A Review of Chandra Prasad’s Mercury Boys (Soho Teen, 2021)

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Written by Stephen Hong Sohn
Edited by Lina Jiang



I was an absolute fan of Chandra Prasad’s last publication, Damselfly, so Mercury Boys (Soho Teen, 2021) was definitely high on my to-read list! As usual, Prasad absolutely excels at the complicated social dynamics that define teen life. And, in keeping with her past publications, Prasad also mines the thorny ways in which teen life intersects with identities in development.

Let’s let the official marketing description do some work for us: “History and the speculative collide with the modern world when a group of high school girls form a secret society after discovering they can communicate with boys from the past, in this powerful look at female desire, jealousy, and the shifting lines between friendship and rivalry. After her life is upended by divorce and a cross-country move, 16-year-old Saskia Brown feels like an outsider at her new school—not only is she a transplant, but she’s also biracial in a population of mostly white students. One day while visiting her only friend at her part-time library job, Saskia encounters a vial of liquid mercury, then touches an old daguerreotype—the precursor of the modern-day photograph—and makes a startling discovery. She is somehow able to visit the man in the portrait: Robert Cornelius, a brilliant young inventor from the nineteenth century. The hitch: she can see him only in her dreams. Saskia shares her revelation with some classmates, hoping to find connection and friendship among strangers. Under her guidance, the other girls steal portraits of young men from a local college’s daguerreotype collection and try the dangerous experiment for themselves. Soon, they each form a bond with their own ‘Mercury Boy,' from an injured Union soldier to a charming pickpocket in New York City. At night, the girls visit the boys in their dreams. During the day, they hold clandestine meetings of their new secret society. At first, the Mercury Boys Club is a thrilling diversion from their troubled everyday lives, but it’s not long before jealousy, violence and secrets threaten everything the girls hold dear.” So, this description is quite detailed, but I would argue that the book isn’t Saskia’s alone. She makes friends with a group of teen girls, who all become the Mercury Boys Club. There’s Lila, another minority at her high school, and then there are two mean girls: Sara Beth and Paige. Finally, there’s Adrienne, who seems more reluctant to engage in the socially aggressive behavior that are the hallmarks of Sara Beth and Paige’s approaches to teen life.

I found this book both fascinating and frustrating at the same time. On the one hand, the speculative conceit was a very attractive way into the text, as the time portal provided by the mercury daguerreotypes was something extremely unique. On the other, I sometimes though that the stakes of this kind of time travel could have been explored even further. For Saskia, traveling to the past is complicated due to her biracial status. In other contexts, these temporal shifts create other problems. For instance, Lila is queer and her same-sex romance presents other possible problems. Finally (and perhaps most intriguingly), Adrienne finds herself in a past in which she must care for dying and maimed soldiers during the Civil War. Prasad’s focus on the aspect of romantic interest is simultaneously structured but also limiting. This narrative template provides a key connection between all of the major characters but circumscribes the use of daguerreotypes primarily by the ways in which each girl interfaces with their chosen object of affection, but I kept wondering about the other possibilities of time travel, whether or not the girls might have established other relationships and projects connected with past temporalities. Of course, the novel would have been entirely different but Prasad’s conception of the speculative terrain is so rich, I couldn’t help but wonder what else might have been in store. Despite my own personal viewpoints, I did find the novel immensely readable and appreciate, as always, Prasad’s nuanced engagements with teen culture and the perils within.

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A Review of Rajiv Mohabir’s Antiman: A Hybrid Memoir (Restless Books, 2021)

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Written by Stephen Hong Sohn
Edited by Lina Jiang



It’s been a minute since I covered books out of the brilliant Restless Books, but I was certain that I wanted to spend some time with one of their latest offerings: Rajiv Mohabir’s Antiman: A Hybrid Memoir. I’ve been a huge fan of Mohabir’s poetry, and we earlier covered one of Mohabir’s collections, so it’s always an interesting thing when a poet turns to a more prose-y form.

