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Written by Stephen Hong Sohn

Edited by Uttara Rangarajan

As a continuation of my speculative fiction palate cleansing reading (LOL), I pick up Youngmi Mayer’s I’m Laughing Because I’m Crying (Little, Brown and Company, 2024), which is a real departure from the other books I’ve read in terms of tone. I have to say: balancing the comedic with the dramatic is incredibly difficult, but Mayer manages to do it in a way that reminds me so much of the Korean American bestie who wants to keep it real with me. In any case, here is the marketing description: “It was a constant truism Youngmi Mayer’s mother would say threateningly after she would make her daughter laugh while crying. Her mother used it to cheer her up in moments when she could tell Youngmi was overtaken with grief. The humorous saying would never fail to lighten the mood, causing both daughter and mother to laugh and cry at the same time. Her mother had learned this trick from her mother, and her mother had learned this from her mother before her: it had also helped an endless string of her family laugh through suffering. In I’m Laughing Because I’m Crying, Youngmi jokes through the retelling of her childhood as an offbeat biracial kid in Saipan, a place next to a place that Americans might know. She jokes through her difficult adolescence where she must parent her own parents: a mother who married her husband because he looked like white Jesus (and the singer of The Bee Gees). And with humor and irreverence and full-throated openness, she jokes even while sharing the story of what her family went through during the last century of colonialism and war in Korea, while reflecting how years later, their wounds affect her in New York City as a single mom, all the while interrogating whiteness, gender, and sexuality. Youngmi jokes through these stories in hopes of passing onto the reader what her family passed down to her: The gift of laughing while crying. The gift of a hairy butthole. Because throughout it all, the one thing she learned was one cannot exist without the other. And like a yin and yang, this duality is reflected in this whip-smart, heart-wrenching, and disarmingly funny memoir told by a bright new voice with so much heart and wisdom.”

Mayer grows up in a really challenging milieu. She clearly loves and respects her parents, but they do make things difficult, and there is no question that Mayer’s departure on her own from Korea as a very young adult is partly based upon the instability of her home growing up. To become independent would mean to find the means to support herself without any of the complicated strings that might come with family. Indeed, it’s unclear to me if she has been in touch with any family members since coming to the United States. The early chapters of the memoir detail her itinerant life. Mayer, though born in the United States, is soon whisked off to many locations, including Korea and Saipan. She makes her way back to the United States, lands in Palo Alto at first, then heads up to San Francisco. These early sequences in America have a dark humor to them: she finds a good deal in a sublet in Treasure Island. She can’t believe her luck, until we all find out that she’s actually in a place filled with methamphetamine addicted residents. She eventually moves out (thankfully) and also eventually finds a measure of financial stability, all the while embarking on a life-changing relationship with Danny Bowien, who himself will find major success as a chef. There were points in this memoir where I wasn’t sure if I should be shocked or amused, but that’s part of the point of the title: that there’s a thin line often between what we find traumatic and what we find funny. Mayer makes the most of making those lines blur, emphasizing that the comedic is a palliative to the strange and often challenging obstacles that life throws our way. Mayer will end the memoir realizing that she has always wanted to be a stand-up comedian, and she ultimately lets go of all these things holding her back. She finds her most fulfillment at this stage in life, admitting that everything before seems primarily as an in-between, limbo space, where she has been sort of living life without a fully realized purpose. The concluding arc also has some pretty frank ruminations on new motherhood, including the revelatory moment that the body has these incredible capacities to help support the life of a developing living entity. Before reading this memoir, I hadn’t known much about Mayer’s stand-up career. There is something about this particular moment, where there are different levels of fame and social visibility, as we are atomized across media platforms. I’ll definitely be looking out for Mayer in the future.

