-the-skyland-walled-city-book-1/

http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/his-dream-of-the-skyland-anne-opotowsky/1111619897

A Review of Quan Barry’s She Weeps Each Time You’re Born (Pantheon 2015).


So, to be quite honest: I had trouble getting the momentum when reading this novel. To be sure, this problem is mostly related to my own reading habits, as I’ve gotten older and more distracted, and probably too used to the prose found in YA novels (no dig on YA novelists of course). Quan Barry’s debut novel She Weeps Each Time You’re Born stands tall alongside her four other poetry collections (some which have been reviewed here) and offers a rather luminous addition to the ever growing body of Vietnamese American literatures. Barry must have been channeling Faulkner and Ondaatje (or someone of a similar writing aesthetic), as there are many narrative perspective shifts, temporal shifts, poetic sequences, and longish sentences. The novel provides a very useful diagram to open that helps to remind us of the relational connections among the characters, some of whom are not biologically related to each other. Barry’s work is historically textured and set across Vietnam’s long colonial and postcolonial history. A grandmother (Thuan), her son (Tu), the son’s wife (Little Mother), and their child (Rabbit) are the main family, but their lives are torn apart by multiple wars.  During  fire bombing, Little Mother is killed, while Thuan suffers significant wounds, but Little Mother is still able to give birth (somehow if I read this section right) during this period. Thuan later succumbs to her injuries. It is during the period of refugee flight that this family hooks up with another: a grandmother (Huyen) and her granddaughter (Qui) are also on the move and attempting to survive. Qui is somehow able to nurse Rabbit, which provides Rabbit with the nutrition to survive. The second half of the novel involves a slight time jump: Rabbit is a young child; she is friends with another boy around her age named Son. They spend their times training cormorants, so that they can be sold to local fisherman to aid them in their work. This sequence is one of the most beautiful in the novel and continues to the slightly surrealistic elements, especially as Rabbit seems to have a special ability to speak to these water birds. But Rabbit and Son’s friendship ends prematurely after their families endure incredible hardships at sea. The novel is reminiscent on the plotting level of Hoa Pham’s The Other Shore because Rabbit eventually develops supernatural powers concerning the ability to see and to communicate with the dead in some way. This ability is cultivated by military forces who seek to use her skills to find mass graves; in this sense, the novel’s surrealistic quality is put to use to explore the legacy of war. As the novel moves toward the conclusion, Rabbit finds herself in a romantic relationship with a Russian soldier; here, Barry unveils one of the most compelling portions of the narrative, as Barry uses this relationship to revisit an earlier trauma of the narrative. To read the event from two different perspectives demonstrates how trauma actually functions on the level of a narrative aesthetic, as Rabbit comes to understand the gravity of the events at sea only from a latent perspective. If there is one major critique to be made of the novel, it remains on the level of its episodic nature, which occasionally undercuts the power of the incredible images and lyrical prose that so strongly supports the characters and their fictional world. A highly recommended read, and given the challenge of the prose itself, a work you’d want to revisit anyway.

Buy the Book Here:

http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/she-weeps-each-time-youre-born-quan-barry/1119480067?ean=9780307911773

Ken Liu's The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories

I apparently have a soft spot for works of literature with the word menagerie in the title; the play The Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams has been one of my favorites since I first read it in high school. Add to that play my love for Ken Liu's short story, "The Paper Menagerie," which you can read in full for free at i09. I happily read through Liu's collection of short stories just published, The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories (Saga Press, 2016), and enjoyed the range of fantasy and science fiction stories that demonstrate Liu's unique yoking of those genres with historically and racially astute narratives.



Read the story but prepare to weep! It is an astoundingly moving short story that exemplifies Liu's imagination and ability to yoke together the fabulist mentality of fantasy/science fiction genres with a deeply emotional awareness of the lived experiences of racialization in the United States. There's something extraordinary about the fragility embodied in the paper tiger, the zhezhi created by the protagonist's mother as expressions of her love and her past. As my friend stephenhongsohn pointed out regarding this story, racial melancholia is the worst! The story truly captures the loss attendant upon immigrant families that is passed intergenerationally through both the disconnection from a home country and the experiences of racist antagonism in the new homeland. I love the magic of the paper tiger and other creatures, a set of toys that comes alive with the mother's breath. Yet, these are toys not understood nor appreciated by the white American boys in the protagonist's neighborhood, and as such, they became markers of the shame that he feels at being different and not-quite-American--things to be rejected and hidden along with Chinese language in favor of things like factory-made Star Wars toys and English language.

The other stories in this collection are similarly thought-provoking and often heartbreaking as well. Some of the stories are thought experiments, taking up a scientific concept and spinning it into fictions of worlds beyond our current experiences. The opening story, "The Bookmaking Habits of Select Species," for instance, considers what it means to record experiences in written form and takes as a form some brief descriptions of how various species "write" and archive experiences. As a result, the story questions what it means to have intelligence and to separate thought from physicality.

The stories I liked the most take on a fantastical or science fictional mode while weaving in Asian/American experiences. I also especially appreciated Liu's attention to the historical and linguistic specificity of Taiwanese experiences, with a complicated grappling with Japanese colonialism, Chinese politics, and a yearning to understand the silences in familial stories. In this respect, "The Literomancer" is especially moving. It centers on a white American girl who moves with her parents to Taiwan during the Cold War. The father works for the US government in some capacity as someone intent on ferreting out Communist spies with the Taiwanese Nationalist government. The girl befriends a boy her age and his grandfather. The grandfather practices literomancy, the magic of prophesying through words, particularly in reading the chacters of Chinese words for deeper meaning. The story is tragic, much like "The Paper Menagerie" is, with childhood innocence destroyed upon the reefs of grown up political hostilities, and the girl becomes part of a betrayal that she cannot possibly understand.

Amont the other stories that I really loved, "A Brief History of the Trans-Pacific Tunnel" and "The Man Who Ended History: A Documentary" stood out for their grappling with our sense of historical truth, understanding, and forgiveness. "A Brief History" is an alternate history story in which, instead of entering a second world war, Japan and the United States embark on a trans-Pacific, undersea tunnel to connect Asia and North America. The resulting decade of work stimulates the Depression era economy and diverts inter-country aggression towards this shifting configuration of global trade. Of course, this alternate history echoes the work of Chinese railroad workers who helped build the transcontinental railroad on North American soil in the 1800s.

"The Man Who Ended History," similarly, engages with the difficulties of mid-20th century world politics but from a science fictional perspective in which a husband-wife team of historian-experimental physicist discover a way for individuals to experience historical moments but in the process always destroy those moments from further experience. The Chinese American husband, an historian, becomes obsessed with redressing the atrocities of Unit 731, a secret laboratory/horror chamber during World War II in which the Japanese Imperial Army experimented on Chinese and other prisoners and civilians to test the limits of physical pain and endurance as well as to explore possible biological weaponry. The Japanese American wife, the experimental physicist, provides the means for him to send relatives of victims of Unit 731 to the past to experience what really happened. The story takes the form of a documentary film and offers varying perspectives on what it means to remember a historical event, to apologize for atrocities of the past, to be accountable as governments that did or did not exist in the same way at different moments in time, and ultimately to remember while moving forward in time.

These stories are all remarkable, beautifully written and provocative in their subject matter.

Asian American Literature Fans – Megareview for March 7, 2016

Asian American Literature Fans – Megareview for March 7, 2016

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.

In this post, reviews for Sunil Yapa’s Your Heart is a Muscle the Size of a Fist (Little, Brown and Company, 2016); Christie Hsiao’s Journey to Rainbow Island (BenBella Books, 2013); Emiko Jean’s We’ll Never Be Apart (Houghton Mifflin Young Adult, 2016); Tony Tulathimutte’s Private Citizens (William Morrow, 2015).

A Review of Sunil Yapa’s Your Heart is a Muscle the Size of a Fist (Little, Brown and Company, 2016).



Sunil Yapa’s debut novel Your Heart is a Muscle the Size of a Fist is an intriguing study in the fictionalization of a major event: the 1999 WTO protests. We’ll let B&N provide the useful synopsis here: “On a rainy, cold day in November, young Victor—a nomadic, scrappy teenager who's run away from home—sets out to join the throng of WTO demonstrators determined to shut down the city. With the proceeds, he plans to buy a plane ticket and leave Seattle forever, but it quickly becomes clear that the history-making 50,000 anti-globalization protestors—from anarchists to environmentalists to teamsters—are testing the patience of the police, and what started out as a peaceful protest is threatening to erupt into violence. Over the course of one life-altering afternoon, the fates of seven people will change forever: foremost among them police Chief Bishop, the estranged father Victor hasn't seen in three years, two protesters struggling to stay true to their non-violent principles as the day descends into chaos, two police officers in the street, and the coolly elegant financial minister from Sri Lanka whose life, as well as his country's fate, hinges on getting through the angry crowd, out of jail, and to his meeting with the President of the United States. When Chief Bishop reluctantly unleashes tear gas on the unsuspecting crowd, it seems his hopes for reconciliation with his son, as well as the future of his city, are in serious peril.” Though Victor does ostensibly seem to be the protagonist of this work, Yapa splits the perspective amongst these seven characters, who do include the aforementioned Chief Bishop, two other police officers (Timothy Park and Julia), two protesters (John Henry and King), Charles Wickramsinghe (the “elegant financial minister from Sri Lanka”). The fates of these seven characters eventually collide in a manner not dissimilar to something we might see in a Robert Altman movie. Victor, for instance, is pulled into the protests, even though he seems to be mostly ambivalent about them. King and John Henry, we discover, are lovers, though King is harboring a dark secret regarding her past, which limits her effectiveness in the protests. Chief Bishop (along with his fellow police officers) attempts to maintain order over his city, something that becomes increasingly difficult as the protests escalate in their scope and rhetoric. The actual diplomatic work being conducted by Charles Wickramsinghe is structured through intermissions, as he attempts to rally the support to gain Sri Lanka’s entrance into the World Trade Organization. Yapa is particularly deft in his use of analepses, effectively using flashbacks and shifts back in time to unveil the psychological shape of the main characters. Victor, in particular, comes off as a well-rounded figure seeking to find fulfillment, having struggled with a complicated upbringing involving migration and adoption. Yapa’s work is certainly provocative in its exploration of activism, racial discord, protest cultures, and police brutality, more so because Yapa is intent in twining the political with the personal. The narrative can sometimes sag because of this dynamic and the conclusion might strike some as too philosophically broad, but Yapa’s work is certainly fresh in its unique narrative conceit, as it employs a shifting third and second person narration to reveal the complicated interior lives of these seven characters. Further still, this work intrigues me, especially in its kaleidoscopic storytelling depictions, as the seven narrative perspectives all come from characters of varied ethnoracial backgrounds. Had this novel been published earlier, I might have written about it in my first book, which by the way, just passed its two year birthday (shout out to myself). Finally, readers of Asian American literature will no doubt find productive comparisons between this novel and Yamashita’s Tropic of Orange, not only on the level of its seven primary characters, but its association around a climactic event (an apocalyptic freeway event in Los Angeles downtown vs. the WTO riots).

Buy the Book Here:

http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/your-heart-is-a-muscle-the-size-of-a-fist-sunil-yapa/1121865205

A Review of Emiko Jean’s We’ll Never Be Apart (Houghton Mifflin Young Adult, 2016).




Emiko Jean’s We’ll Never Apart starts with an intriguing premise: an emotionally disturbed young teenager named Cellie starts a fire. In the process, it seems as though she will be ending possibly her own life, her sister’s life (Alice Monroe), and her sister’s boyfriend’s life (Jason). After this prologue, the narrative perspective shifts to Alice (and remains there for most of the novel), and we’re left in the wake of that fire. Alice doesn’t remember everything that happened that night. All she knows is that she tried to escape from a mental health facility with her foster brother Jason, but their eventual path to freedom is thwarted by the mentally unhinged Cellie, who arrives at precisely the worst time. From this point forward, Alice is stuck back in the mental facility (in/appropriately called Savage Isle, located it seems somewhere in California), navigating life in the C ward, where she’s able to filter in with other patients like herself. She makes friends with her new roomie Amelia, while developing a potential romantic interest with another troubled teen named Chase Ward (if you’re seeing the play on “chase” and “ward” in relation to finding out the truth in the mental facility, you’ll start to see that this novel tries a little bit too hard at times). At the same time, Alice eventually discovers that Jason was killed in the fire, which leads her to believe that Cellie is still alive and probably being held in the D ward, the isolation area in which the most damaged and deranged patients are kept in padded rooms. Alice hatches a plan, using Chase’s assistance, to find a way to get into D ward, so she might have the chance to kill Cellie, before Cellie would ostensibly kill her. Due to heightened security measures, though, Alice cannot get to D ward right away, so the novel gives us other things to worry about. For instance, Alice starts to write in a journal, as suggested to her by her therapist. The journal is a critical narrative device that gives us the painful backstory of Alice and her sister Cellie: how they were sent into foster care only after they were found living alone with the deceased corpse of their grandfather. It is in the foster care system that Alice and Cellie meet Jason; Alice and Jason will eventually develop a romantic interest in each other, which will cause Cellie to develop a sense of jealousy that will ultimately, or so Alice thinks, turn homicidal. First time author Emiko Jean takes a big gamble on employing an unreliable narrative perspective precisely because we’re already made to be suspicious. Readers like myself already figured out the central conceit undergirding the narrative soon after it began, and I simply hoped that I would be wrong. Because of this possibility, some readers will definitely be disappointed on the level of plot exposition at the conclusion, but the larger social context that Jean brings up is of course important: the necessity of proper care (both mental and physical) for youth in the foster care system. It is evident that the novel’s main intervention in terms of its critique of social inequalities remains the ways in which we let youth potentially rot in a system in which their lives are ultimately dependent upon the capricious care of adults.



