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stephenhongsohnAsian American Literature Fans – Megareview for December 20, 2017
AALF uses “maximal ideological inclusiveness” to define Asian American literature. Thus, we review any writers working in the English language of Asian descent. We also review titles related to Asian American contexts without regard to authorial descent. We also consider titles in translation pending their relationship to America, broadly defined. Our point is precisely to cast the widest net possible.
With apologies as always for any typographical, grammatical, or factual errors. My intent in these reviews is to illuminate the wide-ranging and expansive terrain of Asian American and Asian Anglophone literatures. Please e-mail ssohnucr@gmail.com with any concerns you may have.
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In this post, reviews of Rajan Khanna’s Raining Fire (Pyr, 2017); Rachel Khong’s Goodbye, Vitamin (Henry Holt, 2017); Kendare Blake’s One Dark Throne (HarperTeen, 2017); Brian Lee O’Malley’s Snotgirl Vol. 1 (Image Comics, 2017); Ellen Oh’s Spirit Hunters (HarperCollins Children’s Division, 2017); Weike Wang’s Chemistry (Knopf, 2017); Sheba Karim’s That Thing We Call a Heart (HarperTeen, 2017); and Michelle Kuo’s Reading with Patrick: A Teacher, a Student, and a Life-Changing Friendship (Random House, 2017).
A Review of Rajan Khanna’s Raining Fire (Pyr, 2017).
I was elated to read the final installment in Rajan Khanna’s zombie trilogy. Raining Fire (Pyr, 2017) begins with as much pace as the previous books. We’ll let B&N do some work for us with its editorial description: “Ben Gold, former airship pilot has lost everything: his airship, his friends, and Miranda, the woman he loves. All that he has left is a thirst for revenge, a reckless plan to sate it, and some journal entries from Miranda to help ground him in the chaos. As he spirals out of control, he must survive old friends, new enemies, and of course Ferals, the mindless, violent victims of the global pandemic that shattered the world. Meanwhile, the Cabal, a group of scientists on the floating city of Valhalla, are using the disease as a weapon while the militant Valhallans continue their raiding and destruction across the continent. When raiders from Valhalla massacre a town of innocents, Ben finds a new purpose in doing anything he can to undermine their power. Ben must reunite with old friends and find new ones if he is to succeed. Can he overcome the forces arrayed against him in time to save himself—and maybe the world?” This description leaves out that the first half of the book is essentially a suicide plot: Ben is trying to find the most productive way of leaving that world. It makes sense to a certain extent: the world is infested by what is called The Bug, which turns humans into Ferals. In this period of post-apocalypse (called The Sick), the remaining humans have mostly turned on each other, with the worst of them named in the previous passage. Thus, the first half sees Ben reminiscing about a period of time before his father had turned Feral; he actually has one of his last remaining friends airlift him over to the exact location where his father was infected with The Bug. He’s on a death wish to find his father, perhaps to kill what remains of his father if he can find him (or it), and then kill himself, but once he arrives at the location (which is a Temple), there is a raid going on not far from him. His preservation instincts kick into high gear, and he attempts to save the group. Though he is successful in helping them out, he eventually is captured by slavers, who work for the Valhallans. Ultimately, Ben is freed when there happens to be an assault on the slavers’ location. At this point, Ben receives critical information that gives him a purpose and a final mission. What I have appreciated about Khanna’s work is that he always gives Ben what seems to be an impossible situation that he somehow gets himself out of. In this way, Ben reminds me of a postapocalyptic version of MacGyver. He seems to have nine lives. The concluding sequence might stretch some credulity, as Ben’s many injuries never ultimately slow him down. If there is one minor critique I have of this work, it’s actually something related to the production process. First, Miranda’s journal entries are written in a typescript/ font that I had a problem reading. Second, the font sizing for Ben’s section I also thought were way too small. I guess I am getting old and need reading glasses, but still: I compared the font sizing against other standard sized paperbacks, and I definitely think it could have been increased by a point or two. But, back to the main point: obviously, fans of this series will need to buckle down and sit through the font sizing and cursive scribble. We’ll all be anticipating what Rajan Khanna will be cooking up next!
