A Review of Axie Oh’s Rogue Heart (Tu Books, 2019)

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A Review of Axie Oh’s Rogue Heart (Tu Books, 2019)
By Stephen Hong Sohn 



This book has been on my to-read list pretty much since it was listed last year. Unfortunately, my work and personal life blew up this fall. I basically haven’t been reading new Asian American literature with any regularity for the past three months. I’ve picked up two or three books simultaneously that I’m working through (one of the others right now is Kamila Shamsie’s Home Fire, which I’m about 50% of the way through and also loving), and Rogue Heart is the first I’ve finished in a while. It feels good. It reminds me of why I started reading Asian American lit (broadly defined) in the first place. You get these wildly imaginative, politically engaged, and creatively rich fictional worlds.

Let’s let the official site get us started with a description: “Neo Beijing, 2201. Two years after the Battle of Neo Seoul, eighteen-year-old telepath Ama works in a cafe by day and moonlights as a lounge singer in a smoky bar at night. She's anonymous, she's safe from the seemingly never-ending war, and that's how she'd like to stay. But then PHNX, a resistance group specializing in espionage, approaches her with an offer to expose a government experiment exactly like the one she fled. Soon, Ama is traveling with PHNX on a series of dangerous missions, using her telepathic powers to aid the rebellion against the authoritarian Alliance. As the war ramps up, PHNX is given its most dangerous mission yet: to infiltrate the base of the Alliance's new war commander, a young man rumored to have no fear of death. But when Ama sees the commander for the first time, she discovers his identity: Alex Kim, the boy she once loved. The boy who betrayed her. Now, Ama must use her telepathic abilities to pose as an officer in Alex's elite guard, manipulating his mind so that he doesn't recognize her. As the final battle approaches, Ama struggles with her mission and her feelings for Alex. Will she be able to carry out her task? Or will she give up everything for Alex again--only to be betrayed once more?”

So, Oh knows the genre of the YA paranormal romance, but what I adored about Oh’s work is that she shifted the narrative perspective from the first book in the series to a different character. The first in the series Rebel Seoul followed Jaewon, a reluctant but plucky heroic figure who was climbing the ranks of the Neo Seoul military ladder. The second now shifts the narrative perspective to Ama, one of the enhanced super soldiers who was created in an experimental project; she was only one of three to survive those experiments, which took orphans and other children and used them for the possibility of these genetic innovations that could produce the perfect fighting machine. Of the surviving super soldiers, I found Ama the most interesting: she wasn’t the strongest or had the flashiest powers: she was a telepath and illusionist and had to use these powers to manipulate rather than force her way to win battles.

In terms of the genre conceits, Ama starts off the novel as a seemingly regular teen in Neo Beijing, but she harbors a secret, which she will have to unveil over the course of the novel. While she could continue to run from the authorities that want to exploit her or fear her for her powers (and want to kill her), Ama decides to put her powers to a productive use. In this sense, the generic aspects can be fulfilled through its quest plot, as Ama must help work for the resistance fighters who are working against the Alliance, which functions in this case as a kind of Empire. In this regard, the rebels are attempting to wrest control from a governmental system that seems to be intent upon conquest.

Of course, the other generic element to fulfill is the romance plot. Here, Oh carries over the starcrossed romance between Alex and Ama and explores its ends in this particular novel. When Ama goes undercover as an Alliance soldier, she must maintain an illusion that she’s someone else, all the while falling in love all over again with Alex, the man who broke her heart. The bind is real: how can Ama manage to save Alex’s life when she’s simultaneously taking down the Alliance, the very political system that Alex is fighting for? If you want the answers, then you’ll have to read Oh’s spirited companion novel. You’ll be transported. The K-Drama elements are still there, and the god machines are still there, so there’s a little bit for everyone. Dive on in, the genre waters are warm and pleasant. 

Buy the Book Here.

Review Author: Stephen Hong Sohn
Review Editor: Gnei Soraya Zarook

If you have any questions or want us to consider your book for review, please don’t hesitate to contact us via email!
Prof. Stephen Hong Sohn at ssohnucr@gmail.com
Gnei Soraya Zarook, PhD Student in English, at gzaro001@ucr.edu

A Review of David Yoon’s Frankly in Love (G.P. Putnam’s Sons Books for Young Readers, 2019)

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A Review of David Yoon’s Frankly in Love (G.P. Putnam’s Sons Books for Young Readers, 2019)
By Stephen Hong Sohn



I was super duper excited to read David Yoon’s debut Frankly in Love (G.P. Putnam’s Sons Books for Young Readers, 2019), because it features a Korean American teenage male protagonist. I don’t think I’ve seen this figure very often, even in the YA genres that have been promoting more diverse central characters.

Let’s let the Penguin/ Random House give us some key marketing information: “Frank Li has two names. There’s Frank Li, his American name. Then there’s Sung-Min Li, his Korean name. No one uses his Korean name, not even his parents. Frank barely speaks any Korean. He was born and raised in Southern California. Even so, his parents still expect him to end up with a nice Korean girl–which is a problem, since Frank is finally dating the girl of his dreams: Brit Means. Brit, who is funny and nerdy just like him. Brit, who makes him laugh like no one else. Brit . . . who is white. As Frank falls in love for the very first time, he’s forced to confront the fact that while his parents sacrificed everything to raise him in the land of opportunity, their traditional expectations don’t leave a lot of room for him to be a regular American teen. Desperate to be with Brit without his parents finding out, Frank turns to family friend Joy Song, who is in a similar bind. Together, they come up with a plan to help each other and keep their parents off their backs. Frank thinks he’s found the solution to all his problems, but when life throws him a curveball, he’s left wondering whether he ever really knew anything about love—or himself—at all. In this moving debut novel—featuring striking blue stained edges and beautiful original endpaper art by the author—David Yoon takes on the question of who am I? with a result that is humorous, heartfelt, and ultimately unforgettable.”

So, the one admittedly bad thing that occurred was a result of happenstance sequencing. I read this book not long after Fake It till You Break It by Jenn P. Nguyen. There is a kind of similar storyline going on here in which two main characters “fake” a relationship in order for their parents basically to leave them alone. In both Nguyen’s and Yoon’s novels, the two main characters who end up “faking” it end up actually liking each other. With this particular novel, I was less invested in Frank Li and Joy Song’s relationship because I thought Yoon was tackling a far more difficult issue by positioning both Frank and Joy as teen characters who basically have to deal with the prejudices of their parents. In other words, Yoon had a real opportunity to explore how these teenage characters would have to work through the fact that their parents’ traditional viewpoints also in many cases simply overlap with racist convictions. Yoon sidesteps this conundrum by having Frank and Joy end up actually liking each other.

