A Review of Marie Lu’s Steelstriker (Roaring Brook, 2021)

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Written by Stephen Hong Sohn
Edited by Corinna Cape



One of the most anticipated releases for me this year has been Marie Lu’s Steelstriker (Roaring Brook, 2021), which brings us to the close of the duology that began Skyhunter. At the conclusion of Lu’s series, Lu offers up an acknowledgments page that begins with admitting that this duology is her darkest. I certainly agree, and I remember reading the first installment and feeling as though the darkness was fairly relentless, even as the characterization—something that Lu has always excelled at—remained first rate. The interplay between Talin and Red continues with Steelstriker.

Let’s let Macmillan’s marketing description get us moving: “As a Striker, Talin was taught loyalty is life. Loyalty to the Shield who watches your back, to the Strikers who risk their lives on the battlefield, and most of all, to Mara, which was once the last nation free from the Karensa Federation’s tyranny. But Mara has fallen. And its destruction has unleashed Talin’s worst nightmare. With her friends scattered by combat and her mother held captive by the Premier, Talin is forced to betray her fellow Strikers and her adopted homeland. She has no choice but to become the Federation’s most deadly war machine as their newest Skyhunter. Red is no stranger to the cruelty of the Federation or the torture within its Skyhunter labs, but he knows this isn’t the end for Mara – or Talin. The link between them may be weak, but it could be Talin and Red's only hope to salvage their past and safeguard their future. While the fate of a broken world hangs in the balance, Talin and Red must reunite the Strikers and find their way back to each other in this smoldering sequel to Marie Lu’s Skyhunter.”

The one drawback of these descriptions is that they have to streamline the plot so much that only the primary protagonists become central to the marketing! What I love about this text is that it’s really the side characters that bring up the stakes of the novel. Early on, Red and his allies are ambushed because Red’s psychic link with Talin ends up inadvertently alerting the Premier about their plans to commandeer a train that’s holding key prisoners. In that battle, two of Red’s allies—Adena and Aramin (who is Jeran’s partner)—are captured, while he and another character, Jeran, remain free. The capture of Adena and Aramin is crucial to the plot precisely because the rest of the novel involves Red and Talin trying to figure out how to get them out. Talin has her own complications, as she is basically under the lock and key of the Premier, forced to do his bidding partly because of the fact that the Premier is essentially holding Talin’s mother hostage. If Talin tries to disobey, the Premier will torture and even kill her mother. This kind of stranglehold is precisely why the novel is so dark. Talin, though we understand her sense of ethics and morals, often is forced into killing people she does not want to or engaging in actions she finds incredibly repugnant. To read alongside this kind of plot is definitely heavy and dark!

In any case, what I loved about the novel is the payoff: there’s a lot of people you don’t want to die, so Lu really has work cut out for her. So many characters are in incredibly dangerous situations, so the conclusion is really gratifying in the way that Lu gives so many of them incredible and rewarding forms of closure. If there is a minor critique I would make about the text, then it’s that I was hoping that the ghosts would be more prominent in this particular text. I had wondered more about the science behind the ghosts and whether or not there might be a way to reverse engineer what had gone on with those who had turned into ghosts. Otherwise, Lu’s text is always first rate.

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A Review of Alexandra Kleeman’s Something New Under the Sun (Hogarth, 2021)

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Written by Stephen Hong Sohn
Edited by Corinna Cape



I picked up Alexandra Kleeman’s Something New Under the Sun (Hogarth, 2021) with her first novel in mind, the strange and quirky You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine. Something New Under the Sun is likewise filled with its own idiosyncratic characters and off-kilter situations.

Let’s let the marketing description give us some information: “East Coast novelist Patrick Hamlin has come to Hollywood with simple goals in mind: overseeing the production of a film adaptation of one of his books, preventing starlet Cassidy Carter's disruptive behavior from derailing said production, and turning this last-ditch effort at career resuscitation into the sort of success that will dazzle his wife and daughter back home. But California is not as he imagined: Drought, wildfire, and corporate corruption are omnipresent, and the company behind a mysterious new brand of synthetic water seems to be at the root of it all. Patrick partners with Cassidy—after having been her reluctant chauffeur for weeks—and the two of them investigate the sun-scorched city's darker crevices, where they discover that catastrophe resembles order until the last possible second. In this often-witty and all-too-timely story, Alexandra Kleeman grapples with the corruption of our environment in the age of alternative facts. Something New Under the Sun is a meticulous and deeply felt accounting of our very human anxieties, liabilities, dependencies, and, ultimately, responsibility to truth.”