Buy the Book Here:
A Review of Rachel Khong’s Goodbye, Vitamin (Henry Holt, 2017).
So, I’d seen this title listed on amazon for awhile. For some reason, the first time I read the title, I thought it said Goodbye, Vietnam. WHOOPS! The book is nothing related to Vietnam anything. In any case, Rachel Khong’s debut Goodbye, Vitamin (Henry Holt, 2017) is another wonderfully unexpected find for me this year. We’ll let B&N provide us some brief contexts: “Freshly disengaged from her fiancé and feeling that life has not turned out quite the way she planned, thirty-year-old Ruth quits her job, leaves town and arrives at her parents’ home to find that situation more complicated than she'd realized. Her father, a prominent history professor, is losing his memory and is only erratically lucid. Ruth’s mother, meanwhile, is lucidly erratic. But as Ruth's father’s condition intensifies, the comedy in her situation takes hold, gently transforming her all her grief. Told in captivating glimpses and drawn from a deep well of insight, humor, and unexpected tenderness, Goodbye, Vitamin pilots through the loss, love, and absurdity of finding one’s footing in this life.” This description is pretty terrible actually. Ruth’s father is not just losing his memory, he’s suffering from later stage Alzheimer’s disease. Ruth quits her job in order to come home and help take care of him, but the circumstances are not ideal. When Ruth had left for college about a decade earlier, he had begun drinking again. He would later engage in an affair. These events leave Ruth’s mother in a state of fragility; Ruth’s little brother, by this time, has developed hard feelings about his father and doesn’t want much to do with him. But Ruth didn't have to deal with these events, so she goes home with a little bit less to worry about than her other family members. At the same time, Ruth is still nursing a broken heart, which creeps up now and again in her spirited first person narration. What becomes evident, as the novel goes on, is that the diary-like entries offers us a glimpse into another formal impulse: Ruth is trying to capture his father in much the way he used to capture her when she was just a child. She wants to memorialize him in a manner that honors all of his complexity, warts and all. She certainly accomplishes this task, making this novel one that may cause you to shed a tear or two. With its compact length, expect to finish this work in one sitting, and leave a Kleenex box nearby just in case. There will be a moment when you realize: oh, she’s become her father’s caretaker, just as he was once hers. With this reversal of fortune, Khong has us in her capable hands.
Buy the Book Here:
https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/goodbye-vitamin-rachel-khong/1124568883#productInfoTabs
A Review of Kendare Blake’s One Dark Throne (HarperTeen, 2017).
Kendare Blake’s One Dark Throne is her follow-up to Three Dark Crowns, part of what is now a planned quartet (though originally a duology). It seems as though that the popularity of Blake’s initial installment encouraged the publisher to extend her contract through four books instead of two (much like what happened with Sabaa Tahir’s An Ember in the Ashes). I’m not complaining, even though I’d much rather prefer reading the whole series in one sitting rather than to have to wait one or two years for each new offering. In any case, One Dark Throne continues the major storyline in book 1: there’s a kind of contest going on involving three queens, only one of which can survive to rule the isle of Fennbirn. Once a generation, a set of three girls are born; each individual is born with a specific gift, raised by a specific house or community based upon that gift; then, once these three girls come of age, they are set in a contest to see who is the most powerful and thus most fit to rule. In this case, there is Katharine, who is a poisoner; Arsinoe, who is supposed to be a naturalist; and Mirabella, who is an elementalist. There are other potential gifts, including the war gift and the oracle gift, but oracles are immediately put to death (as they go mad once their gift purportedly starts to develop) and the war gift hasn’t been seen in a possible queen in generations. So, here, I’ll begin to drop some spoilers that I didn’t mention in my review of the first book, hoping that you’d pick it up. So, at the conclusion of the first book, we discover that Arsinoe was never a naturalist, which explains why her gift never developed; she’s actually a poisoner. The conclusion also sees Katharine somehow survive a fall into the pit where queens are often put to death, once they have lost a contest or duel. She’s changed somehow, but it’s unclear how, except for the fact that she’s suddenly way better at her poisoning skills and she’s more assertive than she used to be. Finally, there’s Mirabella, who seems to be the most powerful of the three, but she’s also the one is least intent on bloodshed and sibling-killing until the final events of book 1. As the queens are pitted against each other, we begin to see new alliances form. Mirabella, for instance, comes to find out that Arsinoe did not actually try to kill her using a