The other critique I ended up having was that another chance for Yoon to engage this topic is glossed over in the final arc of the novel. Indeed, Frank’s sister has been disowned for dating and then marrying someone who is African American. The rapprochement that is brokered at the conclusion makes some logical sense given the gravity of what happens during that period, but I had desperately hoped some substantive conversation or even scene might address the fact that the original rupture was incredibly damaging and quite complicated.

In any case, despite these critiques, I found the novel super engrossing and read it basically in one sitting. The characters reminded me a lot of my experiences in high school, and Frank is certainly a winning protagonist. It is easy to root for Frank at every stage. Even when he makes questionable decisions, you always understand his rationale. Though the novel clocks a little bit longer than I’d prefer for teaching texts, I’ll certainly consider it for future courses!

For more on the book and to buy it go here.

Review Author: Stephen Hong Sohn
Review Editor: Gnei Soraya Zarook

If you have any questions or want us to consider your book for review, please don’t hesitate to contact us via email!
Prof. Stephen Hong Sohn at ssohnucr@gmail.com
Gnei Soraya Zarook, PhD Student in English, at gzaro001@ucr.edu

A Review of Emily Jungmin Yoon’s Ordinary Misfortunes and A Cruelty Special to Our Species

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A Review of Emily Jungmin Yoon’s Ordinary Misfortunes (Tupelo Press, 2017) and A Cruelty Special to Our Species (Ecco, 2018)
By Stephen Hong Sohn



First off, let me state that I thoroughly enjoyed reading Emily Jungmin Yoon’s Ordinary Misfortunes (Tupelo Press, 2017) and A Cruelty Special to Our Species (Ecco, 2018). I’m reviewing both titles partly because Ordinary Misfortunes is a chapbook, the majority of which appears in some form (revised or not) in A Cruelty Special to Our Species, a full-length poetry collection. It’s always interesting to think about the question of form and structure, especially when it comes to a chapbook and how it later will be included in a longer collection. Ordinary Misfortunes comes out of Tupelo Press, an independent publisher I have long adored; they have a number of Asian American collections they've put out, some of which I’ve taught (such as Barbara Tran’s In the Mynah Bird’s Own Words, which was part of a syllabus way back in the days I taught at Stanford). For those interested in Tupelo Press offerings, go here: https://www.tupelopress.org/

Ordinary Misfortunes is a chapbook primarily scaffolded by testimonial poems. Yoon takes inspiration from a set of oral histories concerning comfort women to generate a number of provocative and poignant dramatic monologues, each with the kind of specificity that honors the particularities and the tragedies of a given life. Take, for instance, “Hwang Keum-ju,” which begins with these lines: “a draft notice for girls, who was going to go? Everybody/ crying I went I dressed nicely and went/ train windows covered with tar paper/ None of the girls knew” (9). The poem ends with Hwang Keum-ju’s unlikely survival: “I was alone and walked all the way to the 38^th parallel/ American soldiers sprayed me with so much DDT/ all the lice fell off me/ It was December 2^nd/ I lost my uterus/ I am now 73 years old” (9). One element I can’t fully reproduce here is the spacing in between some of the words. Part of Yoon’s aesthetic approach to these dramatic monologue-ish poems is to emphasize the experience of fragmentation and partial recovery. The refraction of these lives into poetic art is never seamless. Instead, rupture and suture is part and parcel of how we must engage all of these testimonies.

Despite the darkness of the subject matter, what I find inspiring about these poems are their willingness to breathe such vitality into the lives of those who have been imperiled. The chapbook’s title, Ordinary Misfortunes, is the darkly ironic rendering of the ways in which traumatic histories become subsumed under pedestrian observations and considerations. Thus, beside the scorching testimonies, there are a set of repeated poems under the same title of “An Ordinary Misfortune” that together accrue deeper meaning under the guise of this naturalization and adaptation to a life imbued by trauma and violence. In some sense, what Yoon accomplishes in her testimonial poems is exactly the opposite, such “extraordinary fortunes”: they make exceptional the lives of these women, to clarify the bounty that we are given in their oral histories, the reminder of what cannot remain unrecognized.

This project of recovery is taken up on a larger scale in A Cruelty Special to Our Species (Ecco, 2018). Yoon provides us with a lengthy author’s note up front, explaining that the “poems on the ‘comfort women’ of the Japanese Empire are the heart of this collection” (xi). Yoon goes on to state that her poetry serves to “amplify and speak these women’s stories, not speak for them” and that she reminds “readers that even if a part of history may not seem to be relevant to their lives, it is—it is their reality too” (xi). Indeed, the testimonies from comfort women that also appear in Ordinary Misfortunes come to be the cornerstone of the longer collection, though there is a wider diachronic character to A Cruelty Special to Our Species, a fact perhaps made most evident in the jacket flap blurb offered by Vijay Seshadri, who sees this work through its “[h]istorical traumas—specifically, the trauma inflicted on women who are seen as the spoils of war; and, generally the trauma of the Korean peninsula.”

The opening, “An Ordinary Misfortune,” gives us this diachronic or polychromic perspective through the lyric subject, who appears as a contemporary figure, giving us access to this larger historical traumas of the Korean peninsula. The lyric speaker finds herself on a “jam-packed train,” having to endure different perspectives on Korea, including “Your life in Korea would have been a whole lot different without the US. Meaning: be thankful” (3). In the second iteration of “An Ordinary Misfortune,” our lyric speaker makes explicit her personal connection to historical trauma, as her grandmother appears as a subject imperiled by male predation in Korea. As the lyric speaker notes, “What is right in war. What is left in war. War hasn't left Korea. I have. I fold. I give up, myself, to you” (6). This perspective, that “War hasn’t left Korea,” is one that is expanded upon in following poems. Indeed, the “unending war,” as it has been called by Christine Hong, presents itself the shadow over which these poems find their weighty centers. Poems such as “Hello Miss Pretty Bitch,” “Don’t Touch Me,” and “Obeli,” are especially notable for their ability to remind us that Korea and the unending war continue to influence representational terrains and our contemporary moment.

Though I can’t go into detail about every single thread that Yoon weaves through A Cruelty Special to Our Species, I will bring up the element of the title, which gestures to the boundaries between human and animal, and the problematic power structures that determine which lives should be saved and which should be discarded. “Bell Theory” perhaps clarifies this issue most provocatively, as the lyric speaker details a thorny experience in the classroom when she is just a young child. Her classmate asks her if she eats dogs, a question that has been levied at Koreans before. But, this question gives way to an extraordinary sequence involving “A Cruelty Special to our species” (37), in which the “the colonized… use the chaos/ of the Kanto Earthquake to poison waters, set fire” (37) to determine a dividing line between the human and the subhuman, and to delineate who would be massacred.