Buy the Book Here:

http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/well-never-be-apart-emiko-jean/1120874784



A Review of Christie Hsiao’s Journey to Rainbow Island (BenBella Books, 2013)


So, I often alternate in between “adult” more serious reading and middle grade/ YA material, and I recently settled on Christie Hsiao’s Journey to Rainbow Island (BenBella Books). This title was one I chanced upon while browsing online bookstores and their offerings. In any case, Hsiao’s debut employs the more traditional fantasy conceits in order to build a storyworld involving a young girl on a quest to save her home, the titular Rainbow Island. After a dark sorcerer revives a long dead obisidigon through evil magics, Yu-Ning must take up her own destiny as a Darq Render to defeat the growing danger. As per usual, we’ll let the folks over at B&N take over with the rest of the plot: “Yu-ning thinks her perfect life on Rainbow Island will never end—until a nasty dragon called the Obsidigon returns from beyond the grave. Now her beloved island is in flames, her best friend has been kidnapped, and the island’s Sacred Crystals have been stolen. To make matters worse, she must venture into the dark corners of the world to uncover secrets best ignored, find a weapon thought long destroyed, and recapture seven sacred stones—without being burned to a crisp by a very angry dragon. With the help of her master teacher, Metatron, Yu-ning embarks on a dangerous journey to overcome not only the darkness attacking her home, but also the scars of sadness that mark her own heart. And while most people just see a normal kid, Metatron—and a few other unlikely allies—pledge their lives to the dark-eyed little girl with a magic bow and a crooked grin.” Yu-ning’s journey involves having to find a bow (called the Lightcaster) and its magical arrows in order to defeat the sorcerer and the obsidigon. She must travel to various islands and locations, challenge smaller villains and antagonists—such as a sweatshop boss and a taskmaster teacher—in order to navigate her perilous tasks. Throughout, Hsiao’s point is very clear: Yu-ning must use the power of love and light to defeat all enemies. For some, this message will obviously come off as trite and perhaps too simplistic, especially since the novel does dovetail with larger problematics of global capitalism and human trafficking even in allegorized forms. Further still, Yu-ning’s can-do attitude never flags, which marks her as a perhaps too-static heroine, one that never flags in her belief that good will always defeat evil. Certainly, the novel’s target audience will be pleased: the plot continually conjures up another challenge to Yu-ning, and Hsiao is especially willing to explore fantastic conceits that will delight young readers, such as talking animals, special magic items, and technological marvels. There are also some very striking visuals (more realist in their quality) included, which contrast significantly with the fantasy style of the narrative. Interestingly enough, Hsiao also seems to be intent on leaving the ethnicities of her characters unmarked, even as there are some obvious nods to an East Asian centric heritage of some of the places and figures. These layerings do make the world more textured, but some readers will no doubt overlook such intentionalities. Hsiao leaves the novel open for a sequel, but as of this time, there is no word on whether or not Yu-ning will have to face sorcerers, dark creatures, and obsidigons any time soon. For the time being, then, she and her allies can rest easy in the idyllic and love-filled place called Rainbow Island.



Buy the Book Here:

http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/journey-to-rainbow-island-christie-hsiao/1114591405


A Review of Tony Tulathimutte’s Private Citizens (William Morrow, 2015)


Here, I am reviewing Tony Tulathimutte’s debut novel Private Citizens. So, this book is going to provoke a deep response in the reader in one way or another. The polarizing nature of this novel is because it is tonally mutable: it’s definitely satirical at times, but at others, you get a much more of a romantic, courtship narrative in which you see Tulathimutte working with characters who are trying to connect with each other in the turbulent period after undergraduate school. We’ll let the plot summary over at B&N do some work for us: “From a brilliant new literary talent comes a sweeping comic portrait of privilege, ambition, and friendship in millennial San Francisco. With the social acuity of Adelle Waldman and the murderous wit of Martin Amis, Tony Tulathimutte’s Private Citizens is a brainy, irreverent debut—This Side of Paradise for a new era. Capturing the anxious, self-aware mood of young college grads in the aughts, Private Citizens embraces the contradictions of our new century: call it a loving satire. A gleefully rude comedy of manners. Middlemarch for Millennials. The novel's four whip-smart narrators—idealistic Cory, Internet-lurking Will, awkward Henrik, and vicious Linda—are torn between fixing the world and cannibalizing it. In boisterous prose that ricochets between humor and pain, the four estranged friends stagger through the Bay Area’s maze of tech startups, protestors, gentrifiers, karaoke bars, house parties, and cultish self-help seminars, washing up in each other’s lives once again.  A wise and searching depiction of a generation grappling with privilege and finding grace in failure, Private Citizens is as expansively intelligent as it is full of heart.” I’m tempted to review the language in this review, but I’ll avoid that task and just explain that the novel is grounded in those four characters. Cory is the progressive liberal of the bunch who has joined a start up with a more humanistic view of the future. Will is the Asian American of the bunch, perhaps the character modeled somewhat autobiographically after the writer. He is Thai, he’s short, he’s a bit angry, and he’s in a relationship with the very beautiful, wheelchair bound Vanya. Henrik is the scholar of the bunch, or so he was, until he drops out of graduate school, then struggles to find his footing Then, there’s Linda: she is a hot mess. She couch surfs, manipulates men to do things for her, and generally scrabbles her way through life. The narrative sees all four of them return to San Francisco a number of years after they graduated from Stanford. They’re not as close as they once were, and this novel explores why their paths have diverged, and of course, why those paths will eventually again converge. But the narrative is perhaps secondary to Tulathimutte’s incredibly engaging third person storyteller, who often undercuts the characters to mock them. There is both a benefit and a drawback to this kind of narrator. On the one hand, the narrator does make the work considerably humorous, but, on the other, you wonder sometimes about whether you can find an emotional center at all. It’s easy to hate every single one of the main characters given the way that the narrator is able to critique them with such stylistic verve, but the later stages of the book give way to other discursive modes. For instance, the introduction of first person journaling begins to chip away at this narrator, suggesting that there isn’t some postmodern hipsterish millennial tech bubble core to each of these characters, and that they wish to move beyond desultory relationships, for something better, even if it’s never quite possessed and always a little bit and only a dream.

Buy the Book Here:

http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/private-citizens-tony-tulathimutte/1121953916

Jhumpa Lahiri's In Other Words (and reflections on international writing)

Jhumpa Lahiri's In Other Words (Knopf, 2016; translated from the Italian by Ann Goldstein) is a fascinating, brief series of essays about the author's embrace of Italian as a language for reading and writing after her decades of master storytelling in English. The translation in English appears in the first half of the book with the original Italian in the second half.



A review in The New York Times tends to point out the clunkiness of the prose and Lahiri's own acknowledgement that this writing is nothing like her English-language prose, but for me, what is utterly beautiful about this book is Lahiri's self-conscious exploration of language as a medium for thinking and living, especially when she deliberately displaces herself into a foreign language that is neither her parents' native language (Bengali) spoken at home nor the language of a country in which she grew up (English). She chooses Italian in part because of her background studying Italian language and literature but also because of her experiences visiting Italy a few times in early adulthood. These visits crystallized for her the power of language and identity and shook loose the experiences many Asian Americans have in the United States when their appearance leads others to expect certain kinds of words and accents to come from their mouths.

I love Lahiri's determination to read and write only in Italian while she lives for a few years in Italy with her family. This decision alienates her from the language that is most comfortable for her but also demands that she stretch her thinking and her ability to articulate her ideas in words.

There are two pieces in the collection that are more like (fictional) short stories than essays, and they operate in a sort of dream-like tone. I don't know if it is the influence of Italian literature or something else that leads her to write stories that are functionally quite distinct from her realist, spare prose in English. She herself comments that there is also something interesting about the autobiographical impulse when she writes in English versus in Italian. As an Asian American writer, she is read by most people as imbuing her fiction with autobiographical facts or perspectives, even as she insists that her fiction is created characters and worlds; but in Italian, she turns staunchly towards the autobiographical I, stripping away even the veneer of fiction in most of the essays to embrace the memoir form.

Lahiri's book is about an American writing in Italian and about an Asian American embracing a foreign language that is not what is expected of her as a mother tongue. There is a lot about translation between languages in the book, especially about the impossibility of full translations that capture nuances of a language's literary history. What is fascinating to me is that at the end of the day, we will probably still read this book as one by an American writer, even though it had to be translated from the original Italian. What does that mean for our conception of national language and of translation?

SInce I left academia, I've been thinking a bit more about reading outside of American literature (the field I immersed myself in as a scholar and teacher), and it's been quite interesting to consider how writers in other countries reflect on the movement of languages and literature in the world (what makes a bestseller in various countries? what gets translated from one language to the next?). I recently read Minae Mizumura's fascinating book of essays, The Fall of Language in the Age of English , in whcih the author grapples with the global dominance of English as the language not only of commerce but of literature. She details the uneven translation of literature into English and the translation of literature from English into local languages. She describes the historical tensions between universal languages and local ones like Latin and its vernaculars. But what I found most exciting was her focus on Japanese as a written language that embodies traces of its history in ways that other languages do not. She calls for more attention to local languages and a refusal to translate only ever into English or to encourage the world to learn English as a common language. (The irony is not lost on us, of course, that we read her book in English translation).

While I was a librarian briefly, I was also interested in starting up an international fiction book club, attentive to the idea brought up by many writers and critics that Americans by and large have very narrow reading tastes, not aware of bestselling authors in other countries and languages. This unevenness is a demonstration of a kind of cultural myopia, and I had hoped to start conversations at the library about literatures (in translation) that would offer radically different perspectives on the world than what American authors write. Of course, we wouldn't have been able to get into some of the really interesting stuff about translation and the difficulties of getting ideas to resonate in their full complexity across languages.

A Review of Emma Shevah’s Dream on, Amber (SourceBooks, 2015)

A Review of Emma Shevah’s Dream on, Amber (SourceBooks, 2015)


This book is another one of those that I’ve been compelled to read as my nieces and nephews are growing older. Emma Shevah’s Dream on, Amber is targeted at middle grade audiences and follows the travails of the titular Amber as she navigates the always shark-infected waters of school. As per my routine, I’ll let Barnes and Noble fill us in on some narrative details: “My name is Amber Alessandra Leola Kimiko Miyamoto. I have no idea why my parents gave me all those hideous names but they must have wanted to ruin my life, and you know what? They did an amazing job… As a half-Japanese, half-Italian girl with a ridiculous name, Amber's not feeling molto bene (very good) about making friends at her new school. But the hardest thing about being Amber is that a part of her is missing. Her dad. He left when she was little and he isn't coming back. Not for her first day of middle school and not for her little sister's birthday. So Amber will have to dream up a way for the Miyamoto sisters to make it on their own.” Beyond the basics provided here, the novel is also set in the UK, which makes for a different cultural context concerning mixed race identity and adolescent development. Amber’s biggest antagonist in this work is a fierce classmate named Joanne, who begins to bully Amber not long after Amber bullies Joanne’s younger brother, who himself had been bullying Amber’s younger sister Bella (*phew*). Amber is also a very gifted artist. When she is forced to enter a contest put on by her school, it becomes evident that Amber finds considerable fulfillment in her artistic endeavors. Naturally, Amber also begins to explore fledgling romantic interests, as she develops a crush on a classmate who is at first only known as Locker Boy (due to the proximity of his locker to hers). Another issue emerges when Amber becomes insecure over her inability to keep up with her classmates on social media. Thus, she takes on the deplorable task of cleaning her grandmother’s cat litter trays in order to save up the cash to buy a new phone, one that would be able to use applications and download data. On a personal note, my phone is also too arcane to handle data or applications, so I need to “upgrade” as well. But I digress! Shevah keeps a nuanced enough approach to the novel’s central issue, which is the fact that Amber and Bella’s father abandoned them when they were very young. The novel provides no easy answers about parental abandonment, and this element is perhaps one of the most compelling parts of this work, which seeks to keep a youthful reader audience interested, while also retaining the complexity of the themes and issues it presents. The production values of Shevah’s book also corresponds with the content, as there are effective and creative uses of images that appear along the borders and openings of chapters. Finally, and perhaps, most importantly, the novel’s exploration of mixed race themes for growing children evidences the obvious awareness of the burgeoning multiracial populations being raised both in the UK and elsewhere.

Our Author Emma Shevah!
Buy the Book Here:

http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/dream-on-amber-emma-shevah/1119090161

Poetry by Hannah Sanghee Park, Lo Kwa Mei-en, and Hieu Minh Nguyen

Here are brief comments on three books of poetry!



Hannah Sanghee Park's the same-different (Louisiana State University Press, 2015) is the winner of the Walt Whitman Award for 2015 for a poet without a previously published book. Park's poems are spare but rich with wordplay.

The asking was askance.
And the tell all told.
So then, in tandem
anathema, and anthem.

Park pays close attention to the sounds of words and how they can both enhance and trouble their meanings when juxtapositions produce startling ideas.




Lo Kwa Mei-en's Yearling (Alice James Books, 2015) offers poems full of curious, kaleidoscopic images and fragmentary language.

The world is another cage I cannot map. Once
emptied, the ocean will sit down, a love song inside it:
a black fish mouthing Hallelujah to the walls, opening
itself on them for good. . . .

The poems make allusions to not just to a variety of creatures but also literary characters like Ariel and Ophelia.




Hieu Minh Nguyen's This Way to the Sugar (Write Bloody Press, 2014) is a collection of poems that plumb the raw depths of sexuality and identity.

Of course it was a bad idea
sending my address
to that headless gentleman--
jack-o-lantern's smile, out of frame,
assumed he would come on a dark horse,
not unlike a prince.

A number of the poems confront the complex dance of anonymous hook ups online, tracing the mix of desire, shame, danger, and racially-laden expectations in such encounters.

Asian American Literature Fans – Megareview for January 31, 2016 (with a focus on Penguin titles)

Asian American Literature Fans – Megareview for January 31, 2016 (with a focus on Penguin titles)

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.

Every couple of months, I already remind the readers of AALF about the College Faculty Information Service over at Penguin Random House whenever I am reviewing associated titles. CFIS allows qualified instructors about five free exam copies per year FOR FREE. It is THE BEST exam copy service of the major publishing houses because it’s quick, it’s obviously affordable, and it thus provides instructors with opportunities to expand course offerings. For more information go here:

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

And if any of the titles below sound interesting to you, you could request them ALL since they are all from Penguin, and there are four titles (which would leave you still with one other to pick from).

Without further ado, here are the reviews.

In this post, reviews of Renée Ahdieh’s The Wrath and the Dawn (Putnam Juvenile, 2015); Zen Cho’s Sorcerer to the Crown (Penguin Publishing Group, 2015); Marie Lu’s The Rose Society (Penguin Young Readers, 2015); and Fatima Bhutto’s Shadow of the Crescent Moon (Penguin Press, 2015);

A Review Renée Ahdieh’s The Wrath and the Dawn (Putnam Juvenile, 2015).