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uttararangarajan

Written by Stephen Hong Sohn
Edited by Uttara Rangarajan

There’s a couple of new presses that have come out with the name Z at the beginning. There’s Zando and then there is Zibby! Zibby has already impressed with its initial slate of books, and Amy Lin’s Here After (Zibby, 2024) is a testament to the incredible acquisitional and editorial work that their team is doing. What a GUT PUNCH this memoir is. You’ll see why after you read the marketing description: “Amy Lin never expected to find a love like the one she shares with her husband, Kurtis, a gifted young architect who pulls her toward joy, adventure, and greater self-acceptance. But on a sweltering August morning, only a few months shy of the newlyweds' move to Vancouver, thirty-two-year-old Kurtis heads out to run a half-marathon with Amy's family. It is the last time she sees her husband alive. Ten days after this seismic loss, Amy is in the hospital, navigating her own shocking medical crisis and making life-or-death decisions about her treatment. What follows is a rich and unflinchingly honest accounting of her life with Kurtis, the vortex created by his death, and the ongoing struggle Amy faces as she attempts to understand her own experience in the context of commonly held ‘truths’ about what the grieving process looks like. Here After is a love story and a meditation on the ways in which Kurtis' death shatters any set ideas Amy ever held about grief, strength, and memory. Its power will last with you long after the final page.”

As I continue the memoir kick I’m on and as I toggle back and forth between fiction and creative nonfiction (maybe it’s finally time to add in some more poetry? Drama?), I have seen Lin’s work get more and more publicity. It follows in the tradition of works like Zauner’s Crying in H Mart in the way that it so totally embraces the profound complications of bereavement. What I especially loved is the use of white space throughout this text. Chapters are really snippets that read like prose poetry, and the white space that surrounds each block begins to accrue a kind of emotional intensity that perhaps helps to mirror that sense of loss — one that most of us can’t even begin to imagine — that has befallen the author. The medical crisis that Lin must navigate on her own are a very dangerous series of clots that require a stent to be put into her body. Without that stent, she may end up having a life-threatening or life-ending stroke. As you might expect, Lin is ambivalent about getting the stent: after all, what is there to live for now that Kurtis is gone? Despite such ideations, Lin also knows that she must find a way to navigate the after: she goes to therapy regularly and also signs up for a new grief counselor. She also consistently meets with a fellow widow, which sometimes helps her process her unique positionality. Days stretch out, like the white blocks that surround each page, as she struggles to find the energy to do anything. Outwardly, friends and family start to assume she is doing better, but Lin knows that she is not. She eventually adopts a puppy, despite more ambivalence about whether or not she can actually care for this other living thing, which may die at any moment. What I appreciate most about Lin’s memoir is that she takes the time to dispel a lot of myths about the grieving process. There are no developmental stages of grieving, nor do projects about how bad grief will be map onto any common template. If anything, we are reminded that the cost of profound love will be catastrophic grief, but Lin also reminds us that one method to dealing with grief is in a communal process. That is, you use the tools you have in order to address grief. For Lin, to address grief is to write about it. The logical step that she may not have at first anticipated is that this writing would be the basis for a creative publication. But it all makes sense. It is Kurtis, after all, who tells Lin that she is a writer, even before Lin has published her first short story, about embracing that identity. It comes full circle with Lin’s coruscating meditation on bereavement, so we see that one way that Lin comes to honor and to grieve Kurtis is in the process of narrative reconstructions. There may be no end to grief, as Lin’s memoir reveals, but it can and should be shared.

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uttararangarajan

Written by Stephen Hong Sohn
Edited by Uttara Rangarajan

Tor.com is always at the forefront of shorter novels and novellas. Such is the case with Nghi Vo’s latest publication The City in Glass (Tor.com, 2024). I’m a huge fan of Vo. The Chosen and The Beautiful, her brilliant re-writing of The Great Gatsby tickled my global modernist sensibilities. It reminded me of the similarly brilliant work by Monique Truong in her supplementary narrative to Stein’s Toklas in The Book of Salt. I am still awaiting other great modernist re-writes by Asian American authors! In any case, let’s let the marketing description do some work for us: “The demon Vitrine—immortal, powerful, and capricious—loves the dazzling city of Azril. She has mothered, married, and maddened the city and its people for generations, and built it into a place of joy and desire, revelry and riot. And then the angels come, and the city falls. Vitrine is left with nothing but memories and a book containing the names of those she has lost—and an angel, now bound by her mad, grief-stricken curse to haunt the city he burned. She mourns her dead and rages against the angel she longs to destroy. Made to be each other’s devastation, angel and demon are destined for eternal battle. Instead, they find themselves locked in a devouring fascination that will change them both forever. Together, they unearth the past of the lost city and begin to shape its future. But when war threatens Azril and everything they have built, Vitrine and her angel must decide whether they will let the city fall again. The City in Glass is both a brilliantly constructed history and an epic love story, of death and resurrection, memory and transformation, redemption and desire strong enough to reduce a world to ashes and remake it anew.”