In the context of Japanese colonialism, what becomes rendered as animal is none other than the Koreans, who become targets of mob violence following the earthquake. Koreans were erroneously believed to have tainted the drinking water. This comparison point and context gains further texture through other poems, such as “Transformation” and “Time, in Whales.” The lyric speaker continually places herself in relation to whales, at one point even suggesting a potential transformation across species. Thus, the collection achieves an intriguing ecopoetic impulse with these poems precisely because the issue of the entity that “poisons waters” is continually marked as the figure who has become corrupted by power. Despite the targeting of disempowered entities, Yoon collection ends with an ethos of resistance, the possibility that water will rise, that it can be brought to a boil: “And yes, in grace. Only song, only buoyancy” (67), the sense that there can be something else that comes to the surface, even after such destruction.

Buy the Books Here and Here.

Review Author: Stephen Hong Sohn
Review Editor: Gnei Soraya Zarook

If you have any questions or want us to consider your book for review, please don’t hesitate to contact us via email!
Prof. Stephen Hong Sohn at ssohnucr@gmail.com
Gnei Soraya Zarook, PhD Student in English, at gzaro001@ucr.edu

A Review of Jean Kwok’s Searching for Sylvie Lee (William Morrow, 2019)

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A Review of Jean Kwok’s Searching for Sylvie Lee (William Morrow, 2019)
By Stephen Hong Sohn

I wouldn’t start this novel (Searching for Sylvie Lee)—Jean Kwok’s third, after Girl in Translation and Mambo in Chinatown—unless you have a lot of time on your hands. Why? Because it’s a mystery plot, as evidenced by the title. We immediately want to find out: what the hell happened to Sylvie Lee?

Let’s let the official site give us some more information before I go further (and spoil lots of things): “A poignant and suspenseful drama that untangles the complicated ties binding three women—two sisters and their mother—in one Chinese immigrant family and explores what happens when the eldest daughter disappears, and a series of family secrets emerge, from the New York Times bestselling author of Girl in Translation. It begins with a mystery. Sylvie, the beautiful, brilliant, successful older daughter of the Lee family, flies to the Netherlands for one final visit with her dying grandmother—and then vanishes. Amy, the sheltered baby of the Lee family, is too young to remember a time when her parents were newly immigrated and too poor to keep Sylvie. Seven years older, Sylvie was raised by a distant relative in a faraway, foreign place, and didn't rejoin her family in America until age nine. Timid and shy, Amy has always looked up to her sister, the fierce and fearless protector who showered her with unconditional love. But what happened to Sylvie? Amy and her parents are distraught and desperate for answers. Sylvie has always looked out for them. Now, it's Amy's turn to help. Terrified yet determined, Amy retraces her sister's movements, flying to the last place Sylvie was seen. But instead of simple answers, she discovers something much more valuable: the truth. Sylvie, the golden girl, kept painful secrets . . . secrets that will reveal more about Amy's complicated family—and herself—than she ever could have imagined. A deeply moving story of family, secrets, identity, and longing, Searching for Sylvie Lee is both a gripping page-turner and a sensitive portrait of an immigrant family. It is a profound exploration of the many ways culture and language can divide us and the impossibility of ever truly knowing someone—especially those we love.”

Well, again, I’ll pause to state that I’ll be spoiling lots of things here and there, so turn away now. First off, Kwok’s gone positively Faulknerian with this particular work, given its complicated explorations of family genealogy, illicit romances, and unrequited loves. Kwok also compels us in her use of shifting first person. The primary perspectives are given to Amy, Sylvie, and their mother Ma. There are also crucial shifts in time. Amy’s and Ma’s first person accounts unfold, for the most part, in chronological time: we’re following them as they help unravel the mystery plot. Sylvie’s is occurring a little bit earlier, giving us the sense of what went on in the period leading up to her disappearance.

We do discover that Sylvie’s been harboring some secrets, ones that increase the possible motives and suspects. First, there’s the estrangement from her husband Jim, who we find out is a domestic abuser. Then, there’s the strange behavior of Sylvie’s Aunt Helena and really Helena’s entire family, including her husband Willem and her son Lukas. Finally, what’s the deal with Lukas’s friend Filip, a talented cello instructor, who seems to have taken a liking to Sylvie? You get the feeling that Jim, Filip, or someone from Aunt Helena’s family could have had a nefarious hand in Sylvie’s disappearance.

Given the fact that I just finished Ruchika Tomar’s A Prayer for Travelers, I guess I was hoping for a more optimistic ending. Despite my personal feelings about how the novel ultimately goes down, you can’t fault Kwok for her faultlessly plotted and paced novel. The characters are multifaceted and brim with the kind of intensity that make for the most enthralling reading experience. Bonus points for taking so-called Asian American literature to the Netherlands, which is a transnational move that I definitely do not recall having read before.

Buy the Book Here.

Review Author: Stephen Hong Sohn
Review Editor: Gnei Soraya Zarook

If you have any questions or want us to consider your book for review, please don’t hesitate to contact us via email!
Prof. Stephen Hong Sohn at ssohnucr@gmail.com
Gnei Soraya Zarook, PhD Student in English, at gzaro001@ucr.edu

A Review of Julie Kagawa’s Soul of the Sword (Inkyard Press, 2019)

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A Review of Julie Kagawa’s Soul of the Sword (Inkyard Press, 2019)
By Stephen Hong Sohn

So, I’m reviewing the second in this series, which started with Shadow of the Fox. I believe that this series is a trilogy with the third already set for release. As you can imagine without me already telling you, this particular installment ends with a kind of cliffhanger.

Let’s get caught up with the publicity material from the official site: “One thousand years ago, a wish was made and a sword of rage and lightning was forged. Kamigoroshi. The Godslayer. A weapon powerful enough to seal away the formidable demon Hakaimono. Now he has broken free. Kitsune shapeshifter Yumeko has one task: to take her piece of the ancient and powerful Scroll of a Thousand Prayers to the Steel Feather temple in order to prevent the summoning of the Harbinger of Change, the great Kami Dragon who will grant one wish to whomever holds the scroll. But she has a new enemy now, more dangerous than any she has yet faced. The demon Hakaimono is free at last, and he has possessed the very person Yumeko trusted to protect her from the evil at her heels, Kage Tatsumi of the Shadow Clan. Hakaimono has only one goal: to break the curse of the sword and set himself free to rain chaos and destruction over the land forevermore. To do so, he will need the scroll. And Yumeko is the only one standing in his way.”

