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asianamlitfansAsian American literature Fans – Megareview for July 14, 2018
To begin, as per usual, I note that AALF uses maximal ideological inclusiveness (following Colleen Lye’s conception of this term) to define Asian American literature. Thus, we review any writers working in the English language of Asian descent. We also review titles related to Asian American contexts without regard to authorial descent. We also consider titles in translation pending their relationship to America, broadly defined. Our point is precisely to cast the widest net possible.
With apologies as always for any typographical, grammatical, or factual errors. My intent in these reviews is to illuminate the wide-ranging and expansive terrain of Asian American and Asian Anglophone literatures. Please e-mail ssohnucr@gmail.com with any concerns you may have.
Now on to the REVIEWS!
In this post:
1.) A Review of Peng Shepherd’s The Book of M (William Morrow, 2018).
2.) A Review of Livia Blackburne’s Rosemarked (Disney Hyperion, 2017).
3.) A Review of Renee Macalinao Rutledge’s The Hour of Daydreams (Forest Avenue Press, 2017).
4.) A Review of Kim Fu’s The Lost Girls of Camp Forevermore (Houghton Mifflin, 2018).
5.) A Review of Roma Tearne’s The White City (Aardvark Bureau, 2017).
6.) A Review of Elsie Chapman’s Along the Indigo (Amulet Books, March 2018).
7.) A Review of Sheena Kamal’s The Lost Ones (William Morrow, 2017).
8.) A Review of Sheena Kamal’s It All Falls Down (William Morrow, 2017).
9.) A Review of Sujatha Gidla’s Ants Among Elephants: The Making of Modern India (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2017).
10.) A Review of Rin Chupeco’s The Heart Forger (Sourcebooks, April 2018).
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1.) A Review of Peng Shepherd’s The Book of M (William Morrow, 2018).
Perhaps the most engrossing book I have read in 2018 (at least thus far) is Peng Shepherd’s debut The Book Of M. As B&N reveals, “Set in a dangerous near future world, The Book of M tells the captivating story of a group of ordinary people caught in an extraordinary catastrophe who risk everything to save the ones they love. It is a sweeping debut that illuminates the power that memories have not only on the heart, but on the world itself. One afternoon at an outdoor market in India, a man’s shadow disappears—an occurrence science cannot explain. He is only the first. The phenomenon spreads like a plague, and while those afflicted gain a strange new power, it comes at a horrible price: the loss of all their memories. Ory and his wife Max have escaped the Forgetting so far by hiding in an abandoned hotel deep in the woods. Their new life feels almost normal, until one day Max’s shadow disappears too. Knowing that the more she forgets, the more dangerous she will become to Ory, Max runs away. But Ory refuses to give up the time they have left together. Desperate to find Max before her memory disappears completely, he follows her trail across a perilous, unrecognizable world, braving the threat of roaming bandits, the call to a new war being waged on the ruins of the capital, and the rise of a sinister cult that worships the shadowless. As they journey, each searches for answers: for Ory, about love, about survival, about hope; and for Max, about a new force growing in the south that may hold the cure.” This overview focuses on the emotional core of this novel, which is at its deepest level a love story. While Max and Ory are separated, they deal with their split in very different ways. Max finds a new community among a group of shadowless; they are being led by a woman named Ursula. They eventually decide to head to New Orleans with the hope that there is a cure, one that has been generated by a mysterious person known only as The One Who Gathers. Ory’s storyline takes him in another direction, as he links up with a former ally who had been with him at the hotel. Shepherd also introduces other critical narrative perspectives, including one that follows Naz, an Olympic level archer; and another involving an amnesiac who may hold the key to a treatment for the forgetting. The logic of this disease and its spread are never made very clear: anyone can suddenly become shadowless. It is not something communicable, though there is some hysteria about that possibility early on in the epidemic. Another interesting element related to losing one’s shadow is that one can delay the onset of the more severe forms of amnesia. Indeed, the novel posits that those who are losing their shadows and starting to forget need to resist the urge to give up their memories. The most intriguing element of this disease is that the world warps around the changed memories in unexpected ways: if someone forgets about the person they love, that person may simply cease to exist; if someone doesn't remember that there was a street in their hometown, that street will suddenly disappear; if someone doesn’t know what a door is, they may die simply because they do not know how to open it in order to get to a place with food, and so on. The shadowless also eventually lose their sanity, so the longer the disease progresses and one’s mental faculties decline, the more warped the world becomes. Naturally, big cities become incredibly chaotic places, as the density of individuals living in those areas makes it so that people’s losses of memory and the warping effects related to these dense clusters of forgettings results in massive (and often contradicitory) changes to the dynamics of those cityscapes. But Shepherd never loses sight of the fact that this narrative is Max and Ory’s: Max desperately uses a tape recorder she possesses to chronicle her journey to New Orleans. The reader wants her to retain her memories of Ory; the reader can sense her urgency when the world around her starts to crumble inward, as one memory after another starts to erode and be stripped away. The alternative kinship that Max creates with those questing toward New Orleans is incredibly poignant: despite the fact that they know they will forget each other’s identities, they continue to persist in the possibility that the One Who Gathers maybe able to save them. Their fortitude, despite all odds, is both compelling and heartbreaking. Shepherd’s cruel triumph appears in the denoument: I was totally unprepared for the way that the narrative would resolve, especially in relation to Max and Ory. But this ending—due in part to the “cruelly optimistic” world that Shepherd has created—is exceptionally fitting. As with Rao’s Girls Burn Brighter, I wondered about these characters far after I had finished reading the last world. A highly recommended read. Fans of speculative fiction, in particular, will be thrilled with such a riveting, textured debut.