Well, I have always been a fan of the genre of the oriental tale. The overview at B&N provides us with the basic gist of Renée Ahdieh’s The Wrath and the Dawn: “Every dawn brings horror to a different family in a land ruled by a killer. Khalid, the eighteen-year-old Caliph of Khorasan, takes a new bride each night only to have her executed at sunrise. So it is a suspicious surprise when sixteen-year-old Shahrzad volunteers to marry Khalid. But she does so with a clever plan to stay alive and exact revenge on the Caliph for the murder of her best friend and countless other girls. Shazi’s wit and will, indeed, get her through to the dawn that no others have seen, but with a catch . . . she’s falling in love with the very boy who killed her dearest friend. She discovers that the murderous boy-king is not all that he seems and neither are the deaths of so many girls. Shazi is determined to uncover the reason for the murders and to break the cycle once and for all.” The novel is loosely inspired by One Thousand and One Nights (otherwise known as the Arabian Nights), which focused on Scheherazade and her bid to survive an otherwise dangerous ruler who had been spurned in love and thus had used his power to execute virgins. Using her ability to weave the magical spell of storytelling, Scheherazade is able to evade her execution by keeping the ruler on the edge of his seat and thus pushing him to allow her to live one more day if he wants to hear more of the story. Ahdieh’s retelling is far more interested in exploring a more traditional courtship plot, which ultimately becomes the novel’s strength and its weakness. On the one hand, fans of the paranormal romance/ young adult fiction will be intrigued by the novel’s exploration of the genre conceit through the guise of the oriental tale and the reconstruction of a known plot. On the other, the place of storytelling eventually takes a backseat to the central romance. The issue here is that Ahdieh lets the elements of the fable enabled by embedded narratives recede into the background, which is an unfortunate result. The early tales that are included are delightful and show much of Shazi’s ability to generate political traction through the force of metaphor and allegory. Otherwise, Ahdieh manages to turn the original on its head in her clever redeployment of the motives behind the Caliph’s desire to execute these virgins. Further still, Shazi is quite the spirited heroine, who will no doubt bring a smile to readers in her proto-feminist, Westernized construct. For those interested in forms of the neo-Oriental tale, otherwise known as contemporary variations of narratives that involve the Middle East (and sometimes the Far East) from a millennia ago, I highly suggest Ted Chiang’s wonderful novelette, The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate. Oh, and if anyone manages to procure a cheap copy of the bound edition, send it to me! HAHA! No joke! =) For fans of this work, you’ll be pleased to note that Ahdieh’s follow-up is scheduled for 2016.

Buy the Book Here:

http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-wrath-and-the-dawn-renee-ahdieh/1120422062



A Review of Zen Cho’s Sorcerer to the Crown (Penguin Publishing Group, 2015).


Well this novel was certainly one of the surprise reads for me this year. While Zen Cho’s Spirits Abroad has been languishing on my shelf for too long (and still remains untouched), I finally got in gear to read her debut novel and US stateside emergence with The Sorcerer to the Crown. This novel is first of a trilogy, which is interesting given the fact that this work is definitely not marketed to the young adult crowd. To me, the differences of this work and young adult remain the age of the protagonist and therefore the kinds of issues and complexities that might come with an older and perhaps more wiser main character. The official Penguin Random website offers this synopsis: “The Royal Society of Unnatural Philosophers, one of the most respected organizations throughout all of England, has long been tasked with maintaining magic within His Majesty’s lands. But lately, the once proper institute has fallen into disgrace, naming an altogether unsuitable gentleman—a freed slave who doesn’t even have a familiar—as their Sorcerer Royal, and allowing England’s once profuse stores of magic to slowly bleed dry. At least they haven’t stooped so low as to allow women to practice what is obviously a man’s profession…At his wit’s end, Zacharias Wythe, Sorcerer Royal of the Unnatural Philosophers and eminently proficient magician, ventures to the border of Fairyland to discover why England’s magical stocks are drying up. But when his adventure brings him in contact with a most unusual comrade, a woman with immense power and an unfathomable gift, he sets on a path which will alter the nature of sorcery in all of Britain—and the world at large.” The woman “with immense power” is none other than a spirited character named Prunella Gentleman, who basically implores Zachary to take her to London, so she can be trained in the magical arts. Indeed, she has essentially been forced to become a lowly servant at a school in which the headmistress was her surrogate mother. Prunella, wishing to avoid this fate, decides that Zachary will enable her to learn more about her powers and perhaps even give her the opportunity to marry above her station. In this sense, the novel obviously resonates alongside the work of Jane Austen. You might call this novel Zen Cho’s version of the Victorian novel that has been mixed with fantasy and speculative narrative elements. Prunella’s “unfathomable gift” is a valise that contains seven eggs of familiars, which, if hatched, would make whoever commanded those familiars the most powerful sorcerer or sorceress in all of England. The plot gets complicated because Zachary must balance the future of the “magical” society against other upstarts who wish to command the group. Further still, England’s international relations have become muddied by an incident regarding Janda Baik, a tiny island territory part of Malaysia. The magically inclined women of this region perceive they are under attack and employ their powers to defy the Sultan, while being a general thorn in the side of anybody related to mystical arts. Zachary must navigate how to deal with these women, while also balancing his desire to remain a potent figurehead for the society. Of course, Prunella Gentleman offers the right amount of spontaneity to create one problem after another for Zachary. Cho’s work is whimsical and most of all humorous, which makes this novel a cut above so many others. It doesn’t take itself too seriously, but also weaves in some historical elements that create a kind of political and social texture. The novel thus breathes life into the international dynamics that supported the development of persistent colonial conquest, while keeping us entertained with such madcap characters. So, we will no doubt anticipate the next two works.


Buy the Book Here:

http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/sorcerer-to-the-crown-zen-cho/1121098389



A Review of Marie Lu’s The Rose Society (Penguin Young Readers, 2015).


So, I’ve been reading all of Marie Lu’s work ever since Legend, which now seems like it hails from a different reading lifetime. The Rose Society is Lu’s sequel to The Young Elites; I presume the work to be part of a trilogy, since this particular novel doesn’t end many different plot strands. I am finding this series quite fascinating because the protagonist, Adelina Amouteru, is something of an anti-heroine and certainly someone that many might consider to be a kind of villain. She is intent on revenge and often seems to enjoy the power that comes with killing. Lu’s work might be described as an X-Men tinged world but set in some earlier historical period in which characters seem to have some sort of European background (perhaps Italian?). In any case, in this particular fictional world, a blood fever that once raged through the population (think Black plague) has left a mark on many of the survivors, who are called malfettos. This term is derogatory, but some malfettos go on to harbor magical powers and many end up joining a group called the Daggers. In the last novel—and here is my spoiler warning as per usual—Adelina ended up forced out of the Daggers after it was presumed that she had betrayed them by having their leader Enzo (and presumed heir to the Kenettran throne) killed. In any case, in this new installment, Adelina and her younger sister Violetta, who we discover is also an elite with the intriguing power of negating the magical forces of other elites, are looking for a mythical individual named Magiano. They believe Magiano might have some key information and would be an instrumental ally in Adelina’s quest for revenge: she begins to realize that she must take the crown in order to save malfettos from their fates of almost certain hard labor and death. The throne is being held by Giuletta, but there is dissension among the ranks, as her lover Teren Santoro, who is an elite himself though hates his powers, is trying to kill off all malfettos in the city by rounding them into slave camps and working them into their graves. The daggers (who include Raffaele, Lucent, The Architect, and The Star Tief, who all return from the first book) are also banding together behind the power of Maeve, the Beldain leader, by attempting to gain entry into the Palace in order to bring Enzo back from the dead. Yes, my friends, Maeve is also an elite with the power to bring the dead back to life. There is one catch: bringing the dead back to life often give them amplified powers and for them to exist, they must be bound to a living individual. The plot strands come together as each team of elites, one lead by Adelina (her team will add an elite named The Rain Maker and is further supported by some other heavies) and the other by Maeve, end up intersecting in the capital city. Adelina employs her powers to confuse and to allow Maeve to resurrect Enzo only to allow him to be bound to Adelina instead of Raffaele. From here on out, it’s a mad dash to the plot-finish, as Adelina must regroup, try to find a way to make it so Teren Santoro will aid her to get her back into the palace, while Maeve and her elites attempt to carry out their plan to have the Beldish defeat the Kenettrans in a major military skirmish. Adelina is able to foil everyone’s plans: she forces Enzo to lay waste to the Beldish military, while she is able to make Teren kill Giuletta, when she implants an illusion that makes it seem as if Giuletta may actually be a malfetto, when she is not. Thus, Adelina ends up on the throne of Kenettra, but at the price of many dead bodies, the possible love that could have bloomed between her and Magiano, and the support of other powerful elites. Further still, the conclusion is particularly dark: Violetta reveals the possibility that all of those bestowed with elite powers may slowly be dying as a result of their use of magic. When Violetta attempts to lock down Adelina’s powers permanently, Adelina lashes out, leaving Adelina alone, pondering her future as queen. Obviously, there’s a lot of plot to cover, as is the case in so many young adult paranormal romance fictions, but there’s also a lot to praise here. I continue to enjoy the fact that Lu is risking the construction of a heroine that readers may not readily identify with by virtue of her darker yearnings. At the same time, Lu’s deft character construction allows us to contextualize why she would want so much revenge, death and destruction: Adelina is psychically traumatized and her twisted version of social justice comes from a place where she believes she can advocate for all malfettos. It doesn’t matter who gets in her way, so long as she herself is not the one who is in fear. Indeed, she wants to live in a world in which she gets to be the one that inspires fear rather than the other way around. In this sense, Lu has given us the young adult version of a magically-informed female Machiavelli, who will stop at nothing to perfect the vision of a new society in which those who are most socially marginalized will never cower in the shadows. Of course, readers will be well aware of the hypocrisies apparent in this vision, as Adelina herself must be involved in conflicts that end up killing some of her fellow elites, who do not share her darker vision of outright survival and conquest.

Buy the Book Here:

http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-rose-society-marie-lu/1120921372



A Review of Fatima Bhutto’s Shadow of the Crescent Moon (Penguin Press, 2015)


So, after finishing the novel, I immediately had questions about the ending. I read the final sequence a couple of times and was still confused, so my first order of the day is to encourage some conversation about the conclusion simply based upon the plotting. In any case, Fatima Bhutto’s debut novel Shadow of the Crescent Moon (Penguin Press, 2015) is given this plot description at B&N (which also gives some spoilers to be sure): “Fatima Bhutto’s stunning debut novel chronicles the lives of five young people trying to live and love in a world on fire. Set during the American invasion of Afghanistan, The Shadow of the Crescent Moon begins and ends one rain-swept Friday morning in Mir Ali, a small town in Pakistan’s Tribal Areas close to the Afghan border. Three brothers meet for breakfast. Soon after, the eldest, Aman Erum, recently returned from America, hails a taxi to the local mosque. Sikandar, a doctor, drives to the hospital where he works, but must first stop to collect his troubled wife, who has not joined the family that morning. No one knows where Mina goes these days. Sikandar is exhausted by Mina’s instability and by the pall of grief that has enveloped his family. But when, later in the morning, the two are taken hostage by members of the Taliban, Mina will prove to be stronger than anyone could have imagined. The youngest of the three leaves for town on a motorbike. An idealist, Hayat holds strong to his deathbed promise to their father—to free Mir Ali from oppressors. Seated behind him is a beautiful, fragile girl whose life and thoughts are overwhelmed by the war that has enveloped the place of her birth. Three hours later their day will end in devastating circumstances. In this beautifully observed novel, individuals are pushed to make terrible choices. And as the events of this single morning unfold, one woman is at the center of it all.” This description cannot fully encapsulate the problematic politics of the region of Mir Ali, which is a hotly contested area, as Taliban insurgents, American forces, and the Pakistani military all fight to retain control. Those in Mir Ali must decide where their loyalties lie. Bhutto makes clear through her fictional depictions that no one can stay neutral: the fact of war forces people to make decisions and to express views that reveal their alliances. Many of these alliances are not necessarily given to any official entities. Mina, for instance, and perhaps even her husband Sikander, find the rhetoric behind any freedom fighting entity to be suspect given the possibility of collateral damage. Others like Aman Erun will sell loyalty in order to find escape from a war torn land, if only transitorily. Bhutto tells this story in shifting third; there is a more diffuse quality to the storytelling, which somehow provides the proper naturalistic aesthetic here. We know even before the narrator tells us that we’re hurtling toward some terrible ending, even if it is not directly conveyed. The chess pieces have all been put into place, and they have no great amount control over their movements. The family’s trajectory is thus somehow already predestined. Thus, brief moments of possibility and potentiality are all the more heartbreaking to observe, simply because they already appear ephemeral, something that all the characters seem to know, despite their best intentions to change the course of their lives. Bhutto also provides an effective context to understand why some disaffected youths might choose to radicalize. Given the continuing uproar over Islamic fundamentalism and terrorist discourse (especially in light of recent events both in the United States and elsewhere), Bhutto’s novel strikes as a particularly incisive work that speaks to the contemporary international relations.

Buy the Book Here:

http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-shadow-of-the-crescent-moon-fatima-bhutto/1116732222

Asian American Literature Fans – Megareview for December 27, 2015

Asian American Literature Fans – Megareview for December 27, 2015

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.

In this post, reviews of Zoë S. Roy’s Calls Across the Pacific (Inanna Publications, 2015); Sherry Thomas’s The Immortal Heights (HarperCollins, 2015); Marisa de Los Santos and David Teague’s Connect the Stars (Harper Children’s Division, 2015); Ayad Akhtar’s The Who & The What (Back Bay Books, 2014); Ayad Akhtar’s The Invisible Hand (Little Brown and Company, 2015); Alexandra Kleeman’s You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine (Harper 2015); Tabitha Suzuma’s Hurt (Transworld Publishers, 2015); and Melissa de la Cruz’s Isle of the Lost (Disney-Hyperion, 2015).


A Review of Zoë S. Roy’s Calls Across the Pacific (Inanna Publications, 2015).



I have been reading Zoë S. Roy’s publication in reverse order, starting with her most recent novel, Calls Across the Pacific, which is told in third person perspective and follows the viewpoint of Nina Huang. The official page provides this useful synopsis: “Fleeing the Cultural Revolution, a young Nina Huang says goodbye to her family and friends, and steals across the bay to Hong Kong, afterward immigrating to the U.S. and later to Canada. Twice she returns to China to reunite with her mother as well as friends, and to see how Chinese society and politics are evolving. However, as an escaped citizen who has returned with an American passport, Nina puts herself in dangerous situations and finds herself needing to flee from the red terror once again.” The novel can be classified more or less as a kind of bildungsroman, as Nina attempts to integrate herself into a larger national identity, one that is ultimately complicated by the titular “calls across the Pacific.” Rather than presenting Nina as traumatized by her many boundary-crossing movements, Roy is intent on revealing a tactical character, one who is willing to push herself intellectually and physically in order to survive. In some ways, this novel reminded me of Jade Snow Wong’s Fifth Chinese Daughter, especially as it twined a narrative about an individual alongside larger social forces embroiling the United States in Asia. In this sense, Roy’s work is very much operating through a historical aesthetic, as Nina becomes a political refugee in a time in which the U.S. must contend from fallout from multiple wars in Asia (and the Cold War). Pivotal to the texture of Roy’s narrative are romance plots, as Nina must find a way to balance her romantic interests alongside her educational endeavours. Indeed, her first significant relationship in North America is ultimately terminated after her boyfriend perceives that she is putting more effort into her studies than into their connection. A second relationship with a Canadian journalist proves to be more fruitful, especially as Nina is able to explore her interests in political science alongside her developing notions of romance and love, especially as couched in a more westernized context. Of course, the calls across the Pacific also speak to Nina’s multiple movements back to China, first after Nixon re-establishes contact in 1975 and later when Nina seeks to embark on more research for an intended book project. But both of these trips are not surprisingly complicated. Nina cannot be too open about her travels there, and both instances involve her identity being interrogated. In the last arc of the book, Roy ups the tension when Nina is detained for a period of time until she can provide proof that she is traveling with the assent of her original labor camp. Of course, Nina is not part of a labor camp, so she must rely upon the quick wits of her friends and family to help her escape and return to Canada. Fortuitously, Nina’s translation skills come in handy during this period, and she inadvertently falls upon some information that reveals the hardships endured by some “sent down youth” during the Cultural Revolution. Such details are essential to Roy’s political project: this novel is part of the historical recovery work of many expatriate and domestic Chinese North American writers who have been delving into this particular period and the many brutalities that resulted from Mao’s reformation policies (see also: Lisa See’s Shanghai Girls for another instance that explores the Great Leap Forward). The sustained interplay between historical references and personal matters can sometimes bog down the emotional impact of the plot, but Calls Across the Pacific is undeniably critical as part of this larger archive of Chinese North American transnational narratives that reveal the intricate nature of ethnic diasporas.