I didn’t find this description to be all that accurate because Yumeko is really not the only one standing in the way of Hakaimono, though she certainly has a particular kind of fox-power that will enable her to do some work to help free Kage Tatsumi from Hakaimono’s grips. Kagawa has worked particularly hard to create a merry band of allies who Yumeko can rely on to make sure that she can complete her quest: they include the ronin Okame, the noble Taiyo, and the shrine maiden Reika. There’s also a narrative perspective given to a ghost, who is also there to provide some extra help for Yumeko. Yumeko and her allies have to also deal with the court intrigue from Lady Hanshou and her followers, while also trying to make their way to Steel Feather temple for the ultimate showdown. What makes the plot attain its full dimensions, though, is yet another villain. Indeed, Hakaimono is not the only one after the full scroll. This second villain is exactly what sets up the third book, as it seems as if the reappearance of the dragon is going to happen no matter what.

In any case, what makes this particular work one of Kagawa’s strongest is, frankly, the banter between the major characters. You’ll want them to succeed and to remain alive despite the fact that the odds are stacked against them. Though other readers probably caught on to this sooner than I did, I was not expecting the same-sex romance to develop between Okame and Taiyo, so this particular romance did add more to my specific readerly entertainment, as it took some attention away from the central romance plot between Yumeko and Kage Tatsumi. In any case, Kagawa’s a master at the paranormal young adult romance, so you can expect that I’ll be in line to read the final installment in the trilogy!

Buy the Book Here.

Review Author: Stephen Hong Sohn
Review Editor: Gnei Soraya Zarook

If you have any questions or want us to consider your book for review, please don’t hesitate to contact us via email!
Prof. Stephen Hong Sohn at ssohnucr@gmail.com
Gnei Soraya Zarook, PhD Student in English, at gzaro001@ucr.edu

A Review of Kamila Shamsie’s Home Fire (Riverhead, 2017)

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A Review of Kamila Shamsie’s Home Fire (Riverhead, 2017)
By Stephen Hong Sohn

This book has been on my “to-read” list for quite some time. It was one of about four books I have been reading simultaneously. I read this book over a couple of weeks.

Let’s let the editorial description get us started: “Isma is free. After years of watching out for her younger siblings in the wake of their mother’s death, she’s accepted an invitation from a mentor in America that allows her to resume a dream long deferred. But she can’t stop worrying about Aneeka, her beautiful, headstrong sister back in London, or their brother, Parvaiz, who’s disappeared in pursuit of his own dream, to prove himself to the dark legacy of the jihadist father he never knew. When he resurfaces half a globe away, Isma’s worst fears are confirmed. Then Eamonn enters the sisters’ lives. Son of a powerful political figure, he has his own birthright to live up to—or defy. Is he to be a chance at love? The means of Parvaiz’s salvation? Suddenly, two families’ fates are inextricably, devastatingly entwined, in this searing novel that asks: What sacrifices will we make in the name of love?”

About two thirds through the novel, I realized that it was a contemporary re-imagining of Sophocles’s Antigone. Shamsie is not the first South Asian Anglophone writer to use that play as the starting point for a fictional re-imagining. Indeed, Joydeep Roy-Bhattacharya’s The Watch takes a similar angle, but that novel is set primarily in Afghanistan. Shamsie’s novel takes its cues from the transnational connections among the United States, England, Turkey, and Pakistan.

I’ll have to provide a spoiler warning here—turn away if you haven’t already—but what made me realize we were working in the frame of Antigone was the plotting reveal that Parvaiz was killed just outside an embassy. Because Parvaiz was suspected of working with subversive entities, his body is not allowed to be buried in England and is instead sent to Pakistan, his ethnic homeland. When Aneeka travels to Pakistan to take proper claims over his body and to give Parvaiz the burial he deserves, it is clear at this point that Shamsie is now working with the general framework of the play in mind. Of course, Shamsie does use names that roughly provide us with ethnic analogues: Aneeka/ Antigone; Parvaiz/ Polynices; Isma/ Ismene.

What I especially appreciate about Shamsie’s novel is its portrayal of the Creon figure, a politician by the name of Karamat Lone, who must find the complicated balance of upholding the law while also being aware that his ethnic heritage means higher expectations about community and loyalty. When Shamsie shifts to his interiority at the novel’s conclusion, we get a sense of the very large stakes of Shamsie’s work, which explores the damaging ways in which the juridical system fractures family and disables the reparative work of mourning. Further still, the surprise and tragic ending to Home Fire gestures to the ongoing struggles over the way the supposed “war on terror” is being waged. How can justice be wrought in a war in which so many are caught up, willing or not, in its ever-widening grasp? This question hovers over the novel as a dark and ominous cloud. Shamsie’s one salve is in her poetically positioned omniscient narrator, who leads us into the lush and dark psyches of these multifaceted characters.

Buy the Book Here.

Review Author: Stephen Hong Sohn
Review Editor: Gnei Soraya Zarook

If you have any questions or want us to consider your book for review, please don’t hesitate to contact us via email!
Prof. Stephen Hong Sohn at ssohnucr@gmail.com
Gnei Soraya Zarook, PhD Student in English, at gzaro001@ucr.edu

A Review of Kendare Blake’s Two Dark Reigns (HarperTeen, 2018)

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A Review of Kendare Blake’s Two Dark Reigns (HarperTeen, 2018)

By Stephen Hong Sohn

The third book in the Three Dark Crowns series has landed. Kendare Blake brings us the action-heavy, ominous Two Dark Reigns (HarperTeen, 2018), which continues the stories of Katharine, the poisoner; Arisonoe, the faux-naturalist, also a poisoner; and Mirabella, the talented elementalist. You may remember: every generation, a set of three daughters are born. Eventually, they must fight each other to the death, so that one may rule. This generation, though, has decided to go about things differently. At the end of book two, Katharine ended up “winning” the crown, but only after getting pushed down a well and “resurrected” in some form, and then having her sisters abdicate Fennbirn Island entirely. Katharine becomes the Queen of Fennbirn by default.

 

So now let’s let B&N do some work for us: “Queen Katharine has waited her entire life to wear the crown. But now that she finally has it, the murmurs of dissent grow louder by the day. There’s also the alarming issue of whether or not her sisters are actually dead—or if they’re waiting in the wings to usurp the throne. Mirabella and Arsinoe are alive, but in hiding on the mainland and dealing with a nightmare of their own: being visited repeatedly by a specter they think might be the fabled Blue Queen. Though she says nothing, her rotting, bony finger pointing out to sea is clear enough: return to Fennbirn. Jules, too, is in a strange place—in disguise. And her only confidants, a war-gifted girl named Emilia and her oracle friend Mathilde, are urging her to take on a role she can’t imagine filling: a legion-cursed queen who will lead a rebel army to Katharine’s doorstep. This is an uprising that the mysterious Blue Queen may have more to do with than anyone could have guessed—or expected.”