Buy the Book Here:
https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-book-of-m-peng-shepherd/1127056474
2.) A Review of Livia Blackburne’s Rosemarked (Disney Hyperion, 2017). 
Wow, I read this novel probably two or three weeks ago, but I’ve been so busy that I managed to overlook the fact that I needed to write a review of this auspicious work. Livia Blackburne’s Rosemarked begins what seems to be a new duology (after her very entertaining series that started with Daughter of Dusk and ended with Midnight Thief). Let us let B&N do some descriptive duties for us: “A healer who cannot be healed . . .When Zivah falls prey to the deadly rose plague, she knows it's only a matter of time before she fully succumbs. Now she's destined to live her last days in isolation, cut off from her people and unable to practice her art-until a threat to her village creates a need that only she can fill. A soldier shattered by war . . . Broken by torture at the hands of the Amparan Empire, Dineas thirsts for revenge against his captors. Now escaped and reunited with his tribe, he'll do anything to free them from Amparan rule-even if it means undertaking a plan that risks not only his life but his very self. Thrust together on a high-stakes mission to spy on the capital, the two couldn't be more different: Zivah, deeply committed to her vow of healing, and Dineas, yearning for vengeance. But as they grow closer, they must find common ground to protect those they love. And amidst the constant fear of discovery, the two grapple with a mutual attraction that could break both of their carefully guarded hearts.” I’m really glad I didn’t read this blurb beforehand because I would have likely been expecting the romance plot to be a central concern. In truth, Blackburne is quite patient in developing this line of attraction, so much so that I got about halfway through thinking: wow, I don’t think the romance plot is going to emerge. Indeed, at first Zivah and Dineas seem to hate each other. What is especially effective on the level of readerly engagement is Blackburne’s very deft use of alternating first person perspectives. Not surprisingly, the marketing department chooses to remind potential buyers that this novel is for fans of books like An Ember in the Ashes. Blackburne, like Tahir, uses a similar narrative technique in the use of alternating storytellers. The two points of view are divergent enough that the fictional world becomes richly refracted. The world-building is also quite inventive, especially in relation to the central plague narrative. Zivah, once infected by the plague, becomes a carrier of the disease and eventually is destined to succumb to it. The number of years it takes for someone to die after becoming “rosemarked” varies, but all eventually die. Others survive the plague to become “umbertouched,” which means that they are immune to the disease, but sport brown scars. They have survived, cannot transmit the disease, and will not eventually die, unlike those that are rosemarked. Zivah and Dineas’s unlikely alliance emerges once she realizes that she can help Dineas to infiltrate the Amparan stronghold. Because Zivah knows how to use various potions concerning memory and forgetting, she can basically program Dineas to become a blank slate, enabling him to go into the Amparan army without holding any significant grudges or mental anguish. Yet, as the two grow closer and simultaneously get further in their quest to disrupt the Empire, Blackburne increasingly throws more complications their way. Thus, the concluding sequence is a mad dash to escape the capital, setting us up for what should be a very thrilling conclusion to the series. As with Blackburne’s other works (and certainly not unlike what we see in the aforementioned An Ember in the Ashes), there is a sense of racialization at play in this fictional world, or at least a sense of tiered social differences. The Amparans are the ruling class and everyone else, including the Shihadi (Dineas’s ethnic background) and the Dara (Zivah’s ethnic background) are considered potentially expendable. Thus, this book is as much about social justice as it is about its requisite paranormal romance plot. Readers should be enthused to note that Blackburne’s follow-up Umbertouched is already listed on Amazon.
Buy the Book Here:
https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/rosemarked-livia-blackburne/1125923454
3.) A Review of Renee Macalinao Rutledge’s The Hour of Daydreams (Forest Avenue Press, 2017).