Let’s let the marketing description get us off the ground: “Growing up a Guyanese Indian immigrant in Central Florida, Rajiv Mohabir is fascinated by his family’s abandoned Hindu history and the legacy of his ancestors, who were indentured laborers on British sugarcane plantations. In Toronto he sits at the feet of Aji, his grandmother, listening to her stories and songs in her Caribbean Bhojpuri. By now Aji’s eleven children have immigrated to North America and busied themselves with ascension, Christianity, and the erasure of their heritage and Caribbean accents. But Rajiv wants to know more: where did he come from, and why does he feel so out of place? Embarking on a journey of discovery, he lives for a year in Varanasi, on the banks of the Ganges, perfecting his Hindi and Bhojpuri and tracing the lineage of his Aji’s music. Returning to Florida, the cognitive dissonance of confederate flags, Islamophobia, and his father’s disapproval sends him to New York, where finds community among like-minded brown activists, work as an ESL teacher, and intoxication in the queer nightlife scene. But even in the South Asian paradise of Jackson Heights, Rajiv feels like an outsider: ‘Coolie’; rather than Desi. And then the final hammer of estrangement falls when his cousin outs him as an ‘antiman’—a Caribbean slur for men who love men—and his father and aunts disown him. But Aji has taught Rajiv resilience. Emerging from the chrysalis of his ancestral poetics into a new life, he embraces his identity as a poet and reclaims his status as an antiman—forging a new way of being entirely his own.

Rapturous, inventive, and devastating in its critique of our own failures of inclusion, Antiman is a hybrid memoir that helps us see ourselves and relationships anew, and announces an exciting new talent in Rajiv Mohabir.” Mohabir’s memoir certainly revels in the hybrid aspect of the form. There is an obvious autoethnographic element, as Mohabir attempts to trace his familial background, one that is complicated by multiple diasporic movements. One of the most interesting aspects of the early half of the memoir is Mohabir’s predicament in India. He feels as though he must closet not only his queer background but also his mixed-caste background. Another formal hybridity occurs because of Mohabir’s focus on the interlingual valences of song. Interspersed throughout the prose tracks, we get songs in their original language as well as the occasional translations of them. Mohabir’s interest in music certainly reminds us of the poetic aspect of the text. Brilliant, honest, and moving.


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A Review of Chris McKinney’s Midnight, Water City (Soho Press, 2021)

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Written by Stephen Hong Sohn
Edited by Lina Jiang



Well, I didn’t expect Chris McKinney’s Midnight, Water City (Soho Press, 2021) to be the type of book published by Soho, which typically boasts a strong crime fiction catalogue. Certainly, this novel follows some generic expectations but it’s also set far into the future. Other reviews have called this novel a cyber-noir, which is a term I’ve only vaguely heard before but it seems very apt.

Let’s let the official marketing description do some work for us: “Year 2142: Earth is forty years past a near-collision with the asteroid Sessho-seki. Akira Kimura, the scientist responsible for eliminating the threat, has reached heights of celebrity approaching deification. But now, Akira feels her safety is under threat, so after years without contact, she reaches out to her former head of security, who has since become a police detective. When he arrives at her deep-sea home and finds Akira methodically dismembered, this detective will risk everything—his career, his family, even his own life—and delve back into his shared past with Akira to find her killer.

With a rich, cinematic voice and burning cynicism, Midnight, Water City is both a thrilling neo-noir procedural and a stunning exploration of research, class, climate change, the cult of personality, and the dark sacrifices we are willing to make in the name of progress.” This novel had so many twists and turns, my head was spinning, but what I love about the narrative is that the protagonist was highly flawed and has a complicated perspective. Akira Kimura is widely embraced by modern society all over the planet as a savior; she is in some sense deified when she is able to take out the asteroid. Yet, over the course of the narrative, we begin to peel back the layers behind Akira to find out exactly how complicated a person she was. For starters, she had twin daughters, one of whom she herself killed when she found it had a birth defect. The other daughter, though surviving, nevertheless bears incredible trauma not only from the loss of her sister but also from her upbringing.

