asianamlitfans | Mar. 19th, 2020

Mar. 19th, 2020

A Review of Erin L. Schneider’s Summer of Sloane (Disney-Hyperion, 2016).

By Stephen Hong Sohn

So, I had a really conflicted reading reaction to Erin L. Schneider’s debut novel Summer of Sloane. The titular Sloane is our first person protagonist, and we’ll let B&N provide us with a summary: “Warm Hawaiian sun. Lazy beach days. Flirty texts with her boyfriend back in Seattle. These are the things seventeen-year-old Sloane McIntyre pictured when she imagined the summer she'd be spending at her mom's home in Hawaii with her twin brother, Penn. Instead, after learning an unthinkable secret about her boyfriend, Tyler, and best friend, Mick, all she has is a fractured hand and a completely shattered heart. Once she arrives in Honolulu, though, Sloane hopes that Hawaii might just be the escape she needs. With beach bonfires, old friends, exotic food, and the wonders of a waterproof cast, there's no reason Sloane shouldn't enjoy her summer. And when she meets Finn McAllister, the handsome son of a hotel magnate who doesn't always play by the rules, she knows he's the perfect distraction from everything that's so wrong back home. But it turns out a measly ocean isn't nearly enough to stop all the emails, texts, and voicemails from her ex-boyfriend and ex-best friend, desperate to explain away their betrayal. And as her casual connection with Finn grows deeper, Sloane's carefree summer might not be as easy to come by as she'd hoped. Weighing years of history with Mick and Tyler against their deception, and the delicate possibility of new love, Sloane must decide when to forgive, and when to live for herself.”

This summary is quite comprehensive, but I do have to provide some basic spoilers to fill in a major gap: Sloane’s heartbroken because her best friend Mick ended up sleeping with her boyfriend Tyler. Mick also gets pregnant on top of that and plans on keeping the baby, so Sloane’s trip to Hawaii to connect back with her mother and with her friends that live there really do provide the right kind of escape, for a time. There is a kind of compulsory heterosexuality to this young adult fiction, which can become cloying, especially given the sea change I’ve seen in this genre over the depictions of teenagers from so many different backgrounds, but Schneider’s concluding arc shifts us further away from the many romantic triangles that pop up to meditate upon questions of forgiveness, blame, and guilt.

The other element that’s central for communities here is Sloane’s complicated ethnoracial background, because she definitely identifies as a mixed ethnic individual, even as both she and her twin brother might look phenotypically white. The novel doesn’t tend to explore this angle as much as it could have because of the focus on romance and friendships, which is a bit of a bummer given the ethnic diversity found in Hawaii, so that was another element that I found to be somewhat lackluster. Nevertheless, Schneider is well aware of certain formula elements of the young adult fiction, especially with respect to romance, so there will be much for fans of this genre with respect to core themes and issues.

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Review Author: Stephen Hong Sohn
Review Editor: Leslie J. Fernandez

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
Leslie J. Fernandez, PhD Student in English, at lfern010@ucr.edu

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A Review of Kevin Kwan’s China Rich Girlfriend (Knopf Doubleday, 2015).

By Stephen Hong Sohn

So, I had some definite trouble getting through Kevin Kwan’s China Rich Girlfriend, which is his sequel to Crazy Rich Asians. We’ll let B&N do some reviewing duties for us: “On the eve of her wedding to Nicholas Young, heir to one of the greatest fortunes in Asia, Rachel should be over the moon. She has a flawless Asscher-cut diamond from JAR, a wedding dress she loves more than anything found in the salons of Paris, and a fiancé willing to sacrifice his entire inheritance in order to marry her. But Rachel still mourns the fact that her birthfather, a man she never knew, won't be able to walk her down the aisle. Until: a shocking revelation draws Rachel into a world of Shanghai splendor beyond anything she has ever imagined. Here we meet Carlton, a Ferrari-crashing bad boy known for Prince Harry-like antics; Colette, a celebrity girlfriend chased by fevered paparazzi; and the man Rachel has spent her entire life waiting to meet: her father. Meanwhile, Singapore's It Girl, Astrid Leong, is shocked to discover that there is a downside to having a newly minted tech billionaire husband. A romp through Asia's most exclusive clubs, auction houses, and estates, China Rich Girlfriend brings us into the elite circles of Mainland China, introducing a captivating cast of characters, and offering an inside glimpse at what it's like to be gloriously, crazily, China-rich.”