bear-familiar. Indeed, Mirabella begins to realize that there may be some sort of rapprochement possible with Arsinoe, but Katharine is ever intent on finishing the contest. Katharine’s ambition pushes the plot forward until the three are forced into a variety of events and festivals, in which queen-killing can take place. The success of this series—a huge improvement over what I considered to be the very lackluster Mortal Gods series—is the effective balance between romance and action. This particular installment also improves upon the first because of the subtle mystery concerning Katharine: why is she now being called an “undead” queen and why has her demeanor changed so radically? The novel’s conclusion provides fitting closure to Katharine’s rise, but this Ascension Year (the year in which the new queen defeats the others) is complicated when we discover finally why Katharine is so different. The rather ambivalent conclusion obviously leads a billion open threads left over, leaving Blake plenty to mine for two future installments, but there’s at least one major character death that will cause readers some measure of distress.
Buy the Book Here:
https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/one-dark-throne-kendare-blake/1125398232
A Review of Brian Lee O’Malley’s Snotgirl Vol. 1 (Image Comics, 2017).
So, Brian Lee O’Malley’s Snotgirl Vol. 1 is actually a collaborative effort. O’Malley scribes this strange graphic narrative compilation, with Leslie Hung on illustrating efforts (as well as others on coloring duties etc). I use the word strange because I didn’t know what to make of this work. The plot follows the misadventures of Lottie Person, aka Snotgirl. She’s Snotgirl because she has a serious case of allergies; she’s constantly on medication, and she is always producing excessive mucous, which happens to fall out of her nose at the most inopportune moments. Because Lottie is also a fashion blogger—which means she has to worry about the way she looks all the time,—the presence of snot on any of her outfits could certainly lead to her social media downfall. She has to run a tight ship, which requires the help of an assistant as well as constant vigilance over her medical condition. But, when she is prescribed a new medication, things begin to go haywire. When she makes a new friend with someone she calls “Cool Girl,” she’s not quite sure when some bad things happen during a night out on the town. To put things in more detailed perspective: she finds herself in a bathroom stall, covered in snot. What happens after this point is unclear. Her friend may have slipped and fell, or Lottie might have pushed her down, but the end result seems unequivocal: Cool Girl’s dead, with her head cracked and blood bleeding everywhere. Snotgirl hightails it out there, soon suspecting that she will get arrested, but nothing ever happens. Eventually Cool Girl texts her back, and she’s thinking what we’re thinking: what the f*@#? In any case, so it seems as if the medication may be causing some sort of hallucinatory effects, or maybe Cool Girl’s dead and someone is trying to bait her. At around this point, another character is introduced: Detective John Cho (not the actor, just a character with the same name as the actor). John Cho seems to have a little infatuation with Snotgirl, so we’re waiting to see what his particular entry into the narrative will be, but it will probably have to do something with the fact that he knows that Snotgirl has lost some of her allergy pills, some of which were covered in blood the night of Cool Girl’s apparent or not-so-apparent death. In any case, I hadn’t read any of the official editorial overviews of the work before I dove in, so I was constantly surprised at the content and the characterization. One of the problems that I’ve been having more and more lately as a reader is whether or no I am supposed to sympathize or laugh at (perhaps both) a character. I didn’t find Lottie all that compelling as a character; she’s fixated on an ex-boyfriend, is worried more about her image than about the fact that she may have actually killed someone, and she doesn’t seem to have all that much going on with respect to knowing anything about the world around her beyond the resolution of the images that will be used to portray her on her social media platforms. One question always seems to come back at me: what’s the intention of the author/ creator when he/she/they make a construct that may in some ways grate against the audience that s/he/ they risks the reader’s attention? To be sure, one cannot necessarily bend the creative vision to an audience’s whims, but it makes me wonder about target readerships, and as I get further and further into my ripe old age, I am wondering if I am becoming less and less the ideal reader that any author would be writing for. Certainly, O’Malley and company’s production levels are first rate; the artwork is wonderful, but I wasn’t all in on the story or the characterization. I’m willing to give this series another go because I’m not sure what O’Malley’s larger endgame is and there may be a far more elaborate arc to this work, given the idiosyncrasies generated in the first issues. Jury’s still out.