 

The weird thing about this book is that it begins with a flashback sequence in which we discover that once upon a time, there was actually something called a Blue Queen. Apparently, once, a fourth daughter was born. When this fourth child appears, then the first three are automatically put to the death; the fourth daughter ends up becoming the Queen of Fennbirn in this scenario. The importance of this flashback sequence is not apparent until well into this novel, as Arsinoe is receiving ghostly visitations by the Blue Queen, named Illiann; she’s also dreaming about another queen named Daphne, who has befriended the Blue Queen. The death of the Blue Queen ends up creating a mist, one that threatens Katharine’s contemporary reign on Fennbirn, but other problems are afoot in the contemporary world of Katharine, Arisinoe and Mirabella.

 

Jules Millone has risen up by virtue of her status as a potential Legion Queen, namely, she is a woman with more than one “gift”: she has something called the war gift, which enables her to command objects and weapons at will (a sort of telekinetic battle power), while she is also a naturalist (and boasts a large predatory cat named Camden as a familiar). There is a potential apocalyptic showdown emerging between Katharine and Jules. Meanwhile Arsinoe is trying to figure out what to do about the fact that the mist is becoming more malevolent. Mirabella faces a crucial decision: should she align herself with Jules, who she believes may destroy Fennbirn entirely, or should she align herself with Katharine, who is the rightful current Queen, but who may continue to try to exterminate her sisters?

 

There’s a lot going on in this book, but I thoroughly enjoyed the plotting. It was interesting to see Blake include the Blue Queen/ Daphne storyline, as I didn’t know what it’s importance would be, and you can see she is building up the “mist” to be a major power player in the final book. Also, another intriguing turn of events in the final pages continues to mark Katharine as a pivotal fulcrum for the action, but I can’t help but feel a little bit pity for her. She’s gone through so much, and there’s a sense that, at least for her, there is no way to go but down. Very much looking forward to what will no doubt prove to be a complicated and twisty final book. As I mentioned last time, this series has been far superior to the angsty-teenagers-reincarnated-as-Greek-gods series she put out previously. Warning: death count is very high.

 
Buy the Book Here.

Review Author: Stephen Hong Sohn
Review Editor: Gnei Soraya Zarook

If you have any questions or want us to consider your book for review, please don’t hesitate to contact us via email!
Prof. Stephen Hong Sohn at ssohnucr@gmail.com
Gnei Soraya Zarook, PhD Student in English, at gzaro001@ucr.edu

A Review of Naomi Hirahara’s Iced in Paradise (Prospect Park Books, 2019)

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A Review of Naomi Hirahara’s Iced in Paradise (Prospect Park Books, 2019)
By Stephen Hong Sohn

It’s been a bit of time since I’ve reviewed a work by Naomi Hirahara, who is definitely one of my favorite Asian American mystery genre writers (along with Steph Cha and some others). I am still praying and hoping that Hirahara will be able to find a publisher that will put the Ellie Rush series into a trade paperback or *gasp* a hardcover. Fortunately, Prospect Park Books chose to release this particular book in dual editions, which is fitting since it seems as though Hirahara is starting off a new series with Iced in Paradise.

Let’s get this mystery, whodunnit party started with the official marketing description here: “Leilani Santiago has left her post-collegiate life in Seattle to return home to the Hawaiian island of Kaua‘i. Her mom’s been diagnosed with MS, and she wants to help keep afloat the family business, a shave ice shack. When Leilani arrives at work one morning, she stumbles across a dead body, a young pro surfer who was being coached by her estranged father. As her father soon becomes the No. 1 murder suspect, Leilani must find the real killer and somehow safeguard her ill mother, little sisters, and grandmother, while trying to keep the long-distance relationship with her boyfriend alive. With Iced in Paradise, award-winning mystery writer Naomi Hirahara is at the top of her game, introducing a smart, outspoken, sometimes cranky young sleuth and immersing readers in the charms and quirks of small-town Hawaiian life.”

First off, big kudos to Hirahara for pushing her aesthetic representational choices by working in dialogue that employs pidgin English. In an author’s note, Hirahara details that she’s not entirely an expert in the dialect so she had to work quite hard to render it in a realistic way. This choice is more than a detail because Hirahara is looking to give concrete and material dimensions to her depiction of Kaua‘i. Of course, with any good mystery, you have to have something to solve, which appears in the guise of the aforementioned surfer. Because the surfer is found dead in the family’s shave ice business, they are naturally looked at as suspects. But you know that Hirahara will lead us elsewhere. In particular, you’re hoping that the death of the surfer might have something to do with his father, a business magnate who is trying to develop more land at the expense of indigenous and local Hawaiian communities. In this respect, Hirahara is well aware of settler colonial problematics and gives readers a sense of the larger stakes of what it means to own land on the islands. At the same time, in some sense, this material becomes somewhat of a red herring, especially as the mystery draws to a close.

Though scope and problem of land ownership in Hawai‘i does cast a larger shadow over the resolution to the murder, the novel still manages to find its genre footing precisely because of Hirahara’s expert and deft use/construction of first person narration. Leilani Santiago is a fully realized, flawed, yet exceedingly likable heroine. We’ll fully sympathize with her, as her relationship disintegrates amid her desire to reconnect with her family and her roots. We’ll cheer for her as she doggedly tries to find a way to clear her father’s name. We’ll appreciate the subtle and not-so-subtle ways that she finds herself attracted to a former Silicon Valley executive who has traveled to the area to start a new life. And naturally, we’ll want to read ever more about her exploits and her mystery-solving adventures, so let’s hope Hirahara has at least the requisite trilogy in the works. In the meantime, it’s still summer, so let’s find a way to get ourselves a shave ice (not shaved ice) treat before the hot weather has given way to pumpkin spice lattes and Halloween candy.

For more and to buy the book, go to the official site.

Review Author: Stephen Hong Sohn
Review Editor: Gnei Soraya Zarook

If you have any questions or want us to consider your book for review, please don’t hesitate to contact us via email!
Prof. Stephen Hong Sohn at ssohnucr@gmail.com
Gnei Soraya Zarook, PhD Student in English, at gzaro001@ucr.edu

A Review of Priya Sharma’s Ormeshadow (Tor.Com)

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A Review of Priya Sharma’s Ormeshadow (Tor.Com)
By Stephen Hong Sohn

So this book was yet another I was reading in the midst of many others. It comes out of Tor’s e-publishing initiative and imprint called, appropriately, Tor.com. Despite the name, they do have traditional trade paperback copies.