I’m always on the lookout for new offerings from the independent press, which brings me to this gem of a title: Renee Macalino Rutledge’s The Hour of Daydreams (Forest Avenue Press, 2017). B&N gives us this pithy description of the book: “Manolo Lualhati, a respected doctor in the Philippine countryside, believes his wife hides a secret. Prior to their marriage, he spied her wearing wings and flying to the stars with her sisters each evening. As Tala tries to keep her dangerous past from her new husband, Manolo begins questioning the gaps in her stories—and his suspicions push him even further from the truth. The Hour of Daydreams, a contemporary reimagining of a Filipino folktale, weaves in the perspectives of Tala’s siblings, her new in-laws, and the all-seeing housekeeper while exploring trust, identity, and how myths can take root from the seeds of our most difficult truths.” This background does give us the basics. For a little bit more, we can go straight to the author, who provides us with essential contexts for understanding her authorial inspirations:
http://necessaryfiction.com/blog/ResearchNotesTheHourofDaydreams
I was not aware of the Star Maidens fairytale prior to reading the novel, but Rutledge is obviously playing with the idea of a man who may or may not have fallen in love with something or some being of mythical properties. Rutledge skillfully mines the border between magic and reality throughout the early sections of the novel, giving us key information concerning other belief systems (such as the duwende). Tala herself continually visits a witch doctor at a local market, a fact that begins to concern her husband who begins to follow her, desperate to get more information about her daily (mis)adventures. Manolo and Tala also live with Manolo’s parents, who exist as integral secondary characters; Manolo compares his own relationship to the clear ardor that still is evident in the marriage of his parents. Though the plotting meanders at times, Rutledge’s clear literary skill is in the atmosphere-building in this narrative, which will succeed in casting its magic over you, despite what one might perceive as pacing problems. The best condensation of my response to this book was actually written by another reviewer, Sandi Ward, on goodreads: “The story made me think about the fact that it may be difficult for some cultures today to reconcile the tales and superstitions of earlier generations with modern society, yet we lose something when we forget about the past” (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/31213521-the-hour-of-daydreams). Ward’s point perfectly crystallizes the ethos of Rutledge’s fiction, a story that reminds us that we perhaps have discarded our belief in the supernatural, the magical at the expense of functionalist modes of rational explanation that cleaves us from a stronger sense of ancestry and lineage.
For more on the Book Go Here:
http://www.forestavenuepress.com/catalog/the-hour-of-daydreams/
A Review of Kim Fu’s The Lost Girls of Camp Forevermore (Houghton Mifflin, 2018). 
So I read this novel right after Clarissa Goenawan’s Rainbirds, thinking to myself, I wonder if I didn’t get the ending. I had a similar experience with this work. Certainly, the reading experience was immensely enjoyable. Fu has a sparkling prose and a keen ability to give characters a wonderful depth and intricacy. So exquisite is she in this regard that it almost makes up for the concluding arc. I say “almost” because I’m not quite sure I understood what happened at the end. I feel as though I missed something vital about what the narrative was doing by offering this last perspective to Siobhan and her shift into the sciences, but I am getting a little bit ahead of myself. Let us have some context (from B&N as per usual): “A group of young girls descend on Camp Forevermore, a sleepaway camp in the Pacific Northwest, where their days are filled with swimming lessons, friendship bracelets, and camp songs by the fire. Filled with excitement and nervous energy, they set off on an overnight kayaking trip to a nearby island. But before the night is over, they find themselves stranded, with no adults to help them survive or guide them home. The Lost Girls of Camp Forevermore traces these five girls—Nita, Andee, Isabel, Dina, and Siobhan—through and beyond this fateful trip. We see them through successes and failures, loving relationships and heartbreaks; we see what it means to find, and define, oneself, and the ways in which the same experience is refracted through different people. In diamond-sharp prose, Kim Fu gives us a portrait of friendship and of the families we build for ourselves—and the pasts we can't escape.” So, here, I’ll provide my spoiler warning right away: do not read on, if you want to remain spoiler free! What the description fails to let you know is that the novel involves a frame narrative, which is related to the camp goings-on. The girls find themselves stranded because their teenage camp counselor/ guide dies during the night. Because their camp counselor had encouraged them to go on a sort of side trip, no one knows where their actual location is; the girls must make decisions about what to do. Isabel volunteers to stay behind, while Nita, Andee, Dina, and Siobhan attempt to hike their way over land. Interspersed throughout the frame narrative, the story changes perspective, offering each character their own story arc as they grow up and move on from the events of the camp experience. Nita struggles to find much meaning in her suburban, normative marriage. Andee has to adjust to a life in which an absentee mother continually threatens any stability that she and her younger sister carve out. Isabel grows up in the shadow of her flawed relationships with men, the last of which is which Victor Chang, the brother of Dina. Victor drowns during a surfing trip, which is what brings Isabel and Dina back together in the narrative. Dina’s portion involves her attempt to make it as a model in Los Angeles. Finally, Siobhan’s life is one connected to science. She’s relatively antisocial and seeks to find some sense of fulfillment through this line of work. This final arc is where I missed the boat, so to speak. And, as a novel, I suppose what I found a little bit frustrating was the general lack of coherence. The frame narrative works only insofar as it keeps all the girls in one diegetic level. Once the novel moves outward, the characters do not return to each other’s stories, with the exception of Dina and Isabel. Such an approach makes The Lost Girls of Camp Forevermore something more akin to a linked story collection, perhaps a story cycle, rather than a more traditional novel. As I mentioned at the outset, Fu’s prose and ability to texturize her characters is marvelous (and her previous novel For Today I am a Boy is a true standout). My reading experience was not unlike the one I had when I read Michael Ondaatje’s maddening, but gorgeously penned work Divisadero. Thus, I’d highly recommend you read this work, with the caveat that the ride will be a little bit incoherent, even as it is a compelling, poignant portrait of five young women.