So, this plot summary gives us a great idea of Kwan’s writerly goal: to show us how fabulous it is to be China-rich. Many of the Singaporean characters in this novel are not China-rich, meaning that they have boatloads of money, but aren’t necessarily in that super elite strata. If the Singaporean elites in the last book were the top of the top, Kwan shows up how high the top actually can extend. Part of the point here is that Kwan is playing around with the Chinese diaspora and its many variations, social classes, and formations. At the same time, while reading this novel, the reader must navigate Kwan’s shifting third person narratorial tonality, which consistently moves between ironic/ satirical, on the one hand, and fawning/ sycophantic, on the other. Readers are meant to take pleasure in but also find these cultures to be comical: we’re supposed to desire the lifestyle while somehow also denigrate its excesses. This kind of dissonance can get tiring, especially when the characters themselves seem to be window dressings to the extravagant lifestyle that Kwan wants to ensure is authentically represented. I have no doubt that all of the haute couture handbags and designer labels actually exist, but much of this rarefied culture was lost on me.

Rachel, who I found refreshing for her “middle-class” background is blandified in this particular book, as she’s carted off throughout China from one luxury location to the next. Much of her character is reduced to squeals of pleasure at [insert X luxurious location or item here]. If there is a plotline that Kwan does not meddle tonally with, it’s the domestic family and courtship plots. Rachel’s marriage to Nick Young is the source of consternation to multiple families, despite the fact that she is well educated, seems pleasant enough, and actually loves her husband-to-be. It is only when Rachel’s background is revealed to include Chinese economic royalty that she becomes “worthy” to her soon-to-be in-laws, but this new background generates only more problems because she is seen to tarnish her biological family’s reputation. Rachel is now an out-of-wedlock love child, who may be seen as a competitor to a massive inheritance. In this sense, Kwan’s novel has much more in line with some Victorian courtship and marriage plots, but without the Austenian narrator’s ability to generate sympathy for our heroine. In this case, Rachel cannot be considered a woman on the edges of the landed gentry: she’s smack dab in the middle of gobs and gobs of money.

The other, perhaps stronger storyline is Astrid Leong’s issue with her husband. It becomes apparent that she cannot “stand by her man,” because he’s constantly riding a wave of insecurity due to the fact that he feels she is always looking down on him because he “only” comes from self-made billionaire money. But, as is the case with Rachel’s storyline: eventually, at least for me, the exigencies of the super rich not only become comical, but often absurd and profanely so. Though Kwan revels in the mixture of comic and excessive, I did not like ending my own reading experience in a hybrid mode of hate-laughing characters. Nevertheless, as the cover illustrations serve to show, this novel also does function within the broader mode of Chiclit, and I will not fault Kwan for going full throttle in this genre convention mode: romance, designer labels, and inheritances are all on the line here. Commence the drama.

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A Review of Lygia Day Peñaflor’s Unscripted Joss Byrd (Roaring Book Press, 2016).

By Stephen Hong Sohn

Targeted for middle grade readers, Lygia Day Peñaflor’s debut, Unscripted Joss Byrd, explores the life of a preteen movie star. The titular Joss Byrd is on a shoot in Montauk with her single mother Viva. She’s struggling to commit new scripts to memory, especially because of continual re-writes. At the same time, we immediately begin to see how much pressure Joss Byrd has on her young shoulders because she’s the “cash cow” for her family, so much so that her mother has already squandered a considerable amount of Joss’s earnings in a failed venture. But all is not well with Joss: she doesn’t always feel up for doing movies, and she needs to find a more productive way to memorize lines. Further still, she finds her older co-star on the movie (a man named Rodney who is a method actor) to be detestable and slimy. Fortunately, Joss is able to make a friend in her youthful co-star, Chris, who is playing her older brother in the movie.