For more information Snotgirl, go here:
https://imagecomics.com/comics/releases/snotgirl-vol.-1-tp
A Review of Ellen Oh’s Spirit Hunters (HarperCollins Children’s Division, 2017).
So, I’m absolutely excited by this new generation of YA writers (that include Paula Yoo, Mike Jung, Lydia Kang, and others), especially the Korean Americans who have recently really made an impact in this area. Ellen Oh is definitely part of this changing of the guard and adds to the pioneering work of writers such as Sook Nyul Choi and Marie G. Lee. She is definitely making a case to be part of this KA young adult pantheon, which most prominently includes Linda Sue Park (recently of the Wing and Claw series that I have been enjoying) and An Na (who has another YA novel coming out this very year). This particular novel (after Oh’s Prophecy trilogy) follows the adventures of Harper Raine, who we discover has a very special relationship with the dead. Yes, folks, she sees dead people. In any case, let’s let B&N provide us with some context: “We Need Diverse Books founder Ellen Oh returns with Spirit Hunters, a high-stakes middle grade mystery series about Harper Raine, the new seventh grader in town who must face down the dangerous ghosts haunting her younger brother. A riveting ghost story and captivating adventure, this tale will have you guessing at every turn! Harper doesn’t trust her new home from the moment she steps inside, and the rumors are that the Raine family’s new house is haunted. Harper isn’t sure she believes those rumors, until her younger brother, Michael, starts acting strangely. The whole atmosphere gives Harper a sense of déjà vu, but she can’t remember why. She knows that the memories she’s blocking will help make sense of her brother’s behavior and the strange and threatening sensations she feels in this house, but will she be able to put the pieces together in time?” This description is pretty lacking. First off, the whole “We Need Diverse Books” campaign focuses not only on books with protagonists possessing backgrounds not often seen in the YA world, but also on the writers themselves who might hail from backgrounds not too dissimilar form these protagonists. In this case, Ellen Oh as a Korean American writer also happens to create a protagonist who hails from at least a partially similar background, which you wouldn’t really get from this description: Harper’s half-Korean by way of her mother. The centrality of this ancestry is made even more apparent when we discover that her grandmother is a mudang, which is a Korean term for a kind of shaman, who has the ability to challenge malevolent spirits and push them to cross over into the other side. The problem is that Harper’s mother isn’t on good terms with her own mother, so Harper’s ability to tap into this supernatural lineage isn’t even enabled until the concluding arc of the book. The novel’s far darker than I would have imagined for that particular age group, but I was absolutely enthused to see this mixed race protagonist. Indeed, as part of the diverse books initiative, this installment is particularly relevant for my personal life because my niece boasts the exact same biracial background as this particular protagonist. It’s probably the first that I can remember recommending on this level alone. In any case, the story itself is quite compelling, and I sat through it in one sitting. I’m also delighted that this book looks to be a series, as I will definitely want to see where Harper goes next with her abilities. Since she’s such a young character, I can’t imagine her going on ghost hunting type quests, especially given the fact that these spirits can be so harmful, but who knows, I’m sure the author will have some spectral surprises in store for us. Let’s just hope that Oh won’t make us wait too long.