Buy the Book Here:
https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-lost-girls-of-camp-forevermore-kim-fu/1125350311#/
A Review of Roma Tearne’s The White City (Aardvark Bureau, 2017).
First off, let me say that I was super excited about this title based upon the premise. I haven’t read anything from Roma Tearne since Mosquito and Bone China, though she has gone on to publish a number of other works, including The Swimmer and Brixton Beach (which I hope to be reviewing soon enough). Mosquito and Bone China I absolutely adored, so I knew the bar was already set high. The White City marks an achievement for Tearne for two major reasons: first, it uses first person narration, which is a departure from what I recall to be a brilliant use of third in the first two novels; second, the novel takes some inspiration from speculative fiction, as it is set in some near dystopian future when London is covered in snow. The temporality of the novel is a little bit confusing, but over the course of the plot it becomes apparent that most of the chapters have occurred farther into the past. Our narrator is a woman named Hera, who has endured considerable loss. Much of the novel is addressed to a “you,” a narratee known as Rafael, a man that Hera had once loved and who is apparently not in her life anymore. We don’t know what happened to him, except that their relationship is star-crossed. The other plot involves Hera’s family. Her brother Aslam has gone missing, and her parents, Hektor and Calypso, are frantic in their search for him. Calypso’s ex-lover but who is now a family friend, Lyle, also lives with the family in this dystopian London, seeking a way to reunite the family with Aslam. Aslam has been pegged by the police as an Islamic terrorist and is eventually deported. The strain of this event leads to Calypso’s death; Hektor will later also die when he is in a car accident, while Lyle exits the narrative once it becomes clear that he must leave London in search of Aslam. Only Hera remains, who laments the loss of her relationship to Raphael. We eventually discover Raphael’s past, and why he cannot find a way to be with Hera. The narrative turns over to Raphael’s harrowing years living in Santiapolis (which is a fictionalized version of Santiago, Chile, during the worst years of the Augusto Pinochet dictatorship). Raphael’s wife, Ishtar, espouses revolutionary sentiments, which leads her to be captured and then disappeared. Raphael’s daughter ends up dying of meningitis, when he is unable to get the medications she needs in time. Raphael himself must endure torture before he is able to secure passage to London. He arrives, of course, during the worst years of the freeze. The novel moves toward its conclusion once a thaw starts occurring. The thaw is, of course, as metaphorical as it is literal: Hera is beginning to remember what has happened to Raphael, that she has willed away the most traumatic memory as it involves him (spoiler alert): he has committed suicide. She eventually returns to his home and discovers a note that she never noticed before addressed to her, which provides her some measure of closure over why he could not go on. (As an aside, I found this plot point a bit unbelievable, but the narrator is also meant to be unreliable.) But, this rather lugubrious novel doesn’t leave readers with much to go on, as Hera seems literally and figuratively alone by the last page. The political texture of this novel appears not only in Raphael’s bleak tale, but also in the disintegration of Hera’s family, as one targeted for their beliefs. It’s never detailed why exactly Aslam is detained, except for his hazy connection to a radical Islamic group. The surveillance of their family and the demise of its cohesion is meant also to mirror Raphael’s experience, but with one crucial difference: Hera decides that she still must live, if only to chronicle those who have been lost. Tearne’s writing is always beautiful. Readers may balk at what may seem to be overwrought passages filled with poetic sequences, but the tonality is quite right for Hera, who is an artist to the core and who must find the lyrical in the world around her, if only to find what is beautiful even in times of wretched heartache and loss. I do have two minor gripes. First, I wish the paper stock was a little bit more sturdy! It seemed far closer to the low-grade stock you find for mass market paperbacks. Second, I wish the margins were a little bit larger, so that I could an easier time writing some notes. Perhaps, if the book is reissued, these flaws can be addressed =).
For more about the publisher Aardvark Bureau, go here!
Buy the Book Here:
https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-white-city-roma-tearne/1125857173
A Review of Elsie Chapman’s Along the Indigo (Amulet Books, March 2018).