The movie itself is a biopic based upon the director Terrance’s life. Complications begin to arise because Viva is having a sexual relationship with the director, despite the fact that he is married. Further still, Joss begins to realize that the movie shoot is encroaching on the lives of the locals, who cannot use specific beaches to surf or hang out. Joss is definitely caught in the middle, but she begins to find her way, especially with the help of a tutor named Damon, who enables her to memorize her lines with more efficiency. Her developing friendship with Chris is another stabilizing force.

Though Peñaflor’s debut has much going for it, especially with its insider-type look into the life of a child actor, the story itself was uneven. It was especially difficult to find any redeemable value in Joss’s mother. Peñaflor is forced to find a way to make Viva likable, but does not provide enough of a back story to support the major pivot that the conclusion makes. If anything, that particular character makes me worry about Joss Byrd well beyond the final pages. You wonder if she will find her way in a movie industry that seems so intent on exploiting her, on the one hand, and a mother who seems unable to engage her duties as a supportive parental guardian, on the other.

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A Review of Robin Ha’s Almost American Girl (Balzer + Bray, 2020).

By Stephen Hong Sohn

I absolutely ADORED this memoir, and I will be teaching it probably over and over again. First, THERE ARE ACTUAL PAGE NUMBERS! THANK THE GODS! After the trauma of reading Jeremy Jusay’s astounding, brilliant The Strange Ones, all I could think about when I opened this book was: “please, please let this book have page numbers so I can teach it.” There, those beautiful page numbers appeared like a miracle from the print production gods. Let’s let the official page at HarperCollins tell us what is going on with this equally astounding, brilliant book: “A powerful and moving teen graphic novel memoir about immigration, belonging, and how arts can save a life—perfect for fans of American Born Chinese and Hey, Kiddo. For as long as she can remember, it’s been Robin and her mom against the world. Growing up as the only child of a single mother in Seoul, Korea, wasn’t always easy, but it has bonded them fiercely together. So when a vacation to visit friends in Huntsville, Alabama, unexpectedly becomes a permanent relocation—following her mother’s announcement that she’s getting married—Robin is devastated. Overnight, her life changes. She is dropped into a new school where she doesn’t understand the language and struggles to keep up. She is completely cut off from her friends in Seoul and has no access to her beloved comics. At home, she doesn’t fit in with her new stepfamily, and worst of all, she is furious with the one person she is closest to—her mother. Then one day Robin’s mother enrolls her in a local comic drawing class, which opens the window to a future Robin could never have imagined.”

Wow, this memoir was just absolutely mind-bogglingly wonderful. I had intended only to crack it open, then finished it. I was so hyped up after I completed it, I cracked open another novel and almost finished that one too. Reading addiction is terrible, especially when it falls on “spring forward” of daylight savings. What you appreciate are the flourishes of the migrant experience that clarify how isolating and devastating it can be. Chuna is bookish, a little gender nonconforming, and introverted, so going to Hunstville, where she does not know the language, does not know any other Koreans than the family that she’s living with, and does not have many allies is a brutal transition. Chuna is re-christened Robin, but a change of the name does not necessarily make things easier. A Halloween venture is full of silences, as Robin struggles to understand her trick-or-treating partner’s monologues. Her new family has its own peculiar dynamics, with cousins and stepsiblings who do not work very hard to include her. Her own mother’s new relationship is soon on the rocks, and Robin cannot understand why they would give up their lives in Korea, when her mother had opened up a successful beauty salon, and they were living independently. Ultimately, what becomes clear is that this story is one about a mother’s fierce love for her daughter, one that also comes in the form of Western ideals of independent womanhood.