I didn’t read much paratextual material going into this one, so I was pretty surprised at how the narrative develops. This one reminds me a bit of Wang’s rental house, because the plot is frankly minimal. Instead, much like Wang’s work (despite the radical difference in genre), the focus is really on relationships. In this case, the anchor of this text is Vitrine’s antagonistic connection to a fallen Angel. Vitrine naturally hates the Angel, but over the course of the text, we see their relationship evolve. At first enemies, the Angel comes to understand Vitrine’s love for humans, with all of their flaws, over the course of narrative. He comes to exist in a position similar to Vitrine in the sense that he watches over the humans and begins to have investments in their survival, success, and overall well-being. At first, the Angel is judgmental, dismissive, and imperious, but his tethering to Azril changes and humbles him. The one element of this text that I wanted more was related to world-building elements involving the angels and demons. Vo gives us just enough to understand that demons have an ability to transform into other beings; they also can seem to carve and to alter material elements before them. They can compose themselves of different things, and they can reformulate their bodies even if they are seemingly disintegrated. Angels seem to be generally impervious as well, but they cannot engage in questionable activities. They cannot lie or steal, so the Angel’s ability to intervene in the lives of mortals is decidedly limited. In other words, the Angel sometimes needs Vitrine’s explicit help once he becomes enmeshed in the lives of mortals. The ending—and here, I will provide my requisite spoilers, so look away at this point lest you want to discover what occurs between the two—was perhaps not what I wanted for these two characters. I appreciated their antagonists and even their mutual respect, which has accrued essentially over centuries, but I didn’t see them as a romantic pairing at all. While a minor quibble, I did absolutely adore Vitrine’s attachments to the mortals. She archives them through a book she holds inside of herself, and throughout the text, we get a sense of the history of Azril and all that were lost when the Angels destroyed the city. In this way, the text ultimately becomes a kind of grief archive, one that exists in the elastic bounds of the speculative fictional world.

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uttararangarajan

Written by Stephen Sohn
Edited by Uttara Rangarajan

As you know, we occasionally set our sights to other allied communities and writers of varying BIPOC backgrounds. One of our favorite writers is none other than the prolific Louise Erdrich, who graces us with another brilliant novel: The Mighty Red (Harper, 2024)! This robust marketing description gives us quite a bit of information: “In Argus, North Dakota, a collection of people revolve around a fraught wedding. Gary Geist, a terrified young man set to inherit two farms, is desperate to marry Kismet Poe, an impulsive, lapsed Goth who can't read her future but seems to resolve his. Hugo, a gentle red-haired, home-schooled giant, is also in love with Kismet. He’s determined to steal her and is eager to be a home wrecker. Kismet's mother, Crystal, hauls sugar beets for Gary's family, and on her nightly runs, tunes into the darkness of late-night radio, sees visions of guardian angels, and worries for the future, her daughter’s and her own. Human time, deep time, Red River time, the half-life of herbicides and pesticides, and the elegance of time represented in fracking core samples from unimaginable depths, is set against the speed of climate change, the depletion of natural resources, and the sudden economic meltdown of 2008-2009. How much does a dress cost? A used car? A package of cinnamon rolls? Can you see the shape of your soul in the everchanging clouds? Your personal salvation in the giant expanse of sky? These are the questions the people of the Red River Valley of the North wrestle with every day. The Mighty Red is a novel of tender humor, disturbance, and hallucinatory mourning. It is about on-the-job pains and immeasurable satisfactions, a turbulent landscape, and eating the native weeds growing in your backyard. It is about ordinary people who dream, grow up, fall in love, struggle, endure tragedy, carry bitter secrets; men and women both complicated and contradictory, flawed and decent, lonely and hopeful. It is about a starkly beautiful prairie community whose members must cope with devastating consequences as powerful forces upend them. As with every book this great modern master writes, The Mighty Red is about our tattered bond with the earth, and about love in all of its absurdity and splendor.”