I’ve been waiting patiently for Elsie Chapman to publish another work, especially after her Dualed/ Divided duology ended. She now brings us Along the Indigo (Amulet Books, March 2018). Though marketed as a young adult fiction, I actually found this work to be somewhat of a strange hybrid: it reads more strongly as a regionalist ADULT fiction than it does as a paranormal romance/ young adult work that it is being marketed as. B&N gives us this description: “The town of Glory is famous for two things: businesses that front for seedy, if not illegal, enterprises and the suicides that happen along the Indigo River. Marsden [Eldredge] is desperate to escape the “bed-and-breakfast” where her mother works as a prostitute—and where her own fate has been decided—and she wants to give her little sister a better life. But escape means money, which leads Mars to skimming the bodies that show up along the Indigo River. It’s there that she runs into Jude, who has secrets of his own and whose brother’s suicide may be linked to Mars’s own sordid family history. As they grow closer, the two unearth secrets that could allow them to move forward . . . or chain them to the Indigo forever.” The rather gritty description is partly why I would have routed this book into a different category. It reminds me of the ways that Cynthia Kadohata’s work has tended to be marketed in the same way, even with books like Outside Beauty, which read tonally to me as something perhaps intended for an adult audience. In any case, this rather pithy description does little to articulate the complicated racial registers of the novel: both Mars and Jude are mixed race characters. Mars is part Chinese; Jude is part Black. They begin to develop a tentative friendship when Jude comes to Mars with the intent of getting help from her: he wants her to accompany him as he looks for a lost time capsule that his brother (Rigby) buried along the Indigo River’s covert many years before he commits suicide there. While “covert” is a word I usually associate with as an adjective related to being secretive, it also occurs as a noun form and is defined as a “thicket in which game can hide” (Google-search dictionary). The covert is also part of Mars’s family’s history, because it becomes a site of a curse: as the family befalls hard times, the land becomes usurped by others, and finally, it becomes a place where people in town continually turn to when they want to commit suicide. Mars’s family is beholden to the town “madame,” (Nina) who runs a brothel in which Mars’s mother (Shine) works. Mars wants a different life for herself and her younger sister (Wynn), so she “skims” off the bodies of those who have died, taking small trinkets and items of value that she might be able to sell. She feels obviously ambivalent about engaging in these activities, but she knows that if she is to escape Glory, she’ll need all the money and resources available to her, even if it means stealing off dead bodies. There’s also the question of Mars’s future there: she’s just on the cusp of womanhood. Though she works at the brothel as a cook, Nina wants her to become a sex worker, just like Mars’s mother. This portion of the plot develops further once it becomes apparent that the death of Mars’s father may have been connected to one of her own mother’s regulars. But Chapman has a ton of secrets and plot twists that occur in the last fifty pages or so, ones that connect characters in ever more complicated ways. Indeed, I was surprised to discover how it was that Mars’s father had come to be killed on the very night he wins a big pot of money while gambling. One of the “gambles” (see what I did there)—spoiler warning appears here, so do not read unless you want to find out what goes on—that Chapman takes in her plotting is to save any paranormal elements in the plot for the latter acts. In this sense, Chapman wraps up the novel quite resolutely, but some readers, especially those expecting the more traditional cataclysmic YA, may be disappointed in what is a longer, drawn out plot. In terms of “tone,” I think what I am getting at is the issue of pacing. Chapman takes her time here, really wanting to develop the setting and its characters, a facet that does not always occur in the typical paranormal YA fiction. Due to its hybrid character—the strongly regionalist focus of this work alongside the hints of supernatural activity that only come to fruition in the final pages—this work, I believe, is one of the more compelling new entries in the land of Asian American literature.
Buy the Book Here:
https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/along-the-indigo-elsie-chapman/1126906007
A Review of Sheena Kamal’s The Lost Ones (William Morrow, 2017).
This title has been on my to-read list for a very long time, and I managed to pick it up one night when I was in the mood for a first person narrator. These days, I sometimes want very specific things before I sit down; sometimes I know I’m ready for a thriller, other times, a young adult fiction. This time around I just wanted a novel told in the first person, so I happened upon Sheena Kamal’s The Lost Ones (William Morrow, 2017). B&N provides us with this editorial description: “It begins with a phone call that Nora Watts has dreaded for fifteen years—since the day she gave her newborn daughter up for adoption. Bonnie has vanished. The police consider her a chronic runaway and aren’t looking, leaving her desperate adoptive parents to reach out to her birth mother as a last hope. A biracial product of the foster system, transient, homeless, scarred by a past filled with pain and violence, Nora knows intimately what happens to vulnerable girls on the streets. Caring despite herself, she sets out to find Bonnie with her only companion, her mutt Whisper, knowing she risks reopening wounds that have never really healed—and plunging into the darkness with little to protect her but her instincts and a freakish ability to detect truth from lies. The search uncovers a puzzling conspiracy that leads Nora on a harrowing journey of deception and violence, from the gloomy rain-soaked streets of Vancouver, to the icy white mountains of the Canadian interior, to the beautiful and dangerous island where she will face her most terrifying demon. All to save a girl she wishes had never been born.” The ending of this description is really the clincher, and I will now provide my requisite spoiler warning. What readers soon discover is that the reason Bonnie is even born is that Nora was once sexually assaulted and left for dead. The product of that sexual assault is Bonnie. Due to a complicated trajectory involving her physical and mental rehabilitation, Nora cannot abort the pregnancy. Thus, when she eventually delivers the child, she immediately gives it up for adoption, not wanting to be reminded of the reason why the