In Korea, still today, there are deep social stigmas attached to single mothers, so the graphic memoir ultimately details the kind of struggles that Robin’s mother had to negotiate just to get to the point where she was respected in her own community. A new life in the United States surely would have seemed ideal, even as it meant potentially giving up financial independence, if only for the possibility that they could live as a “normative” family unit. This message is one that Ha’s memoir makes clear. Even as the family dynamics that Robin’s mother pursues begins to crumble, Ha never falters in understanding why her mother made the choices she felt she had to. An extraordinary work.

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A Review of Rumaan Alam’s Rich and Pretty (Ecco, 2016).

By Stephen Hong Sohn

One night, after a particularly bad day not doing the revising thing, I picked up Rumaan Alam’s Rich and Pretty. Based upon general descriptions and the cover itself, I suspect that the novel was not unlike the Chicklit genre that we’ve seen come to prominence with titles like The Devil Wears Prada and Bridget Jones’s Diary. Alam’s novel does take some inspiration from these works, but diverges significantly especially in the narrative stylings. Alam employs a third person narrator that verges on stream of consciousness at times; this approach forces to do more work. You simply have to slow down and take more time to follow along. The plotting and associated events seem simple enough: Sarah and Lauren are besties. Sarah is the rich one; Lauren is the pretty one. Sarah is the one getting married; Lauren is the maid of honor. Sarah is dependable; Lauren is more impulsive. Despite their differences, they seemingly have maintained strong bonds since their youthful teen years. Sarah’s marriage does add some new wrinkles into the equation, as this event pushes both to reconsider their pasts together and what different life trajectories they’ve taken.

Of the two, Lauren certainly comes off as the more complicated and prickly of the pair: you can see that Lauren wields her beauty without much self-consciousness, but it allows her a level of agency that creates its own dilemmas. Men easily fall in love with her and pursue her, but she just as easily finds herself bored, even by their persistent devotion, their many talents, their dependable, above average love making, their dependable, above average good looks. Much of the novel thus finds its traction in why it is that Sarah ended up becoming such good friends with Lauren, this woman who seems slightly dissatisfied, yet ultimately comfortable with where her life has taken her. There is one particularly compelling moment that really sealed the deal for me as a reader, that made me understood Lauren’s power: Sarah had simply invested in a friendship in which she saw something indisputably elegant in someone else. In other words, Lauren became a kind of platonic curation, someone Sarah had handpicked to come into her world, a world of shopping at Barney’s and bachelorette parties on tropical islands.

To be sure, Sarah isn’t some vapid socialite, but her elite status is assured. She comes from lineage, whereas Lauren does not, but Sarah sees in her a beauty that will only get richer in time, and the novel seems to ask us: who doesn’t want to surround themselves with beautiful things, even as we try to work out larger, perhaps more weighty social problems? Lauren, who is beautiful, who attracts then beautiful men to her, and doesn’t even realize this gravitational pull, finds recognition and upward mobility in this friendship with Sarah. Sarah’s wedding, her unexpected pregnancy, all take a backseat to this philosophical, stream-of-conscious meditation on non-biological sisterhood, the families we create beyond the bounds of traditional kinships. Somehow, through all of the excesses of the novel, the many lavish dinners and bridal events, we wonder about how this alternative sisterhood will manage to last. Though the conclusion did seem somewhat anti-climactic, Alam’s careful rendering of this asymmetrical relationship is no doubt a page-turner.

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A Review of Samra Habib’s We Have Always Been Here: A Queer Muslim Memoir (Viking Canada, 2019)