Buy the Book Here:

http://www.inanna.ca/catalog/calls-across-pacific/

For more on the author:

https://sites.google.com/site/zoesroy/

A Review of Sherry Thomas’s The Immortal Heights (HarperCollins, 2015).


As always, I give a spoilers warning with many young adult fictions due to their often serialized natures. Sherry Thomas returns with The Immortal Heights, part of the Elemental Trilogy, which is focused on Iolanthe Seabourne and her paramour Prince Titus, who is heir apparent to the kingdom. B&N will again provide us with the key synopsis: “In a pursuit that spans continents, Iolanthe, Titus, and their friends have always managed to remain one step ahead of the forces of Atlantis. But now the Bane, the monstrous tyrant who bestrides the entire mage world, has issued his ultimatum: Titus must hand over Iolanthe, or watch as his entire realm is destroyed in a deadly rampage. Running out of time and options, Iolanthe and Titus decide to act now and deliver a final blow to the Bane that will end his reign of terror for good. But getting to the Bane means accomplishing the impossible: finding a way to infiltrate his crypt in the deepest recesses of the most ferociously guarded fortress in Atlantis. And everything is only made more difficult when new prophecies come to light, foretelling a doomed effort. . . .Iolanthe and Titus will put their love and their lives on the line. But will it be enough?” The “friends” that are being referred to here are none other than Kashkari (Titus’s former classmate, who has been revealed to be a mage with prognosticating capabilities), Amara (who Kashkari loves but is betrothed to his brother), Master Haywood (Iolanthe’s guardian when she was growing up), and Mrs. Hancock. Much of the beginning plays out the events from the last novel in which Iolanthe and Titus are recovering from the effects of amnesia and are battling Atlantean forces in the desert. Once this battle is over, they must plan a way to defeat Bane all the while acknowledging the possibility that this conflict may end their lives. The prophecy that has long held this trilogy together remains complicated by Kashkari’s vision that Iolanthe may find herself killed if she engages in a battle with Bane. This fact leads Titus to try to find a way to leave Iolanthe behind, but his stratagem proves futile as Iolanthe is determined to end Bane for the larger cause of terminating such an evil force in the world. There has always been much to admire about Sherry Thomas’s foray into the genre of the young adult fiction with paranormal romance tendencies: she’s game for meticulous world building, especially related to elements involving movement: vaulting, usage of portals and spell books from other dimensions, magic carpet rides, and wyverns capable of carrying particularly deadly riders from Atlantis. At the same time, the intricacies of this world often create an extra readerly burden because the narrative has been strewn across three novels and an excess of 1000 pages at this point. There were times when I had to hunt down the previous two installments just to get reoriented, even as Thomas takes time to reiterate certain “rules” that apply to this fictional world. Thus, even Thomas seems to get bogged down in some of the details and entire chapters can seem to be devoted to exposition, which creates an uneven pace over the span of this final installment. Fortunately, Thomas knows how to tie the loose ends together and devoted fans will be rewarded with a finale that provides much needed romantic catharsis for our central protagonists, visions of doom be damned.

Buy the Book Here:

http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-immortal-heights-sherry-thomas/1121093635#productInfoTabs

A Review of Marisa de Los Santos and David Teague’s Connect the Stars (Harper Children’s Division, 2015).


The holiday season always means reading more guilty pleasures. For me, the guilty pleasures often come in the form of YA para/normal fiction. Santos and Teague’s second collaboration (after Saving Lucas Biggs, which was already reviewed on AALF) was just the right thing I needed after I finished my grading and was moving into what I like to call: catch up and do the publishing thing during winter break. As with Saving Lucas Biggs, Santos and Teague split the narrative perspectives up amongst multiple first person storytellers. The first is given to Audrey Alcott, who possesses a rather unique ability to tell whether or not someone is lying. She is so adept at this skill that she has a rather anthropological eye toward deception, categorizing someone’s lie based upon their demeanor and the truth they are ultimately obscuring. The second is given to Aaron Archer, who also has a talent: he has immaculate sensorial (both visual and aural) memory with such an acuity that he can remember everything he has read, seen, and heard. Each character, though, is a bit of an outcast in their respective middle schools. Audrey is certainly a misfit and is disinvited from a major party at the beginning of the novel. When she is accused of stealing a bracelet from one of the most popular girls in the school, she knows it’s time for a change. For his part, Aaron parlays his talents into being the leader of his school’s trivia team, but his knowledge has its limits, as he can memorize facts and figures, but cannot always subjectively interpret or analyze them. When Aaron suffers a catastrophic failure at a major competition, he too realizes he needs a change. Enter the wilderness camp in which Aaron and Audrey are sent to in order to find a new sense of fulfillment and perspective. There they meet some other outsiders who have “special powers”: Louis, who has heightened sensory perception, and Kate, who boasts hyperempathy, thus giving her the ability to better understand the experiences of others. But, there is still a queen bee who presents a problem for this merry band of four, especially as the camp leader, Jare, places them all on various quests and challenges in order to make the most of their time amongst the mountains and deserts of the area. Santos and Teague are well aware that they need to keep readerly interest, so they raise the stakes in the final arc by presenting a missing person plot, which is twined with the possibility that Jare may not be as upstanding as he seems. This plot device does make for some compelling drama, but the root of the work stems not from the developments of these events, so much as they bring to light the dilemma that Aaron and Audrey face as oddballs. Aaron finds a way to better feel out the facts that have brought him so much attention, while Audrey understands that lying is not a quick way to mark someone else as evil or inherently pathological. Connect the Stars makes for a heartwarming story, perhaps perfect for the holiday season.

Buy the Book Here:

http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/connect-the-stars-marisa-de-los-santos/1120977502

A Review of Ayad Akhtar’s The Who & The What (Back Bay Books, 2014).


Do you ever sometimes burn out on narrative? It was apparent that I needed something really different to read, so I decided to pick up a play: Ayad Akhtar’s The Who & The What (Back Bay Books, 2014). B&N provides this pithy synopsis: “The Pulitzer prize-winning author of Disgraced explores the conflict that erupts within a Muslim family in Atlanta when an independent-minded daughter writes a provocative novel that offends her more conservative father and sister. Zarina has a bone to pick with the place of women in her Muslim faith, and she's been writing a book about the Prophet Muhammad that aims to set the record straight. When her traditional father and sister discover the manuscript, it threatens to tear her family apart. With humor and ferocity, Akhtar's incisive new drama about love, art, and religion examines the chasm between our traditions and our contemporary lives.” The play is apparently a riff off of Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew. Fans of Shakespeare will remember that one of the two sisters in that play is the “shrew,” who is closing in on spinsterhood and the younger of the two realizes that she will have difficulty getting married unless her older sister is married off first. Akhtar uses the same premise for this play, as Zarina’s younger sister Mahwish aggressively encourages her to get married. Zarina’s father Afzal takes it one step further by creating an internet profile for her daughter on a Muslim American dating site and pretending to be her. Akhtar takes the comic aspects of this play to a high level by making it so that Afzal actually screens the men interested in dating Zarina by meeting with them first, without these men realizing that they are meeting Zarina’s father instead. Not surprisingly, Afzal has not found a suitable man for her daughter… until that it is, he meets Eli, a white man who has converted to the Islamic faith. Hijinks naturally ensue when Zarina discovers her father’s stratagem, but Zarina softens when he meets Eli, and this arranged dating actually ends up working to Azfal’s benefit. Zarina and Eli eventually get married, but there are skeletons in the closet. Zarina was in love with another man prior to meeting Eli, and she felt forced into ending that relationship because the man was not a Muslim. Second, Zarina has been suffering from a form of writer’s block based upon a novel that would be an obvious feminist critique of the prophet Muhammed. Once Azfal gets wind of Zarina’s plot, he naturally throws a conniption fit. Here, Akhtar also seems to be gesturing to the imperiled nature of artistic imagination in the face of Islamic fundamentalism, an issue obviously fraught for South Asian American/ Anglophone writers especially following the fatwa directed at Salman Rushdie following the publication of The Satanic Verses. Akhtar’s plays have always also been particularly incisive in their exploration of interracial romance, and The Who and the What is no different. In this case, Zarina, obviously living up to the royal significations of her name, seeks to find a path to independence for the modern Muslim woman, one that allows her to critique religion while also finding a source of identity within that same faith. This project is no doubt a dangerous path and the play reveals how challenging it can be to shake the religious ground from a feminist and transnational standpoint. Akhtar is no doubt a playwright who enjoys channeling the agent provocateur and The Who and the What is sure to generate lots of discussions over religious freedom, artistic imagination, and interracial dynamics.


Buy the Book Here:

http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-who-the-what-ayad-akhtar/1119965865

A Review of Ayad Akhtar’s The Invisible Hand (Little Brown and Company, 2015).


Plays so rarely come in full trade paperback versions, so Akhtar’s embrace by Little Brown and Company has been a treat, especially for fans of Asian American literature (and readers of AALF). Akhtar’s third published drama through LB & Co. is The Invisible Hand, which takes a look at corporate greed, transnational corporations, and their connections to the Islamic faith and Middle Eastern/ South Asian nation-state building (and/ or destabilization). Of the three plays that Akhtar has published, it might be surprising to say that this piece is probably the most polemic and potentially controversial. The short summary given at B&N states: “A chilling examination of how far we will go to survive and the consequences of the choices we make. In remote Pakistan, Nick Bright awaits his fate. A successful financial trader, Nick is kidnapped by an Islamic militant group, but with no one negotiating his release, he agrees to an unusual plan. He will earn his own ransom by helping his captors manipulate and master the world commodities and currency markets.” There are a couple of different power plays at work. On the one hand, there is the more Westernized and liberal entity that is embodied through Bashir, a man affiliated with the terrorist group that has taken Nick Bright captive. Bashir seeks to learn the techniques of trade, futures, and currency manipulation in order to correct the corruption that he perceives has undermined Pakistan’s development as an independent nation-state. On the other, there is the Imam who presents a more conservative approach to the West, who finds Nick Bright’s talents as a trader to be merely a symbol of Western avarice and decadence. There can only be one use value for Nick Bright, which exists only in his likely death as an enemy of Muslims. It is unclear who retains the upper hand between the Imam and Bashir, and the power dynamic is one that Nick necessarily must navigate if he is to survive. In any case, Akthar is most content in unsettling the audience, especially by muddying the boundaries between heroes and villains. Though Nick’s life is no doubt in peril, it’s not quite clear of course what path is the most just or noble. Because of this lack of clear moralism, Akhtar’s latest play is open to fruitful interpretation and no doubt will stir many conversations concerning discourses of terrorism, western capitalism, and social justice. As always, Akhtar retains his status as a preeminent playwright/ agent provocateur.

Buy the Book Here:

http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-invisible-hand-ayad-akhtar/1121865195

A Review of Alexandra Kleeman’s You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine (Harper 2015).


Well, my guess is that readers will react strongly in one way or another to Alexandra Kleeman’s debut novel You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine. The title refers to the existential conceit of the novel, which explores the ways in which an individual may or may not be able to connect to himself, herself or zeself. In the novel’s case, the title character, known simply as A, spends much of her time musing on whether or not she is really herself. She feels a little bit out of sync, a kind postmodern ennui that also undermines her closest relationships. She has a roommate, a young woman named B, who also happens to look like her, though B is skinnier. A’s boyfriend, known simply as C, provides A with the company that she needs to get out of her head and to pretend at times that she’s not so lonely. But the novel takes a strange turn after setting up these basic relationships, as A starts to get increasingly unhinged or at least compelled by her desire to find meaning in a commoditized world in which commercial narratives and capitalism often give her the most compelling ways to get at her conflict: how can A be more like herself? For A, this quest leads her to the Church of Conjoined Eaters wherein she undergoes a cult-like process to purge herself of all dark forces, which apparently involve any specific memories of her past life. She must be recreated as a new vessel in which her relationships especially seem to cause a damaging form of de-selfing. By embracing the ways of the light, she can become the best ghost of herself. This process of ghosting seems to be Kleeman’s take on consumer’s capitalism attempt to construct desire. That is, as we are constructed around what lacks in us. Thus, we continually seek to buy things in order to make us closer to what we actually want to be. The problem, as Kleeman’s novel shows us, is that we can never actually get there, precisely because there’s always something else that you can improve, change, or buy to make you one step closer to the best version of you—under consumer capitalism mind you—that you can be. As a novel of ideas, You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine stretches readerly patience because it requires you to find a way to identify with the title character in order to follow her increasingly weird adventures and meandering thoughts. In this sense, some might find the critique of consumer capitalism and associated technologies to be the more intriguing than any aspect of the novel’s actual literary conceits, including its plots and characters. Nevertheless, readers will definitely find themselves in a quirky fictional world, one sure to provoke discussion over the novel’s open form conclusion.

Buy the Book Here:

http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/you-too-can-have-a-body-like-mine-alexandra-kleeman/1120611753

A Review of Tabitha Suzuma’s Hurt (Transworld Publishers, 2015).


(at first I thought the tagline on the cover was a bit dramatic, but after reading the novel...)