As is common for Erdrich, there are always a ton of characters, but Erdrich is an obvious pro and knows exactly how to cultivate the depth of these figures, even down to the most minor of these individuals in terms of their import to the plots. I will admit: the first 1/3 of the novel or so I found taxing: the central love triangle between Kismet, Gary, and Hugo just sort of drove me crazy, but I suppose I don’t give enough room for the messiness that is young love. In any case, I eventually settled into these dynamics, especially because we discover the reason behind much of these complicated and dysfunctional connections. The other main elements involve the older residents of the town, the thirty, forty and fiftysomethings or so that are the older generation above Kismet, Gary, and Hugo. There’s a book club that links most of the major female characters. Hugo’s mom, Bev owns a bookstore Bev’s Bookery, that brings these women together. Kismet’s mom Crystal is in a strained marital relationship with a man named Martin. Then there’s the fact that there’s been a major tragedy that befell the town some months back that has impacted all of the youth there. This latter issue is the one that was the most surprising to me, as it emerges in the back end of the text. The community generally talks around what has happened but when we finally get to see what it is that is keeping some of the characters so guarded, the novel really gains momentum as some actual healing and reconnection can begin. What I loved best about this book though is something that I haven’t seen in Erdrich before: I feel as though Erdrich always pushes herself stylistically and, in this novel, she uses more clipped sentences than I’ve seen in the past. It is also paired with a sly humorous undertone that I think is more prominent than other novels that I’ve read. There’s also the way that Erdrich will just come up and surprise you with a narrative sleight of hand. There’s always a little bit of magic and mischief in Erdrich’s fictional world: a ghost will pop up in this novel’s case and then there’s the fact that a short chapter is taken from the perspective of a river and how it handles the various beings that fall in it. If there is a minor quibble it’s that twenty years pass by in the blink of a couple pages at the conclusion, which suggests that there might have been hundreds of pages of material for a different novel. After all, Erdrich is the one who has been compared to Faulkner for quite some time, and we can see how maybe there might have been more threads to pull together for another story. Whatever the case, Erdrich is clearly at her heights of creative genius, and we are all the more fortunate for how productive she has been as a writer and as an artist.

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uttararangarajan

Written by Stephen Hong Sohn
Edited by Uttara Rangarajan

Mad Creek Books is an imprint of Ohio State University Press, and it has been killing it with the creative nonfictional titles I’ve read thus far. My reviews from this imprint begin with Amy Lee Scott’s When The World Explodes: Essays (Mad Creek Books, 2025). Again, I’ve mentioned in other reviews that I sometimes find the essay collection to be a strangely defined form. Certainly, it seems to be the most flexible of creative nonfictional genres, as the essay collection is not necessarily united by a specific topic, and individual pieces typically do not proceed in linear fashion. The plasticity of the essay collection can be seen in Scott’s wide-ranging and poignant work. The official marketing description helps us understand this form’s pliability: “By the time she was seven, Amy Lee Scott had seen her world end twice: first as an infant, when adoption brought her from Korea to Ohio, and again when her adoptive mother died of cancer. Orphaned twice over, Scott confronts her personal chaos by investigating a litany of historic catastrophes and the disruptions that followed. Witnessing a Cabbage Patch Kid ‘born’ at BabyLand General Hospital inspires a meditation on the history of Korean adoption and her own origins. Recalling her miscarriage as the streets of her Detroit neighborhood flooded, she asks what it means to mourn what would have been. And she remembers her mother’s illness and death amid the 1992 Los Angeles riots. In this haunting debut, Scott gets to the heart of what it means to wrestle with the grief, rage, and anxiety seething in this tender world. Ferocious and true, When the World Explodes probes the space between personal and global calamities—from Krakatoa to the emotional perils of motherhood—to unearth the sharp ridge of hope that hides beneath the rubble.”