This novel primarily follows these two characters and their various exploits trying to unravel a kind of conspiracy afoot in relation to the film production. Why, for instance, does everyone drink WAT-R, a kind of stand-in for the real thing? WAT-R is only partially made of water, but is supposedly enhanced by various flavorings and additives. Somehow the producers seem to be huge investors in WAT-R and seem far more interested in certain returns than on anything related to the film. Kleeman’s deployment of this novel technology certainly moves Something New Under the Sun into the realm of science fiction.

But what I absolutely adored about Kleeman’s characterization is the journey that Cassidy Carter goes through from the start of the narrative to the end. I found her to be an emotionally complex character in way that often outshone Patrick, who originally seems to be the ostensible protagonist. For his part, Patrick originates as the reader’s center of identification. Like Patrick, we’re confused by the strangeness of the Hollywood types that populate the text and the glossy surface that we’re used to seeing concerning representations of Los Angeles. In this way, Kleeman is following in a long tradition of writers who have depicted the so-called City of Angels and complicated how we come to understand this location. Kleeman’s work offers its own way of thinking about Los Angeles in the COVID moment, with its emphasis on natural disasters, droughts, and fires.

The other subplot involves Patrick’s tenuous relationship to his wife (Alison) and child (Nora). They are staying at an eco-commune called Earthbridge. It would seem that Alison is someone ahead of her time in the sense that she already foresees the various disasters that are going to befall Americans. But Alison’s retreat into the commune effects little change, which is part of the larger novel’s problem. What are we to do about these various issues related to climate, drought, and the living conditions that are rapidly changing how we live and how we can thrive? The bleakness of this novel is that we get very little in the way of answers. The increasingly dystopian nature of this concluding arc was, in my opinion, disappointing, but Kleeman is an exceptionally talented prose writer. Her words spark off the page and give truly dynamic weight to her characters and the various plots.

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A Review of C. Pam Zhang’s How Much of These Hills is Gold (Riverhead Books, 2020)

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Written by Stephen Hong Sohn
Edited by Lina Jiang



I’m not going to lie. I had a couple of false starts with C. Pam Zhang’s How Much of These Hills is Gold (Riverhead Books, 2020). The prose is absolutely stunning and carries this novel forward up until the bittersweet end. Let’s let the marketing description give us some context: “An electric debut novel set against the twilight of the American gold rush, two siblings are on the run in an unforgiving landscape—trying not just to survive but to find a home. Ba dies in the night; Ma is already gone. Newly orphaned children of immigrants, Lucy and Sam are suddenly alone in a land that refutes their existence. Fleeing the threats of their western mining town, they set off to bury their father in the only way that will set them free from their past. Along the way, they encounter giant buffalo bones, tiger paw prints, and the specters of a ravaged landscape as well as family secrets, sibling rivalry, and glimpses of a different kind of future. Both epic and intimate, blending Chinese symbolism and reimagined history with fiercely original language and storytelling, How Much of These Hills Is Gold is a haunting adventure story, an unforgettable sibling story, and the announcement of a stunning new voice in literature. On a broad level, it explores race in an expanding country and the question of where immigrants are allowed to belong. But page by page, it's about the memories that bind and divide families, and the yearning for home.”

Zhang’s style is really all her own, and the relationship between the two siblings, Sam and Lucy, possesses a rawness that is as appropriate to their personal connection as it is to the landscape that they must survive. The novel basically opens with Sam and Lucy trying to find a place to bury their Ba. Through key anachronic sequences, we get a larger sense of what brought Sam and Lucy to this point. Most prominently, we discover that their father, Ba, has an incessant drive to prospect, to gamble, and to hope for a more stable future. Of course, given their status as Chinese Americans, they face considerable discrimination and barely eke out a sustainability living. The tenuousness of this future eventually takes an incredible toll, fracturing the family and eventually leading to Ba’s death. Despite his passing, the two try to make their way through the West. Eventually, the two part ways, with Lucy making a new life as Lucinda. She makes friends with the rich daughter of a prospector, only to discover that Sam has returned to town, upending the anonymity that Lucy had cultivated. Ultimately, the story is about Lucy and Sam’s enduring connection, and their desire to support each other, even as the odds always seem stacked against them. The conclusion takes Lucy and Sam to the City, a kind of fictionalized San Francisco, where they hope to gain passage to another land, somewhere that might be more welcoming of all of their social differences. Where Zhang leaves us is certainly not the Hollywood ending we might have desired, but it strikes as all the more appropriate given the harshness of the land, and the times in which they live. An exceptional debut.

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