Most of Tabitha Suzuma’s work has only been published in the UK. With Forbidden, Suzuma received her stateside release a couple of years ago. Her most recent publication, Hurt, another young adult fiction, has only been released in the UK unfortunately. As always, I start these kinds of reviews with the frustration that comes from having to deal with publication rights and how they ultimately affect a reader’s access to a given work. In any case, Tabitha Suzuma’s Hurt employs a third person perspective that is focalized through Mateo Walsh, a brilliant young diver who is aiming for an Olympic medal. He is in a very serious romantic relationship with a fellow student named Lola; they’re in their late teens and have already engaged in sexual activity with each other. He is popular, though eschews the limelight to focus on his girlfriend and his two best friends, Hugo and Isabel (these two are also a couple). The novel starts with a flashback of a scene in which Mateo finds himself awake in his room with visible cuts and bruises all across his body and no idea why his room is trashed. Something has happened to him, but he is unsure about what that is. Over the course of the novel, little bits and pieces begin to emerge about that flashback. At first it becomes evident that the event was obviously related to some sort of traumatic moment in which he was a central figure: the problem for the reader is that we’re unsure whether or not he was a victim or a perpetrator. Perhaps, this tension is Suzuma’s greatest feat in this work, as readers are propelled to figure out not only what happened on that fateful night, but also whether or not Mateo harbors a secret that he keeps from the ones he loves because he fears some sort of inner monster. Suzuma has a number of plotting tricks up her sleeve that increasingly ramp up readerly anxiety: we wonder if Matheo might harm himself due to his intense agitated state; what is the secret he harbors? *And here we have some spoilers forthcoming* When Matheo finally tells Lola that he’s been sexually assaulted and raped by another man, we begin to see the possibility that he may begin to address his trauma, but the identity of this perpetrator becomes ever significant to the plot, and the reveal is Suzuma’s devastating final card. But, I’ll avoid that revelation for the possible reader. One minor issue that the novel does bring up is the question of the villain and how a figure imbued with antagonistic force is depicted. As the novel grapples with serious questions of trauma and recovery, I couldn’t help but wonder whether or not the figure who is ultimately deemed to be a perpetrator deserves a rounded characterization. It does call to mind whether or not we need a more nuanced vocabulary for the figure of the antagonist and the variations thereof. In any case, I digress. Suzuma’s Hurt will be sure to generate some polarizing responses, but ultimately keep the reader taut to the page.

For more on the book go here:
http://www.tabithasuzuma.com/#/hurt/4565532969

A Review of Melissa de la Cruz’s Isle of the Lost (Disney-Hyperion, 2015).


So, it wouldn’t be AALF without a review of a Melissa de la Cruz novel at some point. I think she may perhaps hold the gold medal for most reviews here. Pylduck can correct me if I’m wrong, but I’m fairly sure that she (or Allen Say) has gotten the most review love over here. Part of the reason is obviously that I am a big fan of the paranormal young adult genre and de la Cruz is ever prolific in this area. One of her latest efforts in this area is Isle of the Lost (Disney-Hyperion, 2015), which is apparently a novelistic prequel to some sort of television series (if I’ve gotten my facts correct). Isle of the Lost takes on the perspectives of the children of major Disney heroes and villains, focusing on the five children. Four are stuck in the Isle of the Lost, the place where Disney villains have been banished and where magic, especially the evil kind, has been completely abolished. These four are Mal (daughter of Maleficent), Evie (daughter of the Evil Queen who tried to poison and off Snow White), Carlos (son of Cruella de vil), and Jay (son of Jafar).  One other perspective is given to Ben, son of the Beast and Belle, who lives in a beautiful and also magical-less place called Auradon in which all of the Disney heroes reside. Ben’s storyline is fairly straightforward: he is bored by how “good” the heroes have it, while he struggles to take on the mantle of being the king, since his father and mother want to retire from governance. The children of the Disney villains are not surprisingly far more interesting: they live in a land filled with frowns and slop, burnt black coffee and evil schemes. They go to school for classes that teach you how to be more dastardly, how to be more selfish, and how to be more cunning. But, Mal, Evie, Carlos, and Jay are not exactly so evil, and de la Cruz’s novel operates with a seductive conceit concerning the heroic capacities of villains and their children. By turning good and bad around, de la Cruz generates a form of narrative intrigue that serves as the perfect grounds for the upcoming series. You’ll want to see if Ben, Mal, Evie, Carlos, and Jay might meet in a universe where bad and good isn’t so easily defined and perhaps create an even better world in the process. But we’ll have to wait and see. Of course, the novel benefits from a fictional world that most Western readers will be quite knowledgeable about already and thus builds in an audience hungry for the story that will follow. Readers will be pleased to see a new generation of Disney heroes and villains because it allows that universe to expand in unpredictable ways, while also incorporating beloved stories from the past all at the same time.

Buy the Book Here:

http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-isle-of-the-lost-melissa-de-la-cruz/1121883556

Asian American Literature Fans – Megareview for November 19, 2015

Asian American Literature Fans – Megareview for November 19, 2015

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.

In this post reviews of Dao Strom’s We Were Meant to be a Gentle People (Paper Doll Works/ Martin Paul Moser Productions, 2015); Rin Chupeco’s The Suffering (Sourcebooks, 2015); Raj Kamal Jha’s She Will Build Him a City (Bloomsbury USA, 2015); Livia Blackburne’s Daughter of Dusk (Disney-Hyperion, 2015); Khanh Ha’s The Demon Who Peddled Longing (Underground Voices, 2014); Shirley Camia’s The Significance of Moths (Turnstone Press, 2015); Sameer Pandya’s The Blind Writer: Stories and a Novella (University of Hawaii Press, 2015); Brandon Shimoda’s Evening Oracle (Letter Machine Editions, 2015).

A Review of Dao Strom’s We Were Meant to be a Gentle People (Paper Doll Works/ Martin Paul Moser Productions, 2015).



Dao Strom is one of those writers that I’ll always associate with a period of reading discovery in graduate school. I was at a bookstore in Goleta and chanced upon something called Grass Roof, Tin Roof sometime in 2003 or so. I was intrigued by the premise and immediately read it with gusto. It became one of my favorite novels (and still is), and I’ll always connect this work with other favorites that I read during this period (including Brian Ascalon Roley’s American Son, Alexander Chee’s Edinburgh and le thi diem thuy’s The Gangster We are All Looking For; all these novels are still on regular rotation in my classes). I considered writing on the novel and even produced a critical essay (still in the publication doldrums) on the work and was feverish for more of Strom’s fiction. Fortunately, she soon published The Gentle Order of Boys and Girls, a notoriously overlooked story collection that cemented in my mind that she was a talent and a writer with a long and illustrious literary career ahead of her. Between the publication of TGOOBAG and We Were Meant to be a Gentle People, I continued to troll amazon, hoping to see a listing for a new publication (still waiting on le’s latest, but Roley is officially putting out his second work soon). Meanwhile, Strom was also cultivating a career in popular music. She released a couple of albums, but there were no written publications in sight. Finally, sometime around last year, I saw something called We Were Meant to be a Gentle People listed, though the publisher kept changing and the genre of the work unclear. As the publishing details solidified, it became apparent that Strom had created a multigenre work: part memoir, part song, part poetry, part visuals (with quite evocative photographs nestled throughout the pages). This work also clarifies some of the fictional impulses that appeared in earlier publications, especially as we begin to see how much of herself and her life can be found in these feats of the imagination. But, one of the most important portions of We Were Meant to be A Gentle People appears when Strom makes apparent the stakes in this memoir: she knew that she wanted to write and publish a work that she had to stand behind without the possible out of fictional “neutrality.” In this sense, we see Strom steer away from fictional impulses if only because she desires to find a creative venue that might be more risky for her. Indeed, this multigenre memoir (if I can call it that) defies any easy categorization and is at its best because it is aware of the limits of writing, recovery, memory, and the desire to embrace one’s roots and heritage (however that heritage might be defined). The work is tripartite in structure, with the interlude providing the division between East and West; this structure is Strom’s way of working out the transnational nature of her existence, the complications of being a refugee, a sojourner, the daughter of what some might call many fathers (and more on that later) and a mother with a distinguished, perhaps even slightly infamous literary past in Vietnam. Here, the memoir goes into great detail about the complications of Strom’s paternal lineage: the man she believed to have been her biological father is revealed to be someone else. Complicating matters further, the man who was actually her biological father and who she believed had died is revealed to be alive; she eventually travels to Vietnam at the age of 23 to meet him through struggling for five weeks to make herself do so (out of a six week vacation). To make matters just a little bit more muddy: Strom’s stepfather (a white European immigrant himself) additionally plays a prominent role in her life, as he is the one who marries her mother after the family has settled in the United States, and directs their lives once they move to Northern California gold country. It is Strom’s stepfather who exerts the most commanding presence in her life when she is growing up in the United States. Strom’s mother is an inspiration for the simple fact of her many transformations; Strom makes clear her mother is a survivor, having juggled a number of different career aspirations and romantic relationships. At the same time, Strom’s mother is one who is not necessarily forthcoming about her past. Not surprisingly, then, the shuttling between countries and the intricate webs of family provide Strom with a sense of unease that she is working out through this memoir: where do we find our sense of who we are, as our relationships become redefined over the course of our lives, Strom asks? Strom’s not entirely sure, as the conclusion shows us, but we’ll be sure to answer her final question by reveling behind the incredible aesthetic achievement that this multigenre memoir is. Thus, we can say that we’ve moved far beyond the “violence” that she wonders may be inherent in the process of excavation and self-discovery. The last chapters are especially affecting, as Strom delves into the tragic loss of a half-brother and her continuing tensions with her biological father that clarifies the large chasm that remains even after she had established a more sustained relationship them in the United States. As is evident, Strom is working through guilt and responsibility: what is her place in trying to create a sustainable bridge with this half-brother and her biological father? There is much I cannot cover in this review, especially the musical portions, as I’m woefully terrible at reviewing songs and associated lyrics, though these melancholic strains make the appropriate accompaniment to this work. If there is a minor quibble to be made in this review, it is that I would have preferred the work to come out in a hardcover version with far bigger page space. Strom’s typeface tends to be very small, so you’ll have to reach for your reading glasses if you have trouble on that level. I do hope that this work might find a second life by being picked up by a bigger art publisher because We Were Meant to be a Gentle People deserves that kind of epic production capacity, with glossy pages, big print, and space for the reader to settle into this dense, elegant, and expansive world.



Buy the Book Here:

http://www.spdbooks.org/Producte/9780990955511/we-were-meant-to-be-a-gentle-people.aspx


A Review of Rin Chupeco’s The Suffering (Sourcebooks, 2015).


Well, for some reason I figured that Rin Chupeco’s followup to The Girl from the Well would probably be the last in a duology, but The Suffering, the plot-driven, action-packed sequel certainly sets up this series for more installments. After the events from the debut, Chupeco has decided to shift narrative perspective to Tarquin (Tark) Hall, moving from the ghost narration in the first (which was focused on the titular girl from the well, Okiku, a spirit intent on vengeance). In the second, Tarquin and Okiku are living out there symbiotic lives together. Okiku still wants to hunt serial killers and Tarquin is more than willing to help her. Early on in the novel, Okiku actually goes off to kill Tarquin’s high school classmate, an act that is problematic insofar as this individual has never actually killed anyone, but Okiku fears that he will one day do so. This Minority Report-esque move has the consequences of creating a rift between Tark and Okiku. But, from here, the plot shifts considerably, as Tark and Okiku are pulled back to Japan in the wake of more disturbing news: Kagura, one of the shrine priestesses that was involved in Tark’s exorcism at the ending of the first novel, has gone missing. Worse still is the fact that she has gone missing on the context of searching for a mythical town called Aitou, which is supposedly located in Aokigahara, otherwise known as Japan’s infamous suicide forest. Tark, having apprenticed with Kagura, feels a great deal of responsibility for Kagura’s well-being and thus goes to Japan with the intent of helping the search parties. Once there, he is reunited with his cousin Callie (who was also an instrumental character from the first book), and they go off together in search of Kagura as well as the band of ghost hunters who were seeking out Aitou with her. While in Aokighara, Tark stumbles upon Aitou and realizes that they’re all in deeper trouble than they realize. Apparently, the inhabitants of Aitou were participating in a ritual involving seven female sacrifices that would be offered up so that a priest would be able to open a hell’s gate and control the powers involved with that gate. The ritual somehow was not completed, but not before the souls of the village were all corrupted into malicious spirits. Thus, Tark must attempt to engage in a number of exorcisms if he is to have any chance of saving Kagura and anyone else who was part of the ghost hunting crew. As I mentioned in the opening, the action is pretty much non-stop. I read this book in a couple of sittings, and was impatient to return just so I could figure out how it would end. The conceit of “traumatized” narration that made the first book so original is partially lost in the shift to Tark, so that was one element that I found less interesting, but overall, this book presents yet another solid addition to the YA paranormal canon. Whereas the first book essentially avoided the romance plot entirely, Chupeco decides to add some flirtatious interactions between Tark and another classmate (Kendele), but this subplot does not get developed at all, making you wonder whether or not it will be picked up in the future. The novel is heavy on the horror and gore elements, so some young teenagers should be forewarned! BOO!

Buy the Book Here:

http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-suffering-rin-chupeco/1121010248?ean=9781492629832

A Review of Raj Kamal Jha’s She Will Build Him a City (Bloomsbury USA, 2015).


Raj Kamal Jhal’s She Will Build Him a City (Jha has already published a number of novels including Fireproof, The Blue Bedspread, etc… I have unfortunately not had a chance to read these earlier works) had been listing on my shelf for a little bit too long, so I took it with me on a trip to the East Coast. I managed to get to it on the way back. The novel begins with an epigraph from Charles Dickens’s David Copperfield. This intertextual reference is apropros insofar as the novel does include a major character who is an orphan amongst a constellation of other characters that include: a woman who seems to be retrospectively telling a story to her daughter, who is now a grown woman about her life, especially the time when the woman’s husband was killed in a bus accident; a man who mysteriously takes a beggar woman and her child home, bathes them, then sends them back on their way; a woman working at an orphanage who is studying to be a nurse; and the aforementioned orphan who manages to leave the orphanage in the company of a dog. There is a magical realist quality to this work, as Jha rotates narrative perspective (using both first person and third person focalizers) sometimes inhabiting psychic interiorities and viewpoints of nonhuman figures (including dogs and at one point even a human who has been reincarnated as a cockroach). Central to this story is the issue of human connection amid rapidly modernizing India; this topic has of course been the subject of numerous novels at this point, including but not limited to Bharati Mukherjee’s Miss New India, Aravind Adiga’s Last Man in Tower, and Vikas Swarup’s The Accidental Apprentice. The novel takes place in an allegorical location, New City, and characters are given allegorical titles such as The Woman, The Man, and Orphan. In this sense, Jha seems to be gesturing to be marking these figures as paradigmatic of larger subsets of modern Indian society: the independent, urbanized widow who struggles to make a life in the shadow of her husband’s death or the orphan who seeks to somehow  rise out of the caste system through a little bit of luck and magical assistance from an enterprising dog. In the second arc of the novel, Jha begins to twine the stories, so that we understand how they are related to one another. From here forward, I will definitely be unveiling some spoilers, so you are forewarned. The mother character is connected to the orphan because she is the orphan’s grandmother. The mother’s daughter, Kahini, runs away from home after she falls in love with an upwardly mobile young man who lives in New City, but that man ends up pushing her to get an abortion. Due to some sort of botched procedure, she ends up still having the baby, leaving him on the doorstep of the orphanage, and then asks to return to her home with her mother with no questions asked. The conclusion sees the daughter return home, but it’s not clear if she has come home to commit suicide. By this point, the mother has fallen into a new romance with a student of her late husband, who had been a college professor. In another subplot, Kalyani ends up discovering she is suffering from TB. She ended up quitting the orphanage where Orphan was at because she was worried that she might infect the infant. Dr. Chatterjee, who had earlier harbored a kind of romantic interest in Kalyani, ends up subsidizing her medical payments, so her destitute family can afford the expensive daily antibiotic treatments. Fortunately, Kalyani’s strain is a treatable version. Jha returns to the motif of the surreal and the fantastic in a character known as Violets Rose (which we later discover is an anagram for Love Stories), who seems to have taken in Orphan at a kind of movie theater/ film screening location called Europa. This portion of the plot was perhaps the least effective because it deviated the furthest from the realism that seems to undergird this novel in its ultimate form. Kahini’s lover, as the readers discover, seems to be some sort of deranged serial killer. This subplot also remained quite complicated because long portions are framed from the perspective of this character, who has obviously become unhinged from reality. In particular, he continues to harbor fantasies about a young girl who had been selling a red balloon alongside her peasant mother. We are unsure if this man ends up killing this young girl, assaulting the mother, and then later also killing a taxi driver who may have been a witness to the fact that this man had taken the mother and the young girl back to his place in New City. The many surreal plot strands can frustrate an otherwise fascinating novel, which continues to mine the thorny path of India’s modernization. As a caveat, you will have to excuse me if I missed any of the plot details, as reading on an airplane does have its occasional turbulence drawbacks.