Buy the Book Here:
https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/spirit-hunters-ellen-oh/1124860403#/
A Review of Weike Wang’s Chemistry (Knopf, 2017)
I absolutely adored this work, but part of the reason is that it fits what I prefer stylistically and pedagogically. The debut novel, Chemistry, by Weike Wang, reads like prose poetry; it’s very succinct and can be taught in the quarter system. The novel requires considerable attention despite its brevity because it’s quite atemporal and the narration, though in a very accessible first person perspective, is still quite opaque. For instance, the narrator doesn’t ever seem to be aware of why anyone would be interested in her; we rarely get a sense of the way she looks, and she tends toward making factual observations over subjective recountings. Her perspective is not surprising given that she’s a PhD student in chemistry. In any case, here’s a description from B&N: “Three years into her graduate studies at a demanding Boston university, the unnamed narrator of this nimbly wry, concise debut finds her one-time love for chemistry is more hypothesis than reality. She's tormented by her failed research--and reminded of her delays by her peers, her advisor, and most of all by her Chinese parents, who have always expected nothing short of excellence from her throughout her life. But there's another, nonscientific question looming: the marriage proposal from her devoted boyfriend, a fellow scientist, whose path through academia has been relatively free of obstacles, and with whom she can't make a life before finding success on her own. Eventually, the pressure mounts so high that she must leave everything she thought she knew about her future, and herself, behind. And for the first time, she's confronted with a question she won't find the answer to in a textbook: What do I really want? Over the next two years, this winningly flawed, disarmingly insightful heroine learns the formulas and equations for a different kind of chemistry--one in which the reactions can't be quantified, measured, and analyzed; one that can be studied only in the mysterious language of the heart. Taking us deep inside her scattered, searching mind, here is a brilliant new literary voice that astutely juxtaposes the elegance of science, the anxieties of finding a place in the world, and the sacrifices made for love and family.” This description reads as more uplifting than what I had experienced as a reader. The novel is quite ambivalent, at least in my opinion, about the possible life paths that the unnamed narrator will go on to follow. To be sure, the “heroine,” as she is called, is a survivor, something best articulated through her repeated references to her psychotherapy sessions. Her biological family, though having very high expectations of her, is still fractured in its own dysfunctional way. There is also a sort of “closet” going on in this work, as she never tells her parents the full extent of her relationship with her obviously white boyfriend. I use the phrase “obviously white” because his racial background is never explicitly marked and only emerges through a kind of comparative absence, rendered through his often disconcerting lack of knowledge concerning Chinese culture and customs. In some sense, it seemed evident from the get-go that this relationship would not stand the test of time: he just did not understand enough about her background and pushed her in ways that made it evident that he didn’t have the kind of sensitivity to nurture her complicated identities (as a woman, as a female scientist, as the daughter of Chinese immigrants). In any case, this narrative is perhaps best understood as a model minority takedown narrative, one that follows a long and rich tradition we have seen in Asian American literature. An editorial description compares this work to Celeste Ng’s Everything I Never Told you. Stylistically and thematically, these works could not be farther from each other (in many ways), but from the standpoint of the model minority problematic, these two novels do very similar, compelling work. One of the elements I ultimately found most fascinating about this novel is the relatively hardheaded, perhaps even deliberately self-occluding way that the narrator fails to understand the interest that she garners from the opposite sex. It’s clear very early on that her two primary male foils are quite interested in her, even as she doesn’t see any of their actions from that perspective. This narrator’s inability to mark this kind of intersubjective connection resonates more largely as a symptom related to the dangers she connects to forms of intimacy, perhaps previously mapped onto her by virtue of her dysfunctional parentage. One doesn’t want to be too psychoanalytical but the novel does introduce such a line of thinking especially given the many times that the narrator herself invokes the process of therapy. An intriguing work; let’s hope that Weike Wang has something already brewing for us soon. This novel counts as one of my best reads of 2017!