By Stephen Hong Sohn

It’s sometimes difficult to get a hand on those North of the border publications but AALF made some friends there (thanks to A.M.), and now we’re catching up on some of those offerings. We’re starting with Samra Habib’s We Have Always Been Here: A Queer Muslim Memoir (Viking Canada, 2019), which immediately had me at the subtitle! Here is the official book description: “How do you find yourself when the world tells you that you don't exist? Samra Habib has spent most of her life searching for the safety to be herself. As an Ahmadi Muslim growing up in Pakistan, she faced regular threats from Islamic extremists who believed the small, dynamic sect to be blasphemous. From her parents, she internalized the lesson that revealing her identity could put her in grave danger. When her family came to Canada as refugees, Samra encountered a whole new host of challenges: bullies, racism, the threat of poverty, and an arranged marriage. Backed into a corner, her need for a safe space--in which to grow and nurture her creative, feminist spirit--became dire. The men in her life wanted to police her, the women in her life had only shown her the example of pious obedience, and her body was a problem to be solved. So begins an exploration of faith, art, love, and queer sexuality, a journey that takes her to the far reaches of the globe to uncover a truth that was within her all along. A triumphant memoir of forgiveness and family, both chosen and not, We Have Always Been Here is a rallying cry for anyone who has ever felt out of place and a testament to the power of fearlessly inhabiting one's truest self.”

This memoir is absolutely extraordinary in terms of how it narrates the development of Habib’s activist, feminist, and LGBTQIA political engagements. While she is eventually able to leave a problematic arranged marriage, her next relationship is perhaps equally tendentious, as she tries to figure out how to move forward with her life. She eventually finds a community that includes feminists, queers, artists, and activists, and she cultivates a stronger relationship with her inner sense of purpose and independence. As she comes to terms with her own sexual identity, she also begins to realize that her family, which at first seemed resistant to her exploration of her queerness, is starting to understand and embrace who she is. Perhaps, my favorite revelation in this memoir concerned Habib’s work toward making more visible queer Muslim communities. She at first faces some resistance, as her contacts don’t always want to be the public face of such issues, but Habib (as she has been throughout the memoir) is ultimately relentless. It is this persistence, this desire to continue toward this sense of greater purpose that makes this memoir so inspiring. She eventually does go on to release this photo project, more of which can be read about here:

As a general note, the field of queer Asian North American literature at large is so much the better for this publication, as there remains much more to be explored for queer South Asian and queer Muslim American communities. The ending sequence of the memoir, which delve into Habib’s return to the faith, is exceptionally crucial simply as a mode by which to understand how religion and queerness, spirituality and sexuality, might find a place in one’s life.

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A Review of Tosca Lee’s A Single Light (Howard Books, 2019).

By Stephen Hong Sohn

So, I did a bad thing: I started writing this review probably weeks or perhaps even a month after finishing the novel. I frankly couldn’t put the second installment of The Line Between series down and wanted to know how it ended. I do recall that that night I thought, “okay, I will give myself an hour or so to read,” and three hours later, I was still reading and refusing to go to bed! EEK!

In any case, I know I’ve said before that Tosca Lee is a master at building moment and propelling a plot forward, but let’s let the Howard Books official description get us started first: “Six months after vanishing into an underground silo with sixty others, Wynter and Chase emerge to find the area abandoned. There is no sign of Noah and the rest of the group that was supposed to greet them when they emerged—the same people Wynter was counting on to help her locate the IV antibiotics her gravely ill friend, Julie, needs in order to live. As the clock ticks down on Julie’s life, Wynter and Chase embark on a desperate search for medicine and answers. But what they find is not a nation on the cusp of recovery thanks to the promising new vaccine Wynter herself had a hand in creating, but one decimated by disease. What happened while they were underground? With food and water in limited supply and their own survival in question, Chase and Wynter must venture further and further from the silo. Aided by an enigmatic mute named Otto, they come face-to-face with a society radically changed by global pandemic, where communities scrabble to survive under rogue leaders and cities are war zones. As hope fades by the hour and Wynter learns the terrible truth of the last six months, she is called upon once again to help save the nation she no longer recognizes—a place so dark she’s no longer sure it can even survive. Fast-paced and taut, A Single Light is a breathless thriller of nonstop suspense about the risks of living in a world outside the safe confines of our closely-held beliefs and the relationships and lives that inspire us.”