What is most impressive about this collection is Scott’s fearless use of juxtaposition. Perhaps, the clearest indication of Scott’s ability to place things side by side in productive fashion is the aforementioned section concerning the BabyLand General Hospital. When I read essay, I had to stop to look up this BabyLand General Hospital, because when I was perusing what Scott had written, the whole set up sounded really strange. After all, adults had gone to see a cabbage patch kid being born: I kept wondering if this sequence was satire. Apparently, not only does this place exist, but it seems to function as a kind of make-believe world fashioned for these cabbage patch kids. What Scott does with this place is to link it to intercountry Korean adoption. The link is of course something to be considered very loosely but Scott’s point is that you can’t fully disarticulate the rise in Cabbage Patch popularity for the rising transnational adoption rates occurring around the same time. The simultaneity that Scott reads into this essay is at play in other sections as well. For instance, Scott links the apocalyptic nature of the Los Angeles riots to the death of her mother when she is just 8. The point is not to trivialize the riots, but really to relate, however metaphorically, her sense of disaster in her own life to the one unfolding socially. “Theories of Cosmogony” is probably my favorite essay, as it explores various celestial phenomena that have occurred over centuries, while simultaneously considering her relationship with Korea. Scott’s enterprising ability to put so many historical events and occurrences into conversation with what she has experienced personally allows this work to unfold with scalar incandescence and certainly combines scholarly acumen with the accessibility of the autobiographical voice. Another creative nonfictional standout, and I can’t wait for the Asian Americanist cultural critic who decides to take on the essay as a cultural and racial form. We are waiting =).

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uttararangarajan

Written by Stephen Hong Sohn
Edited by Uttara Rangarajan

Melody S. Gee’s We Carry Smoke & Paper: Essays on the Grief and Hope of Conversion (University of Iowa Press, 2024) is my continuing work to give myself a break from all of those high intensity speculative fictions I’ve read over the past year. When I originally picked up this one, I didn’t read much paratextual material, so I was pleasantly surprised by all of its religious content. I say “pleasantly,” because this text is one that I know my mother would have loved to have read (she was a huge fan of accessible religious philosophy and Gee certainly comes from this lineage as well), and so I found myself thinking a lot about her while reading it. These are the unexpected gifts of reading. Let’s move to the marketing description: “Answering an unexpected call to faith in her thirties, Melody Gee contends with what saying “yes” to conversion requires of an adopted daughter of Chinese immigrants. Faced with a new framework for her place in the world, grief and doubt shadow her tentative steps toward becoming a believer. She looks for answers and consolation in her family’s story of immigration trauma and cultural assimilation, in the ways their burdens and limitations made her answer-seeking both impossible and inevitable. In essays that explore the parallels between conversion and language acquisition, isolated liturgies, cultural inheritances, stalled initiations, disrupted storytelling, and adoption, Gee examines conversion’s grief and hope, losses and gains, hauntings and promises. We Carry Smoke and Paper is a memoir about what we owe to those who sacrifice everything for us, and it is about the many conversions in a lifetime that turn our heads via whispers and shouts, calling us to ourselves.”

So, I read this one not long after Amy Lee Scott’s essay collection, and they do have some similarities. While Scott’s work often paired the personal with the apocalyptic, the ordering framework of Gee’s text is to rethink her family and personal life in the context of her conversion to Catholicism. Also, both authors are adopted, so that element does become important for both texts. What I found especially engaging about Gee’s essay collection is the way she is so reflective about her immigrant background and family. One of the standout essays, “Chinese American” focuses on the unique genealogy of her loved ones, who come to California, but essentially isolate themselves ethnically while they build a life around a restaurant. The other part of this essay that is so striking is the way that Gee comes to understand her grandfather more fully after he has passed away. Indeed, Gee uses the essay as a way to address a sense of lack: “In the eulogy I should have written, my grandfather was born on February 2, 1914,” but this is only an American date and we never celebrated it” (39). Gee thus employs this essay in part to address something she felt she should have done around the time her grandfather passed away. I found this moment particularly compelling, and it serves as a way to consider creative nonfiction as a realm that can address things latently. I found that the essays in this collection accrued more might and import, as I read on. Toward the conclusion, “Redemption Story,” functions as one of Gee’s strongest essays. It delves into Gee’s mother and her immigration history, which is set amongst the turbulent Chinese modernization of the 20^th and 21^st centuries. Given the continual movement that Gee’s mother experiences due to political instability and migration, Gee comes to the conclusion that her mother is a kind of perpetual exile, and that she must be better at coming to terms with some of her mother’s idiosyncrasies. The essay following that one, “Two Adoptions,” elegantly considers Gee’s background as an adoptee, on the one hand, and her decision to convert to Catholicism, on the other. In both contexts, Gee meditates upon what it means to find a home, however metaphorical or alternative it may be. Gee ultimately leaves us with the insight that, whatever (difficult) path we might take or are forced to traverse, we should find our spiritual center and keep the faith. A uniquely positioned work that combines the best in Asian American creative nonfiction with religious philosophy and spirituality.