Let’s let the official site give us some background on this title: “Acclaimed author Priya Sharma transports readers back in time with Ormeshadow, a coming-of-age story as dark and rich as good soil. Burning with resentment and intrigue, this fantastical family drama invites readers to dig up the secrets of the Belman family, and wonder whether myths and legends are real enough to answer for a history of sin. Uprooted from Bath by his father's failures, Gideon Belman finds himself stranded on Ormeshadow farm, an ancient place of chalk and ash and shadow. The land crests the Orme, a buried, sleeping dragon that dreams resentment, jealousy, estrangement, death. Or so the folklore says. Growing up in a house that hates him, Gideon finds his only comforts in the land. Gideon will live or die by the Orme, as all his family has.”

Much of the novella (or a short novel, if you want to call it that) remains rooted in the realist realm for the most part and could be defined as a kind of domestic drama. When Gideon arrives with his father John and mother Clare to the Orme farm, they stir up old resentments related to family responsibilities. John’s brother Thomas had been handling the farm and now finds himself feeling like he must take in his brother’s family. Complicating matters is the fact that it’s clear that Thomas, who is already married (to Maud) with three children, possesses a sexual chemistry with Clare, so we’re watching these dynamics simmer beneath their interactions. Here, I will provide my requisite spoiler warning, so look away now if you don’t want to discover too much about the text.

One of the pivotal plot points is when Gideon’s father is found dead; the circumstances are unclear. It could have been a suicide or he could have been pushed off a cliff face, but the point is that John’s death catalyzes other problematic developments. Gideon is forced to give up his schooling, must live under the hawkish gaze of Thomas. The conclusion to the story had me a little bit confused. Sharma leaves enough ambivalence that the folktales related to the dragon mythology and a buried treasure remain still a little bit hazy. Certainly, Gideon’s position changes drastically but where Sharma falters, at least in my opinion, is in the connection between the dragon mythology and Gideon himself. The nature of this kind of bond seemed crucial to Gideon’s survival, yet his fate seems to run in another direction entirely. My reading is presupposing a more literal understanding of the plot points, but alas, I have no one yet to discuss the work with. Suffice it to say that Sharma’s prose is perfectly pointed and stylistically precise to the gothic dimensions of the novella.

For more, and to buy the book, go here.

Review Author: Stephen Hong Sohn
Review Editor: Gnei Soraya Zarook

If you have any questions or want us to consider your book for review, please don’t hesitate to contact us via email!
Prof. Stephen Hong Sohn at ssohnucr@gmail.com
Gnei Soraya Zarook, PhD Student in English, at gzaro001@ucr.edu

A Review of Rita Wong and Fred Wah’s beholden: a poem as long as the river (TalonBooks, 2018)

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A Review of Rita Wong and Fred Wah’s beholden: a poem as long as the river (TalonBooks, 2018)
By Stephen Hong Sohn

So, I’ve been super behind on poetry reviews; there’s a ton I’ve been meaning to write up, but it’s been a crazy, crazy year, full of crazy ups and downs. The lows have been really low, and the highs have been incredibly high. In the midst of all of it, I am still making time to read poetry. The thing is: I read a lot of poetry. The trouble is that reviewing poetry is just harder. It takes more energy for me, so I find myself always a little bit backlogged even after I read and re-read full collections. Wong and Wah’s co-written, co-designed long poem was just a wonderful reading experience.

Let’s let the official site provide some context for us, shall we?: “Comprising two lines of poetic text flowing along a 114-foot-long map of the Columbia River, this powerful image-poem by acclaimed poets Fred Wah and Rita Wong presents language yearning to understand the consequences of our hydroelectric manipulation of one of North America’s largest river systems. beholden: a poem as long as the river stems from the interdisciplinary artistic research project “River Relations: A Beholder’s Share of the Columbia River,” undertaken as a response to the damming and development of the Columbia River in British Columbia, Washington, and Oregon, as well as to the upcoming renegotiation of the Columbia River Treaty. Authors Fred Wah and Rita Wong spent time exploring various stretches of the river, all the way to its mouth near Astoria, Oregon. They then spent several months creating long poems along the Columbia, each searching for a language that evoked the complexities of our colonial appropriation of it. beholden was then assembled as a page-turning book that reproduces the two long poems as they respond to the meanderings of the river flowing two thousand kilometres through Canada, the United States, and the territories and reserves of Indigenous Peoples. Visual artist Nick Conbere then transferred this winding footprint into a monumental, 114-foot horizontal banner. beholden: a poem as long as the river “reads” the geographic, historical, political, and social dimensions of the Columbia River, literally and figuratively, proposing two contrasting kinds of attention. As both a stand-alone poem and an accompanying piece to the visual installation exhibited at various galleries, beholden represents a vital contribution to a larger dialogue around the river through visual art, writing, and public engagement.”

One of the elements that you lose directly from the reading experience is the size and scope of the 114-foot horizontal banner. This poem is in some sense a kind of palimpsest in that it is a different, perhaps a revision, of another cultural production. The multimedia installation could of course perhaps be read as a separate work altogether (especially given the authorship status of the visual artistry of the work). Even in the context of the printed page, the collaborative element was fascinating, as two long, unbroken (for the most part, besides the problem of pagination and the occasional entrapment of words as they crashed into each other, as multiple currents in the poetic system flowed together) poetic lines mediate not only the longer history of the river, but its vital impact on communities, both human and otherwise.

One of the most crucial paratexts for beholden is the dialogue between Wah and Wong that appears just after the long poem ends. The conversation is fascinating because it makes clear the intent behind the construction of the poem, its lengthier germination, its political influences, and aesthetic aspirations. Wong’s prognostications, in particular, are depressing, because she comes to wonder about whether or not there will be the right kinds of readers for the works that she, and others like her, produce. Wong and Wah have produced something that exists at the crucial juncture between activist rhetoric and avant-grade experimentation. The juxtaposition is what may prove to be a harder sell amongst general reading publics, who need to read poetic works such as this one.

The other element that I applaud is Wong and Wah’s willingness to delve into indigenous histories and cultures, well aware that their location of speaking cannot ultimately stand for native voices. The risk they take is something that Trinh T. Minh-ha’s calls “speaking nearby,” which is an attempt to avoid appropriative approaches to representation while still voicing concerns that affect particular groups and communities with whom one might not necessarily have a direct affiliation. It is in this sense that we should this productive, politically grounded, and aesthetically inventive work. We can also look yet again to Canada (and their amazing independent presses) for pushing the bounds of both representation and social justice issues, as they are depicted in print realms.

Buy the Book Here.