baby existed in the first place. Nevertheless, the novel plays with Nora’s obligatory sense of maternity, one that continues to drive her forward on the quest to find out what has happened to Bonnie, even as she relentlessly questions this drive. What is especially compelling about Kamal’s noir-ish work is how flawed Nora is: she’s neither beautiful nor heroic, she’s not always dependable nor all that responsible, but she is gritty. She’s a survivor, and she’s a tactician. The conspiracy plot at the center of this novel is quite dark, and one that made me go looking for more information about it. At one point, in my first book (shameless plug here) I did end up writing a portion on something called a “toxic market,” which is Debra Satz’s term for things that should not be for sale. The Lost Ones takes up this idea, as there is a form of biotechnological harvesting going on here, connected to something called the “red market.” The “red market” is the all-too real world of the organ trade and associated economies (things such as cell harvesting, embryo transfers etc), and the novel duly explores the problematics of this kind of atmosphere in which parts of the body can be bought and sold to the highest bidder, even without a person’s consent. The depressing social contexts invoked by this book also make it a very engrossing one, reminding us that fiction isn’t always ever so imaginary, that we’ll want these hardscrabble protagonists to sit with us in the corners of our psyches, while we read, if only because we’d want them on our side, fighting against the forces of capitalist evil. Indeed, Nora is the quintessential anti-heroine in that she’ll evolve over the course of the plot into someone who, though basically squatting out of the basement of the place she works and having fallen off the wagon, will ultimately go down going after what is right. Kamal does great work here in threading biopolitics, Canadian environmental issues and racial dynamics, all alongside this noir-ish plot. A definite must read for mystery fans.
Buy the Book Here:
A Review of Sheena Kamal’s It All Falls Down (William Morrow, 2018).
The second installment to the investigative adventures of Nora Watts is here (following Sheena Kamal’s wonderful debut, The Lost Ones). We’ll let B&N give us this pretty lengthy context for Sheena Kamal’s It All Falls Down (William Morrow, 2018): “The brilliant, fearless, deeply flawed Nora Watts—introduced in the "utterly compelling" (Jeffery Deaver) atmospheric thriller The Lost Ones—finds deadly trouble as she searches for the truth about her late father in this immersive thriller that moves from the hazy Canadian Pacific Northwest to the gritty, hollowed streets of Detroit. Growing up, Nora Watts only knew one parent—her father. When he killed himself, she denied her grief and carried on with her life. Then a chance encounter with a veteran who knew him raises disturbing questions Nora can’t ignore—and dark emotions she can’t control. To make her peace with the past, she has to confront it. Finding the truth about her father’s life and his violent death takes her from Vancouver to Detroit where Sam Watts grew up, far away from his people and the place of his birth. Thanks to a disastrous government policy starting in the 1950s, thousands of Canadian native children like Sam were adopted by American families. In the Motor City, Nora discovers that the circumstances surrounding Sam’s suicide are more unsettling than she’d imagined. Yet no matter how far away Nora gets from Vancouver, she can’t shake trouble. Back in the Pacific Northwest, former police detective turned private investigator Jon Brazuca is looking into the overdose death of a billionaire’s mistress. His search uncovers a ruthless opiate ring and a startling connection to Nora, the infuriatingly distant woman he’d once tried to befriend. He has no way to warn or protect her, because she’s become a ghost, vanishing completely off the grid. Focused on the mysterious events of her father’s past and the clues they provide to her own fractured identity and that of her estranged daughter, Nora may not be able to see the danger heading her way until it’s too late. But it’s not her father’s old ties that could get her killed—it’s her own.” This editorial description does a great job of giving us the stakes of this particular investigation: Nora’s on a quest to find out more about her ancestry, which is already shrouded in so much mystery. The problem is compounded by the fact that she’s estranged (somewhat) from her biological daughter, who was the origination of the mystery in book 1 AND the fact that her investigation into her daughter’s disappearance creates further rupture with her sister Lorelei. Without the traditional family to lean on, where can Nora turn? The problem is extended to her alternative kinships. Her closest friend and former boss, Seb, is dying of cancer; she’s also somewhat in the middle of a complicated romantic estrangement involving Seb and his lover Leo, as Leo is not aware that Seb is dying from cancer. Nora’s romantic life is also not without its own intricacies. A promising romance with Jon Brazuca doesn’t pan out in book 1, as Nora is significantly betrayed by him (don’t worry, Nora gets him back big time). Thus, the search for Nora’s father comes with it a sense of urgency to find some stability. Kamal’s strength is in Nora’s magnetic personality. She’s unsentimental, flawed, and hard on herself. She tries not to make excuses, practically expects the worst in other people, yet somehow occasionally manages to charm others, who can see past this steely exterior. She’s also incredibly resourceful and resilient when it comes to physical confrontations; she uses her diminutive size and dexterity to escape dangerous situations, but often at the cost of others that she cares about. The psychological texture of Nora drives the reader forward, even when the plot increasingly gets messy. Kamal gets herself into a little bit of trouble—at least in my opinion—because she decides to provide us some set up for a third book. Thus, more than one problem (or mystery) is occurring in this text, a fact that is not really understood, on the reader’s part, until the last fifty pages or so. The resolution of this particular mystery was not as satisfying in some sense precisely because the reader can get distracted by this exposition being generated for the next book, which in some sense offers a bigger bad, a deeper mystery, and a sense of unease concerning Nora’s always-already perilous future. Yet, readers will ultimately feel satisfied, only insofar as Kamal’s characterization of Nora is so full and measured; it’s just a matter of time before these books are adapted into full-length features. The question is, especially given Nora’s unique ancestral background, who they will manage to cast for the role.