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uttararangarajan

Written by Stephen Hong Sohn
Edited by Uttara Rangarajan

As a fellow Korean American, Hyeseung Song’s Docile (Simon & Schuster, 2024) hit particularly close to home. I always cite erin Ninh’s work (her biography linked below) when it comes to memoirs like these ones, because the model minority dynamic that Asian American migrants themselves promote can be so utterly destructive. Such is the case in Docile. We shall let the marketing description do some work for us: “A daughter of Korean immigrants, Hyeseung Song spends her earliest years in the cane fields of Texas where her loyalties are divided between a restless father in search of Big Money, and a beautiful yet domineering mother whose resentment about her own life compromises her relationship with her daughter. With her parents at constant odds, Song learns more words in Korean for hatred than love. When the family’s fake Gucci business lands them in bankruptcy, Song moves to a new elementary school. On her first day, a girl asks the teacher: ‘Can she speak English?’ Neither rich nor white, Song does what is necessary to be visible: she internalizes the model minority myth as well as her beloved mother’s dreams to see her on a secure path. Song meets these expectations by attending the best Ivy League universities in the country. But when she wavers, in search of an artistic life on her own terms, her mother warns, ‘Happiness is what unexceptional people tell themselves when they don’t have the talent and drive to go after real success.’ Years of self-erasure take a toll on Song as she experiences recurring episodes of depression and mania. A thought repeats: I want to die. I want to die. Song enters a psychiatric hospital where she meets patients with similar struggles. So begins her sweeping journey to heal herself by losing everything.”

One of the sustained issues in this text is Song’s desire to find her own path and identity independent of the one expected of her by her parents. The problem with putting her own interests aside for those of others is that it becomes a habitual form of self-denigration that undoubtedly impacts her psychic state. This memoir also brings to mind the work of James Kyung-jin Lee in Pedagogies of Woundedness, which looks to narratives of illness and debilitation (information also linked below) to remind us that Asian Americans don’t only achieve and progress. Never is this non-linear progression more evident than when an Asian American must balance model minority expectations alongside the development or germination of illness. In this case, Song occasionally experiences bouts of depression, which are alternately followed by periods of stability and even of major creative profusion. For those versed in the DSM, you’re already beginning to think about the possibility that Song may actually be bipolar. Indeed, Song will finally get this diagnosis later in life, which begins to piece together some of the most challenging parts of her life. But there are lots of unprocessed sections of this book, which make it particularly difficult read (and perhaps important for some to consider through a trigger warning before reading). For instance, a year in Korea that was meant to help Song recalibrate after needing a break from Princeton also comes with it multiple instances of sexual assault. She will also attempt suicide at multiple points, all the while attempting to navigate parental influence alongside her own interests. Even a seemingly stable long-term relationship is upended when Song realizes that she is not finding herself within that coupling and that she needs to relinquish it in order to address more fully what is ailing her. The concluding arc will not give us much resolution, but readers will be buoyed by the knowledge that Song has come to a place of significant self-reflection that has enabled her a level of dynamic equilibrium; she comes to understand her connection to her family as a complicated one, while she continues to advocate for the things that are important to her fulfillment. It is this final aspect that is part and parcel of Song’s journey toward healing: that she herself must find her way whether or not it is her parents or anyone else backing her. In this sense, in some ways, it almost feels as though Song finds her rebirth only after many decades of what others would consider to be incredible achievement. Song might say that her path has only just begun. At the end of the day, this memoir is yet another monumental takedown of the model minority myth and one that should be directed toward Asian Americans themselves who do not realize that the cost of upholding this ethos is so much potential destruction.