Review Author: Stephen Hong Sohn
Review Editor: Gnei Soraya Zarook

If you have any questions or want us to consider your book for review, please don’t hesitate to contact us via email!
Prof. Stephen Hong Sohn at ssohnucr@gmail.com
Gnei Soraya Zarook, PhD Student in English, at gzaro001@ucr.edu

A Review of Roma Tearne’s The Last Pier (Aardvark Bureau, 2019)

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A Review of Roma Tearne’s The Last Pier (Aardvark Bureau, 2019)
By Stephen Hong Sohn

So, I don’t want to reveal all my secrets, but I was able to get a copy of Roma Tearne’s The Last Pier (Aardvark Bureau, 2019) before it was officially out. I saved it for a night when I wanted to read something immersive. For those of you who haven’t had the chance to feast your reading eyes on Tearne’s work, you must immediately get Mosquito and Bone China, two of my literature favorites. In any case, before I get any further, I’m going to issue my requisite spoiler warning, as I begin with some big reveals right away because I want to deal with my three quibbles with this novel first.

Okay, so here are some minor critiques, where I focus on the tiny bads before the ginormous good that is this epic, atmospheric novel.

(1) Aardvark Bureau’s page quality and margins are just too small. I want to write with a heftier pen, but it will smudge or rip the pages, and the margins are TINY! I can’t even put one of those thumb print post-it notes at the edge! *sadface*

(2) I wanted to know more about Cecily Maudsley in between the two major temporal periods (prior to WWII and then the late 60s) that are being presented in the novel. Part of the issue here is Tearne’s choice to use an intimate, limited third person narration, who follows Cecily so closely that we’re only really allowed to think about what she is thinking about or trying to avoid thinking about. Thus, Cecily is less interested in what’s gone on with herself since the late 1930s and early 40s, so we don’t get too much of her life after that point. Certainly, Cecily herself is kind of like a living ghost, so perhaps she doesn’t even think that she’s been doing anything of note.

(3) I was torn by Carlo’s reappearance in the final arc of the book. On the one hand, I wanted him to show up. It presents readers with the possibility that there could be something good, even great, from that pre-WWII period to have survived (relatively) unscathed, but the wrap up is so quick, I was hoping for something a little bit more substantive. Again, though, in this fictional world, you can’t expect anything too uplifting. It’s basically a naturalist novel wrapped up in a disintegrative family saga.

So, now let me go back to the major overarching elements: the novel is an intriguing mash-up of a semi-whodunit, a spy narrative, the World War II narrative, and the family (families) saga. The families at the center are the Maudsleys and the Molinellos. Early on, readers discover that Rose Maudsley, though just a teenager, is dead. Cecily, Rose’s younger sister, is the one people indirectly blame, but readers are wondering: why?! This very question is the one that Tearne keeps close to her vest; she doesn’t reveal the intricacies of the chain reaction that results in Rose’s death until the final fifty or so pages. The payoff is well worth it, partly because Tearne is patiently portraying Cecily’s melancholic life and the fact that Cecily’s memory of the events leading up to and including Rose’s death are colored by her somewhat inaccurate, child-like perspective. We can’t quite get to the reveal because Cecily can’t figure it out herself, and our limited third does not, I would argue, know what’s gone on.

The cast of characters that surround Cecily and Rose, include their parents (Selwyn and Agnes), their Aunt Kitty, their older brother Joe, and their residence (The Palmyra House). Their family is intimately linked to an Italian immigrant family: Mario and Anna are at the head; they have a number of sons, including the youngest named Carlo and a daughter named Franca. Joe and Franca engage in a fledgling romance, while Carlo entertains some flirtations with Rose. Cecily looks on with envy because Cecily has a crush on Carlo. The other complication is a farm hand named Bellamy who also is engaging in some dalliances with Rose. When Robert Wilson, a purported surveyor, comes to their town of Bly, Tearne introduces the surveillance element. It’s pretty clear that he’s there in relation to national security, but we don’t understand what it is he is exactly trying to find out. The surveillance theme is mirrored by Cecily, because she has a habit of eavesdropping. As the War looms ever closer, the level of suspicion rises, leaving readers wondering which characters are involved in perhaps some more nefarious dealings.

The late 60s narrative is the diegetic present of the novel. Cecily has returned to The Palmyra House after having left for many years; the residence has been in a sort of fallow state since her mother Agnes died. Readers eventually discover that Cecily’s father, Selwyn, is alive, though in prison. Cecily’s return to Bly, and the Last Pier (the location where a building burned and Rose perished) is one that raises the hackles of townsfolk. She’s been tainted by what occurred just before World War II, but what exactly happened? So, hold on to your seats folks! What readers eventually discover is that Selwyn’s prison sentence is due to espionage; he’s a spy for Germany! When Selwyn suspects that he’s about to be found out, he goes to the building located near The Last Pier to burn it down and all the documents along with it. What he doesn’t realize is that his daughter is inside, having hoped to meet Robert Wilson there! The only reason why Selwyn thought that his cover was blown (which it was, but not in the way he expected) was because Cecily tells Selwyn that Rose has gone off with Captain Pinky (Wilson’s nickname) and that Pinky’s trying to get Rose to be involved somehow in espionage. This information is not quite accurate, but the damage is done.

By the time Selwyn and everyone else has figured out what’s actually happened, Rose has died in the fire, Selwyn’s been found out (due to information likely provided to Wilson by Aunt Kitty), and Cecily has been indirectly blamed for Rose’s death for having suggested to Selwyn that Rose was involved in espionage. Certainly, Wilson was using Rose for any information that she might have given him, but Wilson did not expect Rose to fall in love with him. In any case, the chain reaction is even more complicated precisely because of various love affairs going on between the Maudsleys and the Molinellos. Selwyn only married Agnes because he didn’t figure out that he was truly in love with Kitty until it was too late. Agnes, feeling ignored, eventually turns to Mario’s brother Lucio for affection and love. Eventually Selwyn realizes he cannot continue the affair with Kitty, but the termination of this relationship is one that reveals how much Kitty knows of Selwyn’s espionage duties and the fact that she’s likely to have betrayed him.

But the biggest reveal Tearne leaves is in relation to genealogy. Cecily’s biological mother is, in fact, Kitty. Tearne’s biggest trump card is perhaps the most tragic of the entire novel, because it is evident that Agnes, though far from being the perfect parent, nevertheless went above and beyond her duty to treat Cecily like she was, in fact, her biological daughter. Cecily’s realization that her actual biological mother did not seem to care for her and perhaps even held an active enmity toward her for being a favorite of Selwyn recasts her entire time as a Maudsley. Of course, the tragedy of this novel is not limited to the Maudsleys. Indeed, one of the most chilling aspects that the novel delves into are the internment camps that Italian immigrants were forced to relocate to in England.

Eventually, Mario, Lucio, and the elder sons who were born in Italy and therefore not English citizens are released, but their departure from the camp also coincides with their eventual deportation to Canada. During this period, their ship sinks; their lives are lost. Tearne bases her novel on historical events, and this sinking is a direct reference to the Arandora Star, which sank (with the eventual loss of 714 lives). The intertwining of the war and all of these associated events give Tearne’s work the epic texture we’ve come to associate with so many of her writings. The gravity and the political heft she achieves through this masterful negotiation of the domestic and the intimate, alongside the transnational and the ever-expansive, make The Last Pier more than worthy of your reading time.