Buy the Book Here:

http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/she-will-build-him-a-city-raj-kamal-jha/1119677824

A Review of Khanh Ha’s The Demon Who Peddled Longing (Underground Voices, 2014).



I had earlier reviewed Khanh Ha’s Flesh (Black Heron Press) and was excited to see his follow-up The Demon Who Peddled Longing come out of another intriguing independent press called Underground Voices. As the title of the press suggests, Underground Voices seeks to bring publication attention to writers and to topics that have been otherwise commonly ignored. In Ha’s case, The Demon Who Peddled Longing is exceptionally fascinating for a text concerning the Vietnamese experience because it doesn’t really focus on war contexts (though these do appear as background issues at various points) and thus diverges from the ur-narratives that have grounded Vietnamese American fiction prior to this point. Flesh also operated in a similar manner, so we’re not surprised to see that Ha has gone in this different direction. There’s also something of a naturalistic impulse to this text, as it is set at first in a region of Vietnam filled with fishing boats, rivers, and flood plains. Our protagonist, who is unnamed, wakes up on a boat after having survived a previous sinking. He is being taken care of by a strange, large bodied woman, who then hires him to help with her fishing business. They have a complicated connection, which also includes the fact that at night she finds a way to force herself sexually upon him. Realizing that these conditions are far from ideal, he chooses to break from her and to continue with a revenge quest that has been quietly motivating his movements. Indeed, Ha is quite patient to let the details behind the mysterious protagonist’s movements and motivations surface. We begin to discover that this young man (called a boy in the novel), who is about 18 or 19 years old, is a drifter. He has no family. His uncle is dead. He fell in love with his cousin, who later also died because she brutally raped by some unknown individuals. Following the advice of a fortune teller, he begins to believe that two brothers are responsible for the crime. Once given information that leads him to conclude that the two brothers may be operating as serial rapists and murderers, he vows to find both of them and perhaps even to kill them. The young man eventually finds another working situation to help him along, this time working for a wife and her husband. The husband is suffering from a sickness that produces boils all over his body, so the wife needs someone to cover for the husband until he can recover. Eventually, it seems as though the husband will recover, though only after they finally see a doctor and only after it is apparent that the wife seems to be prostituting herself in order to cover the medical bills. After this point, the young man is on an errand for the husband-wife couple when it becomes apparent that he is in the company of one of the brothers (who has a conspicuous missing eye). He decides he has to move on from working for the husband-wife couple and devises a stratagem that will take him alongside the one-eyed man back to a place called O Sang. He realizes that he will be able to find out the identity of the other brother by working with the one-eyed man, but things go awry and he kills the one-eyed man partially in self-defense. He is critically wounded in the process, but is saved by a flute player who takes him to a monk who is able to tend to him and heal him. Later, once staying in the hamlet, he is recruited to help with finding a man who is lost out to sea. In that process, he is bitten by a shark. Though suffering from serious wounds, a doctor is able to heal him. During his convalescence, he chances upon a young woman whom he had once met on the road and who had been riding a beautiful horse. This young woman ends up hiring him as a horse caretaker on a property in a hamlet owned by an aging and sickly man, who already boasts one son (who is mentally disabled) from a wife who had cheated on him (and who he had killed using poison). Not surprisingly, he and this woman end up striking up a friendship. Eventually, the woman asks the young man to go to the flute player because she wants the flute player to play for her husband at a birthday celebration that will take place at sea. At this point—and here I am breaking for a spoiler warning—Ha is able to thread the narratives together, as we come to the realization that the flute player is none other than the brother of the one-eyed boy that the young man had killed earlier on in the novel. The flute player ends up scheming (along with the wife of a proprietor) to have the wife kidnapped by Khmer pirates, but this plan is foiled. In the process, the flute player loses his leg. The protagonist eventually confronts the flute player and makes it clear that he never killed the flute player precisely because it was the flute player who had taken him to the monk to be healed the night he had to kill the flute player’s brother. Thus, the protagonist is willing to forgo his quest for revenge precisely because he understands that they are in some ways still even. As the novel moves toward the conclusion, the old man asks his beautiful wife to consider taking on a lover, so that he may bear an heir that would be able to be independent, perhaps of course a son. This request creates considerable strain, as the wife would like to think on this request, on the one hand, and then wants the potential option of choosing the lover, on the other. Not surprisingly, she decides that she does not want to go through with the request if the husband gets to choose the lover. She takes matters into her own hands and asks the protagonist, who agrees. Of course, things go awry from here, as the old man wants the protagonist to leave the hamlet. The wife gives him the news, the protagonist agrees, and the protagonist goes on his way. Not intent to be cuckolded in this way, the old man planned for the proprietor to kill the protagonist, but the proprietor cannot carry out this task, obviously in part because the protagonist once saved his life and endured shark bites in the process. Thus, the drifter/protagonist goes on his way at the novel’s conclusion, seeking to go back to the flood plains, deltas, rivers, and the fishing life he had originally known so well.
           Ha’s writing can be incredibly beautiful, especially in its evocation of the natural landscape. There are times, too, though, the novel can suffer from odd shifts in narrative perspective. Though it is clear that the protagonist of the story remains the young man and his quest for revenge, there are points at which the narrative perspective will briefly or momentarily shift to another character like the wife or her husband. There is something of a timeless quality to this narrative that has its benefits and drawbacks to this impressionistic work.


Buy the Book Here:

http://www.undergroundvoices.com/TheDemonWhoPeddledLonging.html

A Review of Shirley Camia’s The Significance of Moths (Turnstone Press, 2015).



I’ve been a little remiss in the reviewing of poetry, and I can see my general oversight is much cause for concern, as I relished the understated lyricism of Shirley Camia’s The Significance of Moths. Camia is intent to employ a minimalist form of poetry that evokes concrete images often at the expense of a specific sense of time and place and more narratively grounded lyrics. In this sense, these poems certainly derive some inspiration from modernist aesthetics. At the same time, Camia’s collection derives a general coherence over a trajectory that seems to operate from the perspective of migration. Camia’s collection is no doubt influenced by an autobiographical impulse, registering the lush, tropical landscape of the Philippines against the displacement the newly arrived migrant feels in another country. Much of the collection deals with these conceptions of loss, especially in the form of the death of loved ones or the desperate desire to recover a sense of home. These desertions, absences, and unrequited yearnings are perceived even in later generations, among the children of these migrants, even if the routes of intergenerational communication do not always seem open. The most compelling aspect of this collection appears when Camia is able to call on ethnopoetics, a term coined by Shirley Geok-lin Lim, in order to provide the basis for the melancholia that inhabits all of the lyric personages. Figures and images such as carabao and duwendes are deployed not as markers of ethnic authenticity or what Frank Chin has occasionally called a form of ethnic pornography but as a way into the complicated (yet beautiful) landscape of the Philippines that haunts migrants after their their arrival. If there is a critique to be made of this taut and precise set of poems, it might appear in the more abstracted nature of the new world so to speak. While the Philippines resonates ever ephemerally and effervescently for the collection, as it well should given its primacy as the site of a post-lapserian poetic psyche, a spatial concrete-ness of this new (more barren) world drops out of the picture that would further generate a stronger dissonance that Camia is so elegantly constructing. To be sure, Camia’s lyrics are attentive to certain contexts that make migration and transnational movement so difficult. Indeed, the set of poems focusing on women’s labor, domestic service, and the physical exhaustion so apparent in caring for others is certainly some of the strongest in the entire collection. And most readers will find The Significance of Moths to exist in that rare intersection of sophistication and accessibility that so many poetry collections cannot sustain. Additionally, Camia is part of a notable set of Filipino North American poets who have been producing amazing work. The Significance of Moths would be wonderful to teach alongside other new publications such as Aimee Suzara’s Souvenir, Kristina Naca’s Bird Eating Bird, Barbara Jane Reyes’s poeta en San Francisco, and Luisa A. Igloria’s Juan Luna’s Revolver.

Buy the Book Here:

http://www.turnstonepress.com/poetry/the-significance-of-moths.html

A Review of Livia Blackburne’s Daughter of Dusk (Disney-Hyperion, 2015).


So, I figured Livia Blackburne’s Daughter of Dusk (part of the Midnight Thief series) would be a trilogy, but after finishing this one, I’m not sure if it will be. Given the conclusion, signs point to the likelihood that it will not. Blackburne focuses narrative perspective primarily on the assassin-thief-mixed being-human-demon rider heroine known as Kyra (and oops for those of you who haven’t read the first novel because I suppose I just dropped a major spoiler, but such is the way of reviewing these multi-installment works; you inevitably have to give away some important plot points just to begin). Kyra is still struggling to deal with the fact of her mixed heritage: that she, too, has the power to shapeshift into a large cat, replete with all the feral and predatory feelings that might come with it. She’s also still pining away for Tristram, the nobleman who has been reduced in rank for a period of time due to the events in the prior novel. Life in Forge is still very tumultuous. Malikel, one of the Councilmen, is facing an uphill battle getting more support from the residents, especially as other political entities begin to show their cards and their desire for more power. Therein lies the conflict for this novel: the future of Forge and the place that Malikel and his allies will have in it. Malikel’s primary antagonist is Willem, who is able to use his cronies to make life difficult for social outcasts and the lower class, who include Kyra and her closest friends and family (a supporting cast that includes Flick, Idalee, and the youthful Lettie). Once Idalee gets targeted by some of Willem’s noble henchmen, if we can call them that, Kyra takes matters into her own hands, which leads her to be exiled from the city and forces her to seek a stronger alliance with the demon riders. Fortunately for Kyra, some of the demon riders like Pashla and Adele actually seem to want to broach a sustained contact with humans and might even be willing to negotiate a kind of peace, so that raiding will be discontinued. Thus, the novel sets up two tensions, one between human factions, and another between humans and the demon riders. Kyra and her merry band of friends are obviously caught in between. There’s quite a lot of plot to cover in this novel, and sometimes it seems that there is actually too much going on (perhaps there was room for that third installment), but the merits of Daughter of Dusk can be found in Blackburne’s choice to centralize the heroic perspective in a character who is always questioning her morals and ethics. Indeed, at times, she seems more of an antihero and is given to bouts of impulsiveness and even of violence more befitting some of the more villainous characters, giving Kyra a complicated texture that sometimes makes her harder to root for (and therefore far more interesting to me as a reader). The other element I’ve made mention before is that such a novel also brings to mind concepts of “identity” metaphor, as Kyra’s status as a “mixed being,” certainly evokes the situation of any individual who faces questions of liminality, perhaps the mixed race individual, the newly arrived migrant, the social outcast from multiple backgrounds. In this sense, the novel operates to draw in any reader who perhaps understands the perspective of the outsider and who still struggles to make her way in the world. The least compelling part of the novel, at least for me, was the romance plot, precisely because there never seemed to be any true rival in the way of Kyra and Tristam. Blackburne builds in an arranged marriage plot that, perhaps because of genre constraints, one knows will never get far. Bottom line: Daughter of Dusk will be of great interest to fans of paranormal romance/ young adult fictions with its quirky heroine.

Buy the Book Here:

http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/daughter-of-dusk-livia-blackburne/1120878399

A Review of Sameer Pandya’s The Blind Writer: Stories and a Novella (University of Hawaii Press, 2015)


You could say I definitely had a more vested interest in reviewing this work, as I had the chance to meet Sameer Pandya a long time ago when I was first out on the job market. He happened to be on the faculty of the campus I was interviewing at for a flyback. I later discovered that he had left that faculty position to explore his interests in creative writing, and here the proof is in the pudding with The Blind Writer: Stories and a Novella. In this day and age, with kindle and the ever growing anxiety over publishing and the future of readers, to make a life as a writer seems ever more fantastical, a romance of a bygone age. In any case, Pandya takes some of these issues as part of his actual fictional depictions, especially in the title novella, certainly the most compelling in the collection in part due to the fact that Pandya simply has the time to develop his characters further with the increased narrative space. To be sure, the stories that introduce the collection are all wonderfully wrought, taut in their narrative precision, and do have that Chekhovian sensibility that Pandya himself references at one point in “The Blind Writer.” In “M-O-T-H-E-R,” Pandya explores the domestic squabbling and tensions that arise when a South Asian American family looks to support their children who are competing in spelling bees. “Ajay the Lover” explores the desultory erotic life of the title character, who seems to be thinking that he wants a long term relationship, but eventually realizes that perhaps that goal is fruitfully unattainable. “Welcome Back, Mahesh” is probably the most quietly tragic story in the collection (in a collection chalk full of quite tragedies; again the Chekhovian realist aesthetic at work), as the title character returns home after a stint in jail only to discover that his brother, who is already talented in so many things, has now also taken his place at the family business. “Patrick Ewing’s Father” takes on an intriguing narrative conceit: a South Asian American man moves to New York City and ends up on the subway with the title figure. Each character possesses a tortured relationship with someone else, and thus they able to explore a tentative connection in their brief commuting time together. “A Housewarming” is the last story before the novella and involves a downwardly mobile family who goes to the titular event in which they find themselves dealing with a little bit of envy, as they notice how rich and how affluent their friends have become. They, on the other hand, are struggling to make ends meet due to a new business venture. The title story and novella involves a graduate student, who is looking to move away from the production of academic scholarship and shift his focus to creative writing. He takes on a job to become an assistant for a renowned South Asian writer (Anil Trivedi) who happens to be blind. This story would seem to be derived in part (I think) from the actual life and work of Ved Mehta, but obviously Pandya reworks this figure to meet fictional demands. There is a considerable element of subtext to their relationship, as the narrator continues to navigate his murky place as the assistant, while simultaneously developing a complicated attachment to the writer’s wife (Mira). Indeed, the narrator and Mira embark on a brief, but tortured love affair that blooms uncertainly behind the prickly demands of Anil’s creative impulses. Though Mira is a decade older than the narrator, the age difference means little, especially given the fact that they find themselves drawn to each other emotionally, as each finds comfort in the ability to express their disappointments and insecurities. The narrator’s own family life is the obvious contrast point here, as his mother is divorced in all but name to her father, and he attempts to figure out his duties as a son. Certainly, this novella allows Pandya time to breathe narratively, and this work is indicative obviously of the fact that we need to see a novel from the author sooner rather than later. Pandya’s work is part of a growing archive of South Asian American and Anglophone story collections that are outstanding depictions with a social realist tinge to them. A Blind Writer would act as an ideal pairing with works such as Rishi Reddi’s Karma and Other Stories, Jhumpa Lahiri’s Unaccustomed Earth (especially in the use of a linked set of stories at the conclusion of this collection which we also see in The Blind Writer), Daniyal Mueenuddin’s In Other Rooms, Other Wonders, Mary Ann Mohanraj’s Bodies in Motion, and Nalini Jones’s What You Call Winter.