Lee’s got a lot to do with this particular novel because there are at least two plots that require solving: the first is related to Julie, who desperately needs antibiotics. This particular narrative strand moves the story forward once Chase, Wynter, and some of the others emerge from the silo. This portion is probably one of the best parts of the novel because readers are absolutely tickled about finding out what’s been going on since they’ve essentially been on lockdown. The disappointment is that the landscape is not unlike many post-apocalyptic fictions (if you’re familiar with this terrain). Society has essentially broken down; there are some wayward, ethically good people but there are also charismatic leaders with very shifty morals. In this kind of environment, getting the antibiotics once needs is a little bit more complicated. The larger scale problem is related to the fact that there seems to be a possible way to develop a vaccine or a treatment for the disease that has ravaged the United States. The final sections of the novel thus shift the stakes to this higher dimension where Wynter’s cooperation is necessary to make sure some sort of cure can be developed.

One of the main things that I will take away from reading this series is that I didn’t expect it to end based upon where it began: Wynter was a fervent follower in a cult. By the conclusion, she’s really become a heroine with incredible survival skills, willing to fight for what she believes in. In some sense, Lee must have been reading up on her young adult paranormal romance protagonists, as this novel does follow the tried-but-seemingly-always successful formula: a somewhat ordinary person comes to be thrown into an extraordinary situation and must come up against a great evil, all the while still managing to snag the properly handsome romantic lead. Fans of the genre will of course gobble this story up, and then be waiting for whatever Tosca Lee is cooking up next.

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A Review of Tosca Lee’s The Line Between (Howard Books, 2019).

By Stephen Hong Sohn

Well, it’s been a minute since I’ve been able to finish a full novel. I feel like I’m in the middle of about five right now. It’s a really bad habit. My copy of Tosca Lee’s The Line Between (Howard Books, 2019) arrived recently, and though I knew I was supposed to finish some other books, I dove right in. I’ve been a fan of Tosca Lee’s work for quite some time. She knows how to write for plot. There’s always a great hook to the storyline. The Line Between is no different. The opening brings up dead pigs and strange slaughters, then it shifts over to a narrative concerning a cult. Our narrator is Wynter Roth, and she’s just been exiled from The New Earth cult. We’re not quite sure why, but we know she doesn’t really want to go, despite what are not ideal circumstances in that community. As she adjusts to life outside the cult, weird things are happening. A bunch of individuals have dead due to what seems to be rapid early onset dementia. They don’t know what’s going on, and they don’t know if it’s contagious, but… of COURSE it is, since that’s the whole point of moving the plot forward. So, folks, we have our outbreak narrative.

I didn’t expect this thing to entirely come together. Something about cults, disease coming from the permafrost, and an outbreak narrative, didn’t necessarily seem to gel together (at least at first). Eventually though the cult aspect actually seemed quite logical given where this novel ends up going. Here is where I will pause for my spoiler warning, reminding you that you should not read on unless you want to be spoiled. So, the cult aspect is something that seems right for this novel precisely because Wynter is heading toward a plot resolution that necessarily involves a potential and radical reformulation of community dynamics due to the outbreak itself. The kind of isolation that Wynter exists within while in the cult has some relational connection to the level of sequestration she then faces while attempting to find a cure for REOD (rapid early onset dementia).

Lee has her hands full because she also decides to throw in a romance plot. I tend to find these elements to be less compelling in novels involving what seem to be end-of-the-world scenario, but I suppose there must be multiple forms of hope that are possible in such fictional worlds. When the novel ends, there’s already a snippet provided revealing that there will be more to the story, so I can’t wait for the next installment! Perhaps, what’s most impressive is the way Lee continually pushes her own aesthetic approaches. She has published a number of what I can only call religious “counterfictions,” and then moved on to a series that reimagined the descendants of the Countess of Bathory (infamously known as one of the most prolific serial killers). Now she’s given us this outbreak narrative, so she continues to explore these new genres. I haven’t had a chance to read her co-authored works with Ted Dekker, so there’s always more to catch up on.

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A Review of Vikram Paralkar’s Night Theater (Catapult, 2020).