Buy the Book Here.

Review Author: Stephen Hong Sohn
Review Editor: Gnei Soraya Zarook

If you have any questions or want us to consider your book for review, please don’t hesitate to contact us via email!
Prof. Stephen Hong Sohn at ssohnucr@gmail.com
Gnei Soraya Zarook, PhD Student in English, at gzaro001@ucr.edu

A Review of Taran Matharu’s The Chosen (Feiwel and Friends, 2019)

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A Review of Taran Matharu’s The Chosen (Feiwel and Friends, 2019)
By Stephen Hong Sohn

 

I sometimes say you can’t really beat a mystery plot, and Taran Matharu’s The Chosen begins with a great conceit. The main character Cade basically wakes up in a strange and alien world. What is he doing there? How did he get transported from a boarding school to a place where a strange creature is hunting him? How shall he survive? These questions animate the beginning and push the reader quite properly forward.

Let’s let the official page give us some more information: “The Chosen introduces the first book in the Contender trilogy, an epic young adult fantasy from Taran Matharu, author of the New York Times–bestselling Summoner series. Throughout history, people have vanished with no explanation. A group of teenagers are about to discover why. Cade is settling into a new boarding school, contemplating his future, when he finds himself transported to another realm. He soon discovers their new world is populated with lost remnants from the past: prehistoric creatures, ancient relics, and stranger still—people. Overwhelmed by his new surroundings, Cade has little time to adjust, for soon he and his fellow classmates are forced to become contenders in a brutal game, controlled by mysterious overlords. But who are these beings and why did they choose these teens? Cade must prepare for battle . . . because hiding is not an option. Fans of fantasy and LitRPG will welcome this new character and world from the author of the Summoner series.”

I’m always a bit disappointed by these overviews; they often have to reduce the complexity of the plot down to its barest elements. In this case, the description focuses too much on Cade as the protagonist. This novel was striking to me for its ambitious character-system. Eventually, Cade realizes that he’s been transported to this otherworldly place with a bunch of his classmates, who include Finch (the novel’s main antagonist and a definite bully), Gobbler, Yoshi, Spex, Eric, and Scott. Later on, they’ll combine forces with a field hockey team who have also mysteriously appeared in this place: Amber, Bea, Trix, and Grace. The field hockey team presents more questions for the boarding school teens because they seem confused about certain time-specific elements and later reveal that they think it’s 1985! Then there’s also the strangely, nonverbal Quintus, who seems to be someone from an even earlier time than everyone else.

When dinosaurs start appearing, you know there’s bound to be more trouble and the group must figure out how to regroup so that they can survive the game that they are being forced to play. Suffice it to say that I was confused by the ending and am hoping that it’s a bit of a misleading reveal, but what cannot be denied is Matharu’s ambition. After the very lively Summoner series, he did not rest on his laurels and went in a very new direction! I’ll be sure to pick up the second in the series, which is slated for a June 2020 release!

For more, and to buy the book, go here.

Review Author: Stephen Hong Sohn
Review Editor: Gnei Soraya Zarook

If you have any questions or want us to consider your book for review, please don’t hesitate to contact us via email!
Prof. Stephen Hong Sohn at ssohnucr@gmail.com
Gnei Soraya Zarook, PhD Student in English, at gzaro001@ucr.edu

A Review of Jade Sharma’s Problems (Coffee House Press, 2016)

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A Review of Jade Sharma’s Problems (Coffee House Press, 2016)
By Stephen Hong Sohn

I’ve been trying to catch up with as many Coffee House press books as possible, so this one came to the top of the list! I actually read about half of this book about three months ago, and then got caught up on so much work, I couldn’t come back to it until this summer. To put it bluntly, the read was pretty harrowing, so I didn’t mind a break. Before we move on to the text, I want to note that Jade Sharma passed away in July of 2019 at 39 years old. This page at Catapult where her friends and colleagues share their thoughts on her.

Let’s let the Coffee House Press official page give us some more context: “Dark, raw, and very funny, Problems introduces us to Maya, a young woman with a smart mouth, time to kill, and a heroin hobby that isn’t much fun anymore. Maya’s been able to get by in New York on her wits and a dead-end bookstore job for years, but when her husband leaves her and her favorite professor ends their affair, her barely-calibrated life descends into chaos, and she has to make some choices. Maya’s struggle to be alone, to be a woman, and to be thoughtful and imperfect and alive in a world that doesn’t really care what happens to her is rendered with dead-eyed clarity and unnerving charm. This book takes every tired trope about addiction and recovery, ‘likeable’ characters, and redemption narratives, and blows them to pieces.”

I loved the last line of this description: the term “likeable” is not what I’d call most of these characters. Caught in the depths of addiction, many of these characters simply revolve around the thing that they desperately crave: their next high. For Maya, the first half of the novel is really about her trying to find some balance between her addiction and living her life, but when her marriage to Peter ultimately falters, that seems to be the catalyst for her spiraling out of control. The “problems” of this novel are myriad, but one of the clearest ones is that there’s never a sense of where rock bottom actually is. At some point, she does end up in a rehabilitation center. You get the sense that finally, just finally, she may have kicked her addiction, but the novel’s conclusion sees her fall back into its grips.

Then, in the final pages—and your requisite spoiler warning is here—there seems to be yet another 180. You can’t help but be skeptical: given all of the ways that Maya has seemed unable to wrest herself free from addiction, has it really happened? Whatever the answer to this question, Sharma’s blunt, take-no-prisoners writing style is superbly positioned for this kind of character. There’s lots of other intriguing elements to this novel. For instance, Sharma takes the time to develop the very complicated boundaries of married life. Second, Maya engages in an extramarital affair with one of her professors—she, at one point, is interested in writing a novel. Though this relationship (not surprisingly) ends, she does develop an intriguing, though certainly flawed, friendship with this professor, who somehow manages to stay in touch with her despite her turbulent lifestyle. Sharma’s Problems is something certainly one could add to an Asian American literature course, especially ones that might be considering a topic like “bad” Asian Americans. Perhaps, the most productive intervention the novel does make is to undermine the predominant model minority narrative. A provocative, relentless novel.

Buy the Book Here.

Review Author: Stephen Hong Sohn
Review Editor: Gnei Soraya Zarook

If you have any questions or want us to consider your book for review, please don’t hesitate to contact us via email!
Prof. Stephen Hong Sohn at ssohnucr@gmail.com
Gnei Soraya Zarook, PhD Student in English, at gzaro001@ucr.edu