asianamlitfans | A Review of Tiffany Tsao’s The More Known World (AmazonCrossing, 2017).

A Review of Tiffany Tsao’s The More Known World (AmazonCrossing, 2017).

By Stephen Hong Sohn

Tiffany Tsao’s follow-up to The Oddfits, The More Known World, is finally here! Since this title is an Amazon related one, we’ll let that site provide us with the narrative description: “The Quest of the quirky Oddfits continues—and this time, beyond the Known World lies something unspeakable… Two years after Murgatroyd Floyd joined the Quest to understand and catalogue the wonders of the More Known World, the rash-prone, blue-eyed Oddfit starts having doubts about his exploratory skill. And while that’s enough to give his mentor, Ann Hsu, pause, it’s not what’s bringing the Quest to a grinding halt. Blame that on a series of murders that sends Ann and Murgatroyd to a strange new Territory to investigate. Cambodia-Abscond, awash in shades of red, can drive outsiders crazy. With its vermilion foliage, crimson trees, and garnet soil, it screams carnage. Fitting, considering that its settlers are a shady bunch with catastrophic histories who live in a society where no questions are asked, and the official language is silence. Fitting, too, that Cambodia-Abscond is where Ann’s recollections of her own nightmarish past seem to come crawling back out of the bloodwood. Apparently, there’s more to the More Known World than Ann and Murgatroyd expected. And if their Quest has a dark side, the two Oddfits have found it.”

This description gives us the basic set up to this narrative. Unfortunately, I did have a harder time getting immersed in this book, especially in comparison to the last one. There was something that felt more abstracted to me about The More Known World and its various absconds, so the challenge for me was to get a sense of what kind of space these characters were moving through and how it varied from our own. Tsao does have some intriguing creatures, such as the bovquitoes, which seem to be one of the main biological fauna of the absconds. The bovquitoes seem to be variations on mosquito species which have undergone forms of adaptive radiation. There is also an intriguing colonial and anthropological impulse to this text, as it becomes apparent that Ann and Murgatroyd have stumbled upon a group of people who seem to exist as some rough analogue to an “untouched” tribal population that is under threat by the Quest. Tsao’s analogy seems to find the most resonance in this colonial metaphor: just because the Quest is invested in exploration doesn’t mean that this process is somehow only solely good.

Another complication that this novel sets up is the process by which Oddfits are even recruited into The Quest in the first place. Though Oddfits would eventually find their abilities and their lives destroyed by living in the Known World, otherwise understood as our “reality,” their movement into the More Known World and the Quest requires them to relinquish their attachments to their human lives and their families. This fact becomes ever more important, as we get a stronger sense of why Ann is so tortured. Growing up, she was primed to become a pageant queen by her mother, who had ferociously doted on her. So, when Ann makes the catastrophic break for the Quest, that separation is itself that weighs heavily on her throughout the novel. Tsao’s development of Murgatroyd’s character retains his optimistic attitude, and his growing attachment to a character named Nutmeg is one of the highlights of this work. It remains yet to be seen whether or not there will be another installment in the Oddfits series, but the conclusion (which I have not spoiled completely) suggests that there will be more issues to discover and that the Quest is hardly over.

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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