Buy the Book Here:

http://www.uhpress.hawaii.edu/p-9334-9780824847982.aspx



A Review of Brandon Shimoda’s Evening Oracle (Letter Machine Editions, 2015).



When looking up Brandon Shimoda’s newest publication—Evening Oracle—I was intrigued that the work was described as both poetry and literary nonfiction. I suppose that I was prepared for something more like prose poetry or prosey poetry, but instead I was immediately struck by the polyphonous nature of the work: it seemed at times that Shimoda’s lyric speaker was taking on the voices of others. Before I got too far into the work, I went and read some descriptions online, which confirmed my suspicions that some of the lines were actually taken from the writings of others. The editorial description provides this synopsis: “In EVENING ORACLE, Brandon Shimoda encounters shadows, specters, and women—young and old, living and undead—and finds himself standing in a graveyard in the middle of a rice field in a town that no longer exists. EVENING ORACLE is composed of poems originally handwritten at night before sleep in the beds of friends and strangers in Japan (2011-2012), and passages from emails and letters to and from friends and family on the subjects of fruit, vegetables, and dying grandparents. Featuring original poems by Dot Devota and Hiromi Itō, and correspondence by Etel Adnan, Don Mee Choi, Phil Cordelli, Youna Kwak, Quinn Latimer, Mary Ruefle, Rob Schlegel, and Karen McAlister Shimoda, among others.” The use of bricolage and patchwork is appropriate here because Shimoda is tending to the dead: that is, he’s attempting to make sense of the loss of family members, an issue that has tracked across his other poetry collections. The other clear thematic element here is Shimoda’s use of the collection as a kind of travelogue: many of the sections and poems are given names connected with Japanese culture or cities. In this sense, Shimoda is also working through issues of racial heritage (on multiple sides), the question of legacy, bodily disintegration (some of the most difficult poetic sequences involve the indignations of having to sit bedside at a hospital while a family member struggles to breathe or just to maintain their life), and the feelings of displacement that inevitably arise in transnational movements. Perhaps, the most inspired section involves the aforementioned rice field: this poetic sequence I found a little bit confusing, perhaps a nod to the circular nature of loss, as a lyric figure finds himself looking at a grave of an ancestor, but the editorial description cannot fully contextualize the nature of this search, which necessarily involves the help of strangers and a Japanese sense of hospitality. The other element to emphasize in Shimoda’s work (that I didn’t recall as a kind of poetic tone of his earlier collections) is a more darkly humorous wordplay (e.g. “Today, the sea is horny with people” (135) later juxtaposed with “Open graves/ or all that/ can be taken” in the same poem), something perhaps appropriate given the balance being struck in a collection buoyed by poetic verve that is always placed under productive instability through a thematic melancholy. The apparent “horniness” of the sea might be read not as some sort of sexual frenzy, but rather as a kind of callousness that might derive out of one’s need to soldier on after multiple deaths. The last stanza perhaps sums up the struggle to charge forward out of the abyss produced by grief, as the lyric speaker seems to be setting a scene of the Bon Festival in Yokohama, as “women are in the air, they are in the air” (137). Their Icarus-like desire pushes them closer to a sense of divine sublimity: “The deeper they inhale the sun, the closer they come/ To divining the future in shadows, reflecting/ the star that will become of the earth/ Down the corridor of space” (137). Shimoda’s collection reminds us of constant need to transform what is insensible and to search for beauty and uplift (cosmic and otherwise) amid staggering heartbreaks.

Buy the Book Here:

http://www.spdbooks.org/Producte/9780988713758/evening-oracle.aspx

Asian American Literature Fans – Megareview for October 18, 2015

Asian American Literature Fans – Megareview for October 18, 2015

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.

In this post, reviews of Vu Tran’s Dragonfish (W.W. Norton, 2015); Sona Charaipotra and Dhonielle Clatyon’s Tiny Pretty Things (HarperCollins, 2015); James Sie’s Still Life Las Vegas (with illustrations by Sungyoon Choi) (St. Martin’s, 2015); Wesley Chu’s Time Salvager (Tor Books, 2015); Susan Ee’s End of Days (Skyscape, 2015); Aisha Saeed’s Written in the Stars (Nancy Paulsen Books, 2015); Matthew Salesses’s The Hundred-Year Flood (Little A, 2015); and Steph Cha’s Dead Soon Enough (Minotaur, 2015).

A Review of Vu Tran’s Dragonfish (W.W. Norton, 2015).



Somewhere around 2010, I had heard a rumor that there was an upcoming debut novel by Vu Tran called This or Any Desert, or something of the like, and that this novel was forthcoming from Norton. This novel was one of the ones I kept looking for on amazon to see if it had a listing, but it never came up… UNTIL around late 2014. The wait for this novel was well worth it: Dragonfish is an intriguing mash up of the Asian immigrant narrative and the neo-noir. Our protagonist and semi-hard boiled hero is Robert Ruen, an Oakland police officer, who, at the beginning of the novel, has been summoned by two Vietnamese thugs in his home. He is forced to go to Las Vegas where he is unofficially hired by a sort of organized crime boss named Sonny Nguyen to find Sonny’s wife, a woman who also happens to be Robert’s ex-wife (who Robert had called Suzy during their marriage). Robert cannot say no to Sonny because he had already been videotaped in a violent scuffle involving Sonny that occurred five months earlier which had been filmed without his knowledge. Indeed, Robert had traveled five months prior to Las Vegas, after having found out that Sonny had been abusing Suzy. He had hoped to pressure Sonny into treating his wife with more respect and left Vegas believing he had made at least a partial impact. Little did Robert realize that Sonny had been detailing his moves ever since he had left and that Sonny wields far more power and influence than he could have imagined. Once Robert is in Vegas, he is tasked with monitoring a room at a casino hotel that his ex-wife had been secretly visiting every week during a specified set of hours. There is no indication about what she was doing in that room, only that she was going there every week, checking in and checking out always by herself. When Robert goes to the room, he discovers a woman who looks exactly like his ex-wife, only younger. He then realizes that it must be his daughter and indeed, his intuition is correct. Through a series of letters (stylized through the use of italics in the novel), the readers begin to discover more about his ex-wife, particularly her harrowing time as a boat refugee, the death of her first husband after he had returned from a communist re-education camp, her period surviving in a refugee camp and developing a strange, but intimate relationship with a fellow refugee family. The hinge point of the narrative seems to exist around an event involving Suzy’s daughter who almost drowns (Suzy herself is petrified to inaction) and who is saved by a stern man who readers later discover is Sonny. Hence, Suzy had actually known Sonny decades prior to her actual marriage to him and her time living with him in Las Vegas. Sonny’s first wife had died while at sea, and his only company at the refugee camp is his son, who is ever obedient. Readers further discover that Suzy ends up leaving her daughter with her family members once she and her daughter have successfully been sponsored and settled in the states. The use of letters to detail this past is quite an effective one, as Tran must inhabit the voice of a character who seems both mysterious and at first unsympathetic. The letters thus provide some important answers to Suzy’s complicated actions. Further still, Tran is able to count on some surprise motivations and connections among the primary set of characters to give the novel some important twists and turns which propel the reader toward a perfectly ambiguous, unclosed neo-noir finish. Dragonfish also is one of the very few novels (and cultural productions) I can think of that are set in Las Vegas and which has been penned by an American writer of Asian descent; the only others that come to mind are Cathy Park Hong’s Dance Dance Revolution and Melissa de la Cruz’s co-written Frozen series (which does not have an Asian character in it, or so I cannot recall one).

Buy the Book Here:

http://books.wwnorton.com/books/Dragonfish/

A Review of Sona Charaipotra and Dhonielle Clatyon’s Tiny Pretty Things (HarperCollins, 2015).


The overview at the B&N site describes this book as such: “Black Swan meets Pretty Little Liars in this soapy, drama-packed novel featuring diverse characters who will do anything to be the prima at their elite ballet school. Gigi, Bette, and June, three top students at an exclusive Manhattan ballet school, have seen their fair share of drama. Free-spirited new girl Gigi just wants to dance—but the very act might kill her. Privileged New Yorker Bette's desire to escape the shadow of her ballet star sister brings out a dangerous edge in her. And perfectionist June needs to land a lead role this year or her controlling mother will put an end to her dancing dreams forever. When every dancer is both friend and foe, the girls will sacrifice, manipulate, and backstab to be the best of the best.” When I first finished this book, I also tried to consider various intertextual comparisons and the best I could come up with was: Center Stage meets Showgirls. I appreciate the B&N’s comparison set, which is perhaps more apropos concerning the target audience of this young adult fictional novel, which involves (primarily) three first person narrators. The three main characters as noted earlier are Gigi, Bette, and June. There is a fourth narrator Cassie who opens the novel, and her first person perspective ominously opens up the work by effectively delineating the cutthroat atmosphere of the elite ballet school, especially as we later discover that she’s left the school to rehabilitate both her mind and body. The B&N overview fails to account for the fact that most of the students in this school are white and/or European. In contrast to the predominant racial makeup, Gigi and June are both students of color, with Gigi being of African American background and June of mixed race/ Korean descent. Ethnic and racial differences are pivotal to Charaipotra and Clayton’s story, which allows this frothy novel to rise perhaps above others in the same genre. Bette becomes the central antagonist, as it becomes apparent that she will go to great lengths to achieve a solo, even if it means sabotaging other dancers. June was perhaps the most interesting character for me because she struggles with various demons, including the fact that she has little knowledge of her birth father and that she continues to battle bulimia. Gigi is the obvious emotional center of the novel, as there are little flaws to her character. If anything, she comes off as perhaps a bit too angelic. Chairapotra and Clayton throw in some complications with her character with respect to her health, as she suffers from a heart condition that requires her to wear a monitor. Of course, little do her schoolmates know of this medical issue, which, as we can well imagine, will inevitably impact her dancing career in some way. As the novel moves toward its conclusion, it becomes increasingly clear that the loose threads will not resolve, setting up this work for future installments. I’m not quite sure if this novel is the first of an intended duology and trilogy, but I have no doubts the target audience will be excited to see how the storylines will continue. In terms of the so-called field of Asian American literature, this work is intriguing for a number of reasons. First, it is another example of a collaborative YA novel, placing this cultural production in line with others such as Siobhan Vivian and Jenny Han’s Burn for Burn series as well as the husband/ wife teams such as Marisa de Los Santos/ David Teague (Saving Lucas Biggs series) and Melissa de la Cruz/ Michael Johnston (Heart of Dread series). Second, the novel steers clear of certain autobiographical markers especially in Chairapotra and Clayton’s choice to mark one narrator as mixed race and Korean American. Clearly, the writers had to do some research here, as June’s narration requires knowledge of Korean culture, especially with respect to food. The English/ Korean phonetic choices were not optimum, in my humble opinion, but I wanted to note that the writers obviously took their time to make sure their representation had some cultural accuracy. Certainly, a novel worth exploring for those intrigued by a little bit of high school drama as it might play out in an elite ballet academy.


Buy the Book Here:

http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/tiny-pretty-things-sona-charaipotra/1120303511

A Review of James Sie’s Still Life Las Vegas (with illustrations by Sungyoon Choi) (St. Martin’s, 2015).



2015 has been a great year for Asian North American and Asian Anglophone debut novelists. James Sie’s Still Live Las Vegas stands tall alongside a number of other glorious debuts, which include (but are not limited to) Patricia Park’s Jane Re, Deepti Kapoor’s A Bad Character, Ausma Zehanat Khan’s The Unquiet Dead, Vu Tran’s Dragonfish, and Sandip Roy’s Don’t Let Him Know. At the heart of Sie’s mixed genre novel (which includes short sections depicted through the graphic narrative form, with wondrous illustrations by Sungyoon Choi) is a fractured family. The protagonist is Walt Stahl, who is given one of the narrative perspectives, and his viewpoint is the only one that is provided in the first person. The other two are split between Walt’s parents, Emmie, a Vietnamese American adoptee, and Owen, also an orphan, but under much different circumstances. Indeed, Owen’s status as an orphan is connected to something he believes is a curse related to the fact that anyone who is biologically related to him may be killed in relation to a car or a car accident. This so-called curse takes both of his parents, and later we discover that Owen’s infant daughter, Georgia, dies of hypothermia when Owen forgets that he has left her in the back seat. He had gone off to teach for the day and only hours later realizes what he has done, but it is too late. It is Georgia’s death that primarily catalyzes the narrative. In the wake of this event, Emmie impulsively decides to drive to Las Vegas, where she will visit the Liberace museum and commit suicide there (using Owen’s prescriptions and medications). Emmie’s obsession with Liberace occurs when she is just a young child, and it is one that she holds even into adulthood. Owen follows her to Las Vegas, leaving his young son (at the time) at home in Wisconsin with Emmie’s adoptive mother Vee. As Walt grows up, he comes to understand that Owen eventually found Emmie at the Venetian, but she later disappears again, never to be found. Perhaps for that very reason Owen moves Walt to Las Vegas, and they occasionally spend time looking for Emmie, who they believe may be found playing the accordion. Unfortunately, they never find her. Over time, Owen’s depression comes to overtake him, and he spends most of his days in bed and at home, while Walt ends up caring for him. When the novel opens, Walt is just about to graduate high school; he’s learning how to drive a car against the advice of his father and is taking driving lessons in secret. He also is developing his artistic skills by spending hours after his job going to the Venetian, where he uses his time sketching two figures who have been hired to pose as Greek gods. The novel then occasionally flashes back in time, giving us third person narrative perspectives from Emmie’s and Owen’s focalizing standpoints. Soon, it becomes apparent that there are some secrets about the family that Walt has not been privy to, and the novel becomes a sort of coming-of-age. Walt also eventually becomes closer friends with the posing figures hired at the Venetian, especially after Walt intervenes when drunk tourists end up attempting to assault the female goddess living statue. These two posing characters, Chrysto and Mara, are immigrants from Greece, who gain their occupations due to their unique skills, developed since they were children that allow them to hold static positions for long periods without movement. It is Walt’s connection with Chrysto that eventually pushes another subplot forward, as he must come to terms with his own sexual identity. Sie’s novel is a fascinating hybrid of family dysfunction, graphic narrative, and the traditional bildungsroman. The use of graphic narrative intercuts was an interesting aesthetic choice; I didn’t necessarily feel as though they were required, but they do give the novel a unique texture that reminds me of the sequence in Kill Bill Vol. 1 when the realist film lens gives way to anime cartoon. The effect in the novel is similar in that the reader is forced to consider an event from a different perspective, perhaps in a way that is more impressionistic and connected to an imperfect or hazy memory. Readers will be pleased by Sie’s distinctive debut. For me, the novel was particularly intriguing because I just finished reading Vu Tran’s Dragonfish, which is also set in Vegas; both these works do much to texturize the geographical depictions of Asian Americans in the greater American West (beyond California in particular).