Buy the Book Here:
https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/it-all-falls-down-s-h-kamal/1126646783#/
A Review of Sujatha Gidla’s Ants Among Elephants: The Making of Modern India (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2017).
I completely missed this title when it first came out, but we’re in a very lucky era not only with the internet but the brilliant curation going on at the Asian American writers’ workshop. I always can count on AAWW to bring to light new writers to the table. Such is the case with Sujatha Gidla’s Ants Among Elephants: The Making of Modern India (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2017). So, we’ll use B&N’s overview as per usual to set the stage: “The stunning true story of an untouchable family who become teachers, and one, a poet and revolutionary. Like one in six people in India, Sujatha Gidla was born an untouchable. While most untouchables are illiterate, her family was educated by Canadian missionaries in the 1930s, making it possible for Gidla to attend elite schools and move to America at the age of twenty-six. It was only then that she saw how extraordinary—and yet how typical—her family history truly was. Her mother, Manjula, and uncles Satyam and Carey were born in the last days of British colonial rule. They grew up in a world marked by poverty and injustice, but also full of possibility. In the slums where they lived, everyone had a political side, and rallies, agitations, and arrests were commonplace. The Independence movement promised freedom. Yet for untouchables and other poor and working people, little changed. Satyam, the eldest, switched allegiance to the Communist Party. Gidla recounts his incredible transformation from student and labor organizer to famous poet and founder of a left-wing guerrilla movement. And Gidla charts her mother’s battles with caste and women’s oppression. Page by page, Gidla takes us into a complicated, close-knit family as they desperately strive for a decent life and a more just society.” There’s a couple of reasons why this book is so extraordinary (at least from my reading experience). First, the memoir reminds us about how an individual “character” (so to speak) comes to impact nation-formation. In this case, Gidla painstakingly details how Satyam’s participation in the communist party will come to influence many of the major leaders who rise up in the most liberal sectors of India’s society. Satyam’s motivations are not surprising given his upbringing, which brings me to my second point about the memoir’s luminous interventions. The memoir does a fantastic job of portraying how the caste system gets subsumed under capitalistic interests. Ultimately, Gidla’s way of narrativizing her upbringing is to show us how the caste system’s built-in social inequalities enable the rigid stratification of Indian society, even as it must evolve under modernization. As I’ve been thinking more about class in relation to Asian American literatures of all stripes and types, I can’t help but think about how so many novels root so much inequality in the diasporic critique, especially as texts move toward “homelands.” If there is a drawback to the text, it’s only something purely subjective. There is a highly autobiographical voice that begins the story, but it is completely evacuated for most of the ensuing narrative. Part of this issue is purely functionalist: Sujatha is not yet alive (when she’s detailing what’s going on with her family), but on the other, there is an almost omniscient quality to the story, something that rings hollow against the utter sense of urgency that we know compels Gidla to write these stories down. But, this observation is but a minor quibble: it’s a monumental and inspiring text, one that makes me hope that I might be able to do something similar in a future book-length project I’ve been trying, however partially and clumsily, to start!
Buy the Book Here:
https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/ants-among-elephants-sujatha-gidla/1124362625
A Review of Rin Chupeco’s The Heart Forger (Sourcebooks, April 2018).