Buy the Book Here:
https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/chemistry-weike-wang/1124690761#productInfoTabs
A Review of Sheba Karim’s That Thing We Call a Heart (HarperTeen, 2017)
I was really excited to see that Sheba Karim has a new YA fiction out, as it’s been many moons since her debut Skunk Girl. I remember being encouraged to read that work when I believe erin Khue ninh wrote about it in her amazing book Ingratitude. Karim’s follow up That Thing We Call a Heart (HarperTeen, 2017) is one of those rarer YA books that do not have a paranormal element and focus more on the experience of ethnic and racial difference, especially as it impacts someone growing up as a teenager. The rather anemic editorial description over at B&N gives us some background: “Shabnam Qureshi is facing a summer of loneliness and boredom until she meets Jamie, who scores her a job at his aunt’s pie shack. Shabnam quickly finds herself in love, while her former best friend, Farah, who Shabnam has begun to reconnect with, finds Jamie worrying. In her quest to figure out who she really is and what she really wants, Shabnam looks for help in an unexpected place—her family, and her father’s beloved Urdu poetry. That Thing We Call a Heart is a funny and fresh story about the importance of love—in all its forms.” I suppose that this description does give us the basics. Most of the novel revolves around Shabnam mooning over Jamie, who, as suspicious readers like me quickly detect, is far too good to be true. He calls Shabnam “morning dew,” while constantly waxing on about how beautiful she is. Cue the virginity sharks circling Shabnam when Jamie begins to make sure there is wine available whenever they are alone together. In any case, the problem with their relationship, besides the fact that Jamie is obviously a don juan in training, is the fact that Shabnam has basically fallen head over heels in love, and their relationship is already conditioned to be temporary. That is, once the summer job at the pie shack is over, Jamie will be heading back to University of Wisconsin where he is an undergraduate student, while Shabnam will be a freshman over at University of Pennsylvania. Perhaps, the most important relationship, then, of this novel is not this ill-destined, obviously flawed romance, but the friendship that Shabnam holds with Farah. Underdeveloped in the novel, at least in my opinion, is exactly why their relationship eroded. Part of the issue here is that Karim restricts herself to Shabnam’s first person perspective, so we don’t get much perspective on Farah’s own desire to distance herself from Shabnam. The root of their estrangement seems to be the fact that Farah has starting wearing a hijab, which marks her as the subject of much curiosity and prejudice. Shabnam’s own internalized racism is apparent in her ambivalent feelings concerning Shabnam and the fact that she can barely handle having to oversee a visit with her great-Uncle who comes into town wearing gasp a turban. We get it: Shabnam is trying to find a way to navigate her Muslim identity (she’s Pakistani American by the way), while also fitting in, being cool, and even finding someone to love her (other than her parents). At the same time, Shabnam’s constant mooning over Jamie may get tiresome for some readers, who long for other more interesting hijinks that Karim includes. One of the more intriguing side plots is Shabnam’s appropriation of the Partition as a trope. That is, she makes up a story about her great-Uncle based upon the traumas of Partition, after her high school teacher asks her if that historical moment impacted her directly. Shabnam, seeking some attention, completely fabricates a tragic background for her great-Uncle, one involving a love-based courtship crossing Muslim-Hindu religious lines. Of course, the scary thing is that the story could be plausible: Shabnam doesn’t know what happened to her great-Uncle during partition because he doesn’t talk about it and her parents have said that they know it’s something quite traumatic. But Shabnam’s appropriation of Partition through her desire to gain a form of capital is an intriguing way by which to consider the more conservative methods that social context can be weaponized, especially in descending Asian American generations. The other random element is LOVED about this novel was the constant references to pastries: I’m a huge fan of pies, so their time at the pie shack cracked me up. Also, the other pastry referenced constantly is donuts, so I was all in for fried pieces of dough. I was constantly in envy of these characters because the donut shop in this particular fictional world sold many kinds with fillings I haven’t had the chance to have. I’m all about donuts with fillings, and I immediately found myself wanting to eat a boston crème donut!