So, at this point, I will provide my requisite spoiler warning, so that those who may not want such narrative details will now look elsewhere. So, as I was saying: This daughter, Ascalon (which is also the name of the scar that appears across the night sky where the asteroid was blasted) is crucial to the plot, as she seeks out a complicated form of revenge in which she could take the place of her mother. Ascalon knows that Akira would reach out to her former bodyguard, so Ascalon begins to play everyone in Akira’s life like pawns. Of course, our protagonist-detective is himself blinded to Akira’s own machinations, so the story becomes one in which we see how much mother and daughter are alike. I think the element that I struggled with the most was trying to figure out where I stood in relation to both Akira and Ascalon: were they sociopathic narcissists that could not see the damage that they produced? Their actions strike quite disparately against the narrator-protagonist, who still seeks to find justice amid the ruins of Akira’s many stratagems. Supposedly, this particular work is the first in a trilogy, and it will be interesting to see where McKinney moves with this novel. For those not in the know, McKinney is the author of several other novels primarily set in Hawaii, so it’s always exciting to see an author really push himself aesthetically. A thrilling yet dark dive into a futuristic noir!


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Review of My Sweet Girl by Amanda Jayatissa (Berkley, 2021)

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Written by Soraya Gnei Zarook
Edited by Lina Jiang



I’m always thrilled to read anything that has to do with Sri Lanka that isn’t marketed as a trauma text. So My Sweet Girl by Amanda Jayatissa, a psychological thriller, was a book I was really excited about. It took me a while to get into the story, which felt like it was dragging at the start. I found the main character, Paloma, kind of insufferable, with her inability to know what on earth is going on in her own life, but that was by design, I think. About halfway through the book, I became so curious about what was going on that I couldn’t put it down and finished it in that sitting.

The novel is set between Sri Lanka and San Francisco, USA, and begins with Paloma trying to hold things together after she finds Arun, to whom she is subletting a bedroom in her apartment, murdered. We find out that Arun has learned of a deep dark secret that Paloma has been keeping, but she finds him dead in the apartment before she can confront him about it. And then, just as soon as she discovers this, his body disappears and Paloma must figure out if she has gotten so intoxicated lately that she is now hallucinating, or if something more sinister is going on with respect to her past. We learn that Paloma is also the adopted daughter of a white American couple, who chose her while visiting an orphanage they sponsored in Sri Lanka.

That’s all I will say about the plot because as someone who doesn’t read psychological thrillers, I don’t know how to avoid spoilers. So, instead I will say what else I enjoyed about this lovely work. First off, I’m impressed at how much this novel reminded me of home and of childhood, of living in the US as a Sri Lankan, and also of so many other texts, all at the same time. There’s likely much more references than the ones I caught, but I thought of Jane Eyre, A Little Princess, and Jordan Peele’s 2019 film, Us.

Aside from these allusions, the most fascinating aspect of the storyline is how it illuminates issues around scarcity of resources. The girls in the orphanage go to absolutely desperate measures to make sure they have the best chance at getting chosen for adoption. The proprietors of the orphanage themselves take on harmful practices in order to secure funds from donors to keep the orphanage open and running. There is desperation at every layer, so that Paloma’s childhood memories, which seem on the surface to be about her and her best friend in the orphanage, are laced through with arguments that center around the desire to be adopted. Childhood friendships don’t get to be simple and unencumbered in a space like this, but are always tested under the weight of needing to survive, of knowing that whatever respite is there in the present is temporary. Love and family, in this world, become resources to be fought for also.

It might sound like I am taking a murder mystery book and making it about something more than what it is, but I don’t think so. The novel might read as *simply* a psychological thriller to folks who have lived lives of relative privilege/comfort and never had to think much about the availability and distribution of resources. But if you do live in, have lived in, or are familiar with what life looks like in places that have been exploited by colonial systems and where you are not part of the elite in those places, then these issues of scarcity and survival are not only true, but they are commonplace. We do not think about them twice. As wrong as they are, the decisions taken by those in charge at the orphanage become understandable to me. This acceptance, I think, becomes its own kind of horror, and the novel forces us to take time to reflect on that.

Overall, I’m impressed that Jayatissa has created an enjoyable read where every plot point gets moved along swiftly by things that are considered too serious to be enjoyable: colonial legacies, whiteness, capitalism, transracial adoption, racism and assimilation. To me, these are the real psychological and material horrors lying under the surface of each decision characters make in the text, and placing these issues just beneath the action, rather than draping them in melancholy at the center, is a brilliant move. I can see a reading of the ghosts and mirroring in the model as ways to think about mourning, melancholia, and trauma, but I was much more absorbed by the novel’s take on what survival looks like in the wake of violence. Survival is complicated, the novel reminds us, and even if we cannot root for the ways in which some choose to survive, they certainly make for entertaining and surprising villains.

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