Rin Chupeco continues The Bone Witch series with the second installment The Heart Forger (Sourcebooks, April 2018). For some reason, I had thought the The Bone Witch was a duology, but the further I read into the novel, the more I realized there was no possible way that Chupeco was going to wrap all of the issues up in the final 100 pages. After finishing the novel, I headed over to Goodreads, which often lists books well before they will be published. Lo and behold: there is a listing Book 3 of The Bone Witch series, which has yet to be titled. Chupeco also has another book supposedly coming out next year called The Never Tilting World, which will be published by HarperTeen. In any case, let’s get some context about this second installment from B&N: “In The Bone Witch, Tea mastered resurrection—now she's after revenge...No one knows death like Tea. A bone witch who can resurrect the dead, she has the power to take life...and return it. And she is done with her self-imposed exile. Her heart is set on vengeance, and she now possesses all she needs to command the mighty daeva. With the help of these terrifying beasts, she can finally enact revenge against the royals who wronged her—and took the life of her one true love. But there are those who plot against her, those who would use Tea's dark power for their own nefarious ends. Because you can't kill someone who can never die...War is brewing among the kingdoms, and when dark magic is at play, no one is safe.” This description is not ideal for a number of reasons: it focuses primarily on the smaller narrative at play in The Heart Forger, which is set in some unmarked future. Indeed, in between the novel’s main diegetic level, we’re getting something in italics; it’s narrated from the perspective of a bard that Tea has hired to chronicle what is going on with her and her quest for vengeance. By that future point, Tea’s great love, a Deathseeker named Kalen, has been killed. We don’t know under what circumstances, but we do know that Tea is trying to defeat some kingdom. This quest is difficult because her old allies are now against her. Again, we don’t know the reason why this change has occurred. The main diegetic level is set further into the past: Kalen is still alive, Tea has not yet turned so malevolent. They’re on a different quest entirely: to try to find a way to cure Prince Kance, who has fallen ill with a sleeping sickness. The only hope the group of heroes has is to find the original heart forger, a man who has the ability to take and to use people’s memories. In Chupeco’s fictional world, people typically are connected to a kind of heartsglass, which changes color at a certain age based upon an individual’s inclination and talents and which ultimately determines an individual’s career trajectory. Tea has a very unique heartsglass that marks her as the titular bone witch, a kind of mystical being (asha) who can control horrible creatures (called daeva), while also resurrecting the dead. She’s not unlike a necromancer in many ways. There’s a pokemon-esque quality to the novel precisely because Tea eventually gains more daeva over time. At the main diegetic level of the novel’s plotting, Tea has gotten control of a dragon-like daeva with three heads (called an azi). That daeva often enables the team of heroes to travel great distances, even as most are afraid to ride on its back. Tea’s merry band of heroes includes her familiar (and deceased brother) Fox, the Deathseeker Kalen, the Princess Inessa of Kion (who is betrothed to Prince Kance of Odalia but who harbors significant feelings with Fox, despite the fact that Fox is technically dead), and a number of Asha, including but not limited to Tea’s once-mentor Mykkie (who is slowly dying because her heartsglass cannot be located), Polaire, Zoya, and a number of others. There’s also what is probably best described as a trans Deathseeker (named Likh), who is trying to gain entry into the asha guild, even though Likh is biologically male. Chupeco’s novel is plot heavy—a fact common, of course to many YA novels—which is both its major strength and its major weakness. Readers will be effectively transported to another time and place, which is a testament to Chupeco’s ability to world build. At the same time, the dynamics of the romance and courtship plot can bog down the “end of the world” scenario building up across the 500 page novel. Again, my tendency is to find the romance elements to be distracting, often pushing the bounds of my attention, especially as characters must find a way to plant kisses on each other or admit their deep feelings for each other, either right after a dramatic battle or just before a dangerous gambit. It was interesting, as well, to read up on the variety of responses to this novel by other reviewers. Lately, I’ve been checking out vlog reviews of books (on places like youtube) and one reviewer was absolutely savage to the novel, skewering it for being Islamophobic and (self) Orientalist in its depictions. This reviewer’s argument was largely based upon analogic linguistic usage, which I too had noticed, but I wouldn’t have gone as far as to make a similar kind of critique. There’s one kingdom (called Santiang) in which the Emperor can take concubines and characters have names like Baoyi or Tansoong, so it certainly seems like one can associate that particular location with China but it’s obviously difficult to establish any other clear links beyond some general cultural references, especially given the quite fantastic conceits of the fictional world. In other cases, I have found that I’ve been able to make more effective leaps when considering speculative fiction as a riffing apparatus, rather than as a simple reflection of the so-called real world. Whatever a reader’s quibbles, I know that I am quite excited for the final installment, so I can see how it is that things came to be the way that they are =).
Buy the Book Here:
https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-heart-forger-rin-chupeco/1125526060
AALF is maintained by a number of professional academics and scholars, including Paul Lai (pylduck@gmail.com), who is the social media liaison, expert, and active reviewer/ poster. Current, active as well previous reviewers have included (but are not necessarily limited to):
Sue J. Kim, Professor, University of Massachusetts, Lowell
Jennifer Ann Ho, Professor, UNC-Chapel Hill
Betsy Huang, Associate Professor, Clark University
Nadeen Kharputly, PhD, UC San Diego, Lecturer, Ethnic Studies
Annabeth Leow, Coterminal MA Student, Stanford University
Kai Hang Cheang, PhD Candidate, English, UC Riverside
Heejoo Park, PhD Student, English, UC Riverside
Qian (Jamie) Liu, PhD Student, Comparative Literature, UC Riverside
Soraya Gnei Zarook, PhD Student, English, UC Riverside
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