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For more on Ninh’s work, see this

For more on James Kyung-jin Lee’s work, go here

uttararangarajan

Written by Stephen Hong Sohn
Edited by Uttara Rangarajan

I’ve been toggling for whatever reason between a lot of high fantasy and memoir. I guess that’s just the reading mood I’ve been in for the last couple of months. I’ve especially been catching up on the so-called Asian-inspired fantasy trend, which is pretty much everywhere and frankly its own market now, with dozens of titles coming out year after year. The next one that appeared on my radar was Sue Lynn Tan’s Daughter of the Moon Goddess (Harper Voyager, 2022), which is a super engrossing read and certainly one I’d recommend for fans of this genre. Let’s let the marketing description move us a bit forward on this book: “Growing up on the moon, Xingyin is accustomed to solitude, unaware that she is being hidden from the feared Celestial Emperor who exiled her mother for stealing his elixir of immortality. But when Xingyin’s magic flares and her existence is discovered, she is forced to flee her home, leaving her mother behind. Alone, powerless, and afraid, she makes her way to the Celestial Kingdom, a land of wonder and secrets. Disguising her identity, she seizes an opportunity to learn alongside the emperor’s son, mastering archery and magic, even as passion flames between her and the prince. To save her mother, Xingyin embarks on a perilous quest, confronting legendary creatures and vicious enemies. But when treachery looms and forbidden magic threatens the kingdom, she must challenge the ruthless Celestial Emperor for her dream—striking a dangerous bargain in which she is torn between losing all she loves or plunging the realm into chaos. Daughter of the Moon Goddess begins an enchanting duology which weaves ancient Chinese mythology into a sweeping adventure of immortals and magic, of loss and sacrifice—where love vies with honor, dreams are fraught with betrayal, and hope emerges triumphant.”

This description doesn’t outline that there is a central romance triangle, which is absolutely instrumental to our engagement with the plot! Xingyin does eventually become enamored with the prince of the Celestial Emperor. Xingyin and Liwei seem like a pretty good pair, until the readers eventually find out that that Liwei has already been promised for marriage to another! GASP! Xingyin ends up deciding to go her own way and part of that process involves getting work in the celestial army, working under Captain Wenzhi. Whereas the sparks immediately flew with Liwei, things work at a slower pace with Wenzhi, but eventually, Xingyin develops feelings for Wenzhi, thus leading to our central romance triangle. There are various adventures which occur throughout this novel: Xingyin must battle merfolk, dragons, and demons, all with the ultimate intent that she might find a way back to her mother. She must also figure out how to pivot around the Celestial Emperor and Empress, who at various points drive Xingyin into specific actions which could endanger her life. One of the most perilous sections is a kind of trap: Xingyin is tasked to retrieve the pearls of dragons, not realizing that in doing so, she would be forcing the dragons to give up their agency. Xingyin, with her ethically centered self, always manages to find a way around such obstacles, and this aspect of her personality is what grounds this novel at every point, despite the hazards she consistently faces. But back to this romance plot: Despite the fact that Wenzhi seems like a good match (after all, he *is* single), Xingyin continually finds her thoughts moving back to Liwei. And here I will provide us all with the requisite spoiler warning, so please turn away unless you want to find out what all goes down. Though using what I would consider to be a common twist, Tan is able to cover it up in a way that, at least for me, produces a serious level of surprise. What you eventually find out is that Wenzhi is not who we thought he was. He is in fact the heir to the demon realm, and Xingyin must eventually defeat him in order to save Liwei and the more broadly the Celestial Kingdom. For her efforts Xingyin does eventually gain the favor that she wants. Her mother is freed from her imprisonment, and she will be allowed to return to her mother without fear of reprisal from the Emperor. Overall, I really enjoyed this one; it’s quite different from the other Asian-inspired fantasies I’ve read. Many in the kingdom are immortals and most have various powers that enable them to defeat magical monsters and figures. Tan’s world building is both assured and expansive, letting readers into a rich world filled with memorable characters.