Buy the Book Here:
http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/that-thing-we-call-a-heart-sheba-karim/1124362285?ean=9780062445704
A Review of Michelle Kuo’s Reading with Patrick: A Teacher, a Student, and a Life-Changing Friendship (Random House, 2017).
I read this memoir right after Rachel Khong’s Goodbye, Vitamin. As in: I read both of these books in the same day. This feat has rarely happened, but it’s a habit I picked up when I was studying for my MA exam. Sometimes, I find myself either unable to sleep or so engrossed in the process of reading that I won’t want to sleep. In any case, these fits are best timed with the summer schedule, after excessively long days attempting to retain my interest in copy editing. But I digress! Here are some contexts for you via B&N: “A memoir of race, inequality, and the power of literature told through the life-changing friendship between an idealistic young teacher and her gifted student, jailed for murder in the Mississippi Delta Recently graduated from Harvard University, Michelle Kuo arrived in the rural town of Helena, Arkansas, as a Teach for America volunteer, bursting with optimism and drive. But she soon encountered the jarring realities of life in one of the poorest counties in America, still disabled by the legacy of slavery and Jim Crow. In this stirring memoir, Kuo, the child of Taiwanese immigrants, shares the story of her complicated but rewarding mentorship of one student, Patrick Browning, and his remarkable literary and personal awakening. Convinced she can make a difference in the lives of her teenaged students, Michelle Kuo puts her heart into her work, using quiet reading time and guided writing to foster a sense of self in students left behind by a broken school system. Though Michelle loses some students to truancy and even gun violence, she is inspired by some such as Patrick. Fifteen and in the eighth grade, Patrick begins to thrive under Michelle’s exacting attention. However, after two years of teaching, Michelle feels pressure from her parents and the draw of opportunities outside the Delta and leaves Arkansas to attend law school. Then, on the eve of her law-school graduation, Michelle learns that Patrick has been jailed for murder. Feeling that she left the Delta prematurely and determined to fix her mistake, Michelle returns to Helena and resumes Patrick’s education—even as he sits in a jail cell awaiting trial. Every day for the next seven months they pore over classic novels, poems, and works of history. Little by little, Patrick grows into a confident, expressive writer and a dedicated reader galvanized by the works of Frederick Douglass, James Baldwin, Walt Whitman, W. S. Merwin, and others. In her time reading with Patrick, Michelle is herself transformed, contending with the legacy of racism and the questions of what constitutes a ‘good’ life and what the privileged owe to those with bleaker prospects.” This summary is pretty comprehensive. One of the impressions that left me a little bit uncomfortable and one that Kuo herself admits to is the rather radical gulf between herself and her students. As Kuo ascends to greater and greater heights, which includes the notable fact that she gets her law degree from Harvard, the trajectory of her students does not and cannot mirror her own. While the memoir ends on a somewhat optimistic note, the bigger question it leaves with is the power and efficacy of forms of what we might call “triage” teaching. It’s apparent that Kuo’s position, for instance, is not only necessary but quite crucial to the future success of her many at-risk students, but funding is soon pulled from the program. Any possible in-roads her successor might have made in a similar position are completely destroyed. The memoir leaves one wondering had the program that Kuo been a part of continued onward, perhaps there would have been stronger trajectories for these students. Kuo herself wonders about this possibility amid the many hours she spends in the jailhouse, giving Patrick homework and hoping that it’s not too late for him to turn his life around. The memoir also gives any educators pause about the impact that they can make in the classroom. It’s a question I often wonder, especially because so many of us are inspired by the Civil Rights discourse that it leads us to write dissertations with issues of social justice in mind. Certainly, an intriguing work to consider as part of a meta-pedagogical issue and one that I can see will be adopted in future courses for what will sure to be vibrant classroom discussions.
Buy the Book Here:
https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/reading-with-patrick-michelle-kuo/1125196979