Buy the Book Here:

http://us.macmillan.com/stilllifelasvegas/jamessie

A Review of Wesley Chu’s Time Salvager (Tor Books, 2015).


So, after reading Wesley Chu’s Time Salvager in one sitting last night, I woke up the morning after and went traipsing for more information on the novel. First I discovered that Michael Bay is interested in adapting the book into a movie. Second, after reading a reddit “ask me anything” feature with Wesley Chu as the featured focus, I discovered that the novel will indeed have a sequel, which I suspected after the novel’s somewhat open-ended conclusion. Let me say first: I love any books that deal with time travel; it’s just sort of a literary trope I find fun and interesting. It’s what made Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban my favorite of that series, and I generally think more Asian American writers should work with time traveling in their plots. The plot summary I’m providing comes from the MacMillan official site (*partial spoiler warning appears here*): “In a future when Earth is a toxic, abandoned world and humanity has spread into the outer solar system to survive, the tightly controlled use of time travel holds the key maintaining a fragile existence among the other planets and their moons. James Griffin-Mars is a chronman--a convicted criminal recruited for his unique psychological makeup to undertake the most dangerous job there is: missions into Earth's past to recover resources and treasure without altering the timeline. Most chronmen never reach old age, and James is reaching his breaking point. On a final mission that is to secure his retirement, James meets an intriguing woman from a previous century, scientist Elise Kim, who is fated to die during the destruction of an oceanic rig. Against his training and his common sense, James brings her back to the future with him, saving her life, but turning them both into fugitives. Remaining free means losing themselves in the wild and poisonous wastes of Earth, and discovering what hope may yet remain for humanity's home world.” Fortunately, I didn’t read this plot description beforehand because much of what is described here doesn’t even occur until well into eighty or so pages into the novel. The first chapters set up James’s psychological state quite well, showing exactly why he is reaching a breaking point. As a chronman, James can never really change the past beyond what he is tasked with doing, which is to recover some sort of resource for an organization that is no doubt intending to capitalize on that very thing (while conveniently avoiding the fact that they could be saving lives if they wanted to). James is ultimately a kind of mercenary, but even when he is privy to an event that he knows he could change or a person’s life he know he could save, he is forced to shove that idea away. This kind of moral quandary is exactly why so many chronmen (and chronwomen) face psychological breakdowns. Once James does break down and takes Elise Kim back with him, James must find another way of living his life, one that privileges the wellbeing of others and perhaps has a greater purpose than making a dollar for a megacorporation. The novel is briskly paced, and as I mentioned earlier, the open-ended conclusion definitely sets up the possibility of a sequel. One of the elements that I find intriguing is Chu’s willingness to delve into techno-Orientalist tropes for the science fictional universe, as some portions of the novel are set on a post-apocalyptic type earth in which the remnants of China, Japan, and the United States appear. Chu also makes the interesting choice to include surnames that might signify ethnic backgrounds, but never clarifies whether or not a character like Elise Kim, for instance, might be partly Korean. Fortunately, the novel moves beyond the romance plot detailed in the description in its evocation of a future run amok through the greed of corporations and obviously stages a large-scale and temporally expansive critique of capitalism as it continues to function to create wide income inequality. As with most science fictional works, Time Salvager’s rhetorical impulse is firmly grounded in the proliferation of material social inequalities.



Buy the Book Here:

http://us.macmillan.com/timesalvager/wesleychu

A Review of Susan Ee’s End of Days (Skyscape, 2015).


Susan Ee’s End of Days is the conclusion to the Penryn & End of Days trilogy. The final installment is as action-packed and filled with teen angsty romance as is expected in the best in this genre, so hold on to your seats for some thoroughly awkward makeout sequences in this postapocalyptic world filled with fallen angels, hellions, and other such ghoulish beings. As we recall from the first two in the series, fallen angels—and angels in general—are hardly the guardian protectors that some might assume them to have been or to be. These are haughty beings with perfect skin, perfect bodies, and perfect hair, and presume their rightful place amongst a hierarchy of beings in which they are a step below God. When the third book opens, Penryn, Raffe, and Penryn’s younger sister Paige, who by this point has been surgically transformed into a seven year old girl with razor sharp teeth and a desire to eat human flesh, have banded together and survived a battle against Beliel, but their trials are just beginning. Raffe still needs to get his wings back, while Penryn still needs to find her mother and also figure out how to deal with Paige, who has not been nourishing herself because she retains a sense of shame over her desire to consume other human beings. Raffe eventually discovers that his only chance to get his wings reattached—and time is growing short to be sure, since his feathers and wings are disintegrating—is to go to a doctor who betrayed him in an earlier book. In the meantime, Penryn of course gets into trouble. She’s been kidnapped by humans who are working alongside the false Messenger known as Uriel. She’s taken to the Aerie where her fate is left to surviving a duel between the aforementioned Beliel and some hellions that originally came to Earth via an Angel Sword that Penryn wields (if this sentence doesn’t make sense, you’re just going to have to read the novel LOL). Of course, it wouldn’t make for a good novel for Penryn to just die here, and wouldn’t you know it: Raffe appears, replete with his glorious reattached wings. Raffe has hatched a plan to defeat Uriel through a contest, which will require him to get the support of other angels. The best way to do that is to align himself with a Daughter of Man. Of course, the best Daughter of man for this job is Penryn herself, who will use her association with the Angel Sword to help Raffe travel through a portal into hell itself to retrieve his former Watchers, a band of fallen angels who had once been in service to him and who had fallen due to their love of human women. From here, the novel makes a mad dash to a cataclysmic finish. Ee knows how to drive a plot forward, but the fusion of romance with paranormal young adult fiction sometimes feels forced, so much so that we’re not surprised that Penryn is continually obsessed with the appropriateness of her Angel crush when the world is ending. But devotees of the young adult fiction/ paranormal romance will not be disappointed because there’s a handsome otherworldly being to snag and a world to save and not a lot of time left to do both.

Buy the Book Here:

http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/end-of-days-susan-ee/1120986002

A Review of Aisha Saeed’s Written in the Stars (Nancy Paulsen Books, 2015).


As this title is from Penguin, it is eligible to be considered for course consideration (in exam copy form) by qualified instructors as part of the CFIS program. For more information, please go here:

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

Aisha Saeed’s debut novel Written in the Stars comes out of the young adult imprint (of Penguin) Nancy Paulsen Books and explores the harrowing coming of age story concerning its 17 year old Pakistani American narrator Naila. Publishers Weekly writes: “Raised in a conservative Pakistani immigrant family, 17-year-old Naila has been an obedient daughter for most of her life. However, her American education has exposed her to her classmates’ comparative freedom and allowed her to spend time—and fall in love—with Saif, a Pakistani boy whose family has been ostracized from their community. Her parents’ expectations are clear: ‘You can choose what you want to be when you grow up, the types of shoes you want to buy.... But your husband, that’s different.’ After Naila’s transgression is discovered, she is whisked back to Pakistan and forced into an arranged marriage. In her YA debut, attorney and writer Saeed, a contributor to the collection Love, InshAllah, movingly conveys the intense cultural pressure that motivates Naila’s parents and the heartbreaking betrayal Naila feels as she is deprived of her rights, cut off from the outside world, and threatened with shame and death. Saeed includes resources for those who, like Saif’s family, wish to help real-life Nailas, in this wrenching but hopeful story.” This short review and synopsis do give some indication of the complications that Naila will face, as she is forced into an arranged marriage, but the final two hundred pages are especially difficult to read. Indeed, it makes one wonder again about the label of young adult fiction and what makes a work situated in this particular category. Beyond the youthful age of its protagonist, the novel takes on a very politically intricate and controversial topic. The writer is well aware that arranged marriages still take place and that they can be a successful way to enter into a union. As a matter of fact, Saeed herself is the product of what she considers to be a happily arranged married life. At the same time, Saeed casts light upon the dangerous undercurrents of arranged marriage, which obviously border on a kind of trafficking in women. A sobering and unexpectedly grave narrative, which though ending on a “hopeful” note nevertheless manages to rise above the happy ending formula of other YA fictions in its weighty topic matter. This novel finds much in line with other socially conscious works of YA fiction, including Cynthia Kadohata’s Outside Beauty and Benjamin Alire Saenz’s Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe.


Buy the Book Here:

http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/written-in-the-stars-aisha-saeed/1119671473

A Review of Matthew Salesses’s The Hundred-Year Flood (Little A, 2015)



Matthew Salesses’s The Hundred-Year Flood (which is his full length debut, though he published a shorter work prior to this novel) takes Asian American fiction to some new terrains: namely Prague in the Czech Republic. Tee is the 22 y/o Korean American mixed race adoptee protagonist of this work; he travels to Prague in the wake of his Uncle’s suicide, something in part spurred apparently by some sort of affair involving Tee’s adoptive father. Tee wants to escape the psychic fallout from this family dysfunction, which ultimately sees his adoptive mother divorce his adoptive father and a huge secret (revealed late into the novel) that casts Tee’s background in an entirely new light. In Prague, Tee models for a painter (Pavel Picasso) and his wife Katka, while striking friendships with an art dealer named Rockefeller and hanging out with a variety of expats at the local English language bookstore (Ynez and others). For a time Prague is everything Tee needs: it’s different and boasts a culture rich in complicated political dynamics (including the recent 1993 peaceful revolution that saw Czechoslovakia broken into the Czech Republic and Slovakia). Eventually things start going a little bit haywire: Tee falls in love with the older Katka and begins to carry on an affair that reminds him of acts his adoptive father may have engaged in. The title comes from the 2002 European floods in which Prague was one of the hardest hit cities. Tee and Katka’s love affair blooms amid the worst of the flooding, but the novel moves toward a darker conclusion once it becomes evident that Tee and Katka’s romance cannot be sustained (in this case, it does have a strong connection to the recently reviewed Jennifer Tseng’s Mayumi & the Sea of Happiness). Salesses uses an intriguing anachronic technique in this novel because it opens in a rehabilitation center: Tee has lost some of his memory and has obviously endured a major head trauma, but readers are unsure of the circumstances surrounding his injuries (both psychic and physical). Salesses is able to use this technique to great effect, as readers are propelled onward on by this mystery. Fortunately, too, the resolution is a sobering, yet satisfying one in which Salesses makes us understand that Tee will never get all the answers he may want about his families: adoptive, biological, and elective in their formations. Salesses also holds up the burden of being perhaps one of the first novelists who identifies as an adoptee and has accordingly published on the topic of adoptee experiences (however fictionally rendered). Though there have been a number of novels concerning Korean American adoptees (see Marie Myung-ok Lee’s Somebody’s Daughter, Don Lee’s Country of Origin for key examples), I can’t recall one penned by a writer who identifies as an adoptee himself or herself. Salesses’s nuanced and multi-faceted take on questions of origin, kinship and family is precisely the kind of depiction that evidences the importance of identity as it relates to the construction of fictional worlds.

Buy the Book Here:

http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-hundred-year-flood-matthew-salesses/1121276200


A Review of Steph Cha’s Dead Soon Enough (Minotaur, 2015).


I’ve been on a bit of a reading tear lately, probably because I’ve been suffering major “revision blocks.” While I scamper away from the work I should be doing, I find solace in works such as Steph Cha’s Dead Soon Enough, the third in the Juniper Song detective series. This installment opens up in an intriguing way, as Juniper recounts a time when she sold her eggs for money. This anecdote serves as an opening for the novel’s premise: Juniper is hired by an Armenian American woman named Rubina to tail her surrogate, a woman named Lusig, also Armenian American, who is about eight months pregnant. Rubina is worried that Lusig is abusing her body by drinking alcohol and engaging in other destructive activities that may be harming the baby. Since Rubina is paying so much money to Lusig just to support the baby, she wants to make sure the baby is safe. She is using Juniper to find out if she needs to monitor Lusig more closely. But, as the novel moves on, it becomes clear that not all is as it seems. Lusig herself is acting somewhat strangely, and Juniper soon discovers that Lusig is conducting her own unofficial investigation into the disappearance of her very close friend Nora (also Armenian American). The ethnicities of these female characters are important insofar as much of the novel is steeped in the political discourses that Nora engaged as a blogger and activist, who had been seeking to oppose the emergence of Turkish genocide deniers. The novel is very much involved in exploring discourses of memory, trauma, and historical rhetoric with respect to the 1917 Armenian genocide, perpetrated by Turkish Muslims against the Armenian Christian minority. There is much controversy surrounding this event, as Turkey has never officially acknowledged its systematic involvement in genocidal atrocities, and the genocide is still not recognized by many sovereign nation-states today. It becomes apparent that Nora may have been kidnapped or even killed due to her political leanings, so even as Juniper is hired to live with Rubina in order to continue to monitor Lusig, she also begins to investigate Nora’s disappearance, all the while relaying her information to Lusig. Juniper is of course still working alongside her two other PIs Chaz and Arturo, who offer important support at critical moments. Juniper also finds her personal life coming under some transition: her best friend and roommate Lori tells Juniper that she’s planning to move out amid the news that her relationship to her boyfriend Isaac has taken a serious turn. Cha also sees fit to give Juniper the potential of an actual romance in this novel, which is a welcome shift for the private investigator who seems to eschew such potential contact in earlier works. The way that plot ends up being worked out was a little bit of a disappointment to me only because the stakes in how it ends seem so far from what the novel might have been moving toward in relation to the nature of genocide and how it remains present in a kind of diasporic consciousness, but the resolution nevertheless does still resolve in a logical way. The strength of this series has always been Cha’s enterprising characterization of its central sleuth and storyteller. Juniper is wry and witty, someone who undercuts the model minority myth all the while excelling at a profession that marks her as a kind of nourish antiheroine. At some point, in my brief contact with Cha, there seemed to be a sense that there would only be three novels in the Song series, but let’s hope my memory is wrong because Cha has created one of the most memorable Asian American characters, certainly one worthy of continued detective novel installments.


Buy the Book Here:

http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/dead-soon-enough-steph-cha/1120684113?ean=9781250065315