By Stephen Hong Sohn

Here, I’m reading one of the debuts I was most excited about: Vikram Paralkar’s, Night Theater (Catapult, 2020). I recall reading Paralkar’s prior publication, The Afflictions, which was a kind of fictional encyclopedia that I found very intriguing in terms of both content and form. I could see that Paralkar was already a kind of writer seeking to experiment. He continues to push himself with his debut novel Night Theater. Let’s let the official site give us a basic description: “A surgeon flees a scandal in the city and accepts a job at a village clinic. He buys antibiotics out of pocket, squashes roaches, and chafes at the interventions of the corrupt officer who oversees his work. But his outlook on life changes one night when a teacher, his pregnant wife, and their young son appear. Killed in a violent robbery, they tell the surgeon that they have been offered a second chance at living if the surgeon can mend their wounds before sunrise. So begins a night of quiet work, ‘as if the crickets had been bribed, during which the surgeon realizes his future is tied more closely to that of the dead family than he could have imagined. By dawn, he and his assistant have gained knowledge no mortal should have. In this inventive novel charged with philosophical gravity and sly humor, Vikram Paralkar takes on the practice of medicine in a time when the right to health care is frequently challenged. Engaging earthly injustice and imaginaries of the afterlife, he asks how we might navigate corrupt institutions to find a moral center. Encompassing social criticism and magically unreal drama, Night Theater is a first novel as satisfying for its existential inquiry as for its enthralling story of a skeptical physician who arrives at a greater understanding of life's miracles.”

I very much appreciated the stylistic and generic hybridity at play in this narrative, what this description calls “social criticism and magically unreal drama.” What you begin to realize is that the father of this family, a teacher, has more secrets than he is at first willing to reveal. I must provide a spoiler warning at this point. Eventually, the teacher begins to let the doctor in on more secrets from the afterlife, and we discover that the afterlife is, perhaps, just as corrupt and obscure as real life can be. This revelation is probably the whole philosophical point of the novel: that there may be nothing more than a version of the life we are already in once we pass on into the great unknown, not something great or grand or even evil or diabolical… more of the same, just on a different plane of existence. The final arc does move in an unexpected direction, as the unborn child is extracted from her mother’s womb. Then, the family vanishes, and the doctor is left with this baby, who is not yet alive.

By the conclusion, though, something stirs, and we realize that the dead can give birth to live things. It is this kind of reversal that makes the novel so unexpectedly strange and intriguing. If there is another element to explore, it’s in the novel’s social critique of the medical field, especially as it unfolds in impoverished areas. The need for someone like the doctor is exceedingly great, but he is only forced to that part of the country because of a scandal. In this sense, the novel brings to mind the fact that those who are in the greatest of needs are often the ones who are given the least resources. The novel thus comes off as a meditation on the doctor’s ethos: what principles will he retain in the face of great challenges and how can he intervene to help those in distress, despite how little support he is given? Without many answers, the novel still finds a way to keep us in its speculative, philosophical thrall.

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Asian American Literature Fans

A Veritable Literary Feast

Mar. 19th, 2020

Mar. 19th, 2020

A Review of Erin L. Schneider’s Summer of Sloane (Disney-Hyperion, 2016).

A Review of Kevin Kwan’s China Rich Girlfriend (Knopf Doubleday, 2015).

A Review of Lygia Day Peñaflor’s Unscripted Joss Byrd (Roaring Book Press, 2016).

A Review of Robin Ha’s Almost American Girl (Balzer + Bray, 2020).

A Review of Rumaan Alam’s Rich and Pretty (Ecco, 2016).

A Review of Samra Habib’s We Have Always Been Here: A Queer Muslim Memoir (Viking Canada, 2019)

A Review of Tosca Lee’s A Single Light (Howard Books, 2019).

A Review of Tosca Lee’s The Line Between (Howard Books, 2019).

A Review of Vikram Paralkar’s Night Theater (Catapult, 2020).

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