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uttararangarajan

Written by Stephen Hong Sohn
Edited by Uttara Rangarajan

I am waiting for the Asian American literary criticism book that will focus on all of the brilliant work being put out right now by writers that partially or wholly concerns the COVID pandemic. The last one I read that I really loved was Wang’s Joan is Okay, and Daniel Tam-Claiborne’s Transplants (Regalo Press, 2025) is an outstanding addition to this growing body of literature. Also don’t forget to check out the cool Simon & Schuster imprint link below about Regalo Press. Tam-Claiborne is also author of a previous short story collection, What Never Leaves (Wilder Voice Books, 2012). In any case, let’s get to that marketing description: “A harrowing and poignant novel following two young women in pursuit of kinship and self-discovery who yearn to survive in a world that doesn’t know where either of them belong. On a university campus in rural Qixian, Lin and Liz make an improbable pair: Lin, a Chinese student closer to her menagerie of pets than to her peers, and Liz, a Chinese American teacher grieving her mother’s sudden death. They’re each met with hostility—Lin by her classmates, who mock her for dating a white foreigner; Liz by her fellow English teachers, who exploit their privilege—and forge an unlikely friendship. After a startling betrayal that results in Lin’s expulsion, they swap places. Lin becomes convinced to pursue her degree at a community college near Liz’s Ohio hometown, while Liz searches for answers as to what drove her parents to leave China before she was born. But when a global catastrophe deepens the fissures between modern-day China and an increasingly fractured United States, Lin and Liz—far from home and estranged from themselves—are forced to confront both the familiar and the strange in each other.”

So, my COVID reveal up front is a spoiler, but well, there’s no getting around it, as the description does state that there is a “global catastrophe.” What I loved most about this novel is that it is mathematically structured. On the one hand, the text unfolds over the course of a single year — the novel is partitioned off in seasons. On the other hand, the novel is told in alternating third person perspectives. We start with Lin then go to Liz and then toggle back and forth until the conclusion. This juxtaposition perfectly executes the title’s concern about “transplants,” as each character goes in the opposing direction. There is Lin, the Chinese international student who goes to the United States, while Liz is the American-born English teacher in rural Qixian. Things obviously get really harrowing once COVID lockdown occurs. Liz gets stuck in Shanghai, contracts COVID, also recovers, while becoming very concerned with the incredible levels of surveillance, and then, with the help Stephen, one of two friends that she meets in Shanghai, she attempts to reconnect with her roots. When Lin’s college in the United States gets shut down, and she gets booted out of her temporary living situation (by Liz’s brother Phil no less… by the way, I absolutely detested this character and wanted some extra character development just because I found him so excruciating LOL and was hoping there might be some sort of minor redemption for him), she relies upon her fellow Chinese international student friends to survive. Eventually, she and another student (Gua) decide to leave the area (by this point, Lin drops out of her college program and needs to find something else to do), attempting to go to places with less density but all the while aware that they might be targeted for being Chinese. Lin eventually makes it all the way to the west coast, where her fellow student departs for China, but Lin remains unsettled (and unfulfilled) and stays. The concluding arc pushes Liz to confront unanswered questions about her genealogical background and her familial past, while Lin makes an incredibly interesting choice to join a nursing program in Seattle and give some of her time to an Asian American-dominated eldercare location. Lin’s growing connection to a Japanese American woman named Ruth is a highlight. This latter section was the most interesting to me just from the framework of what Tam-Claiborne is doing to show how a Chinese transnational comes to racial consciousness and considers the disposing of ethnic affiliations for a pan ethnic racial designation. What I think the novel does best is to show the situational privilege of someone like Liz. Indeed, even despite her time in Shanghai, I never once doubted that she could find her way back to the United States if she wanted to. Though Liz faces her own trials and tribulations while in China, she does very little to connect with Lin once Lin is settled in the United States. Thus, in some ways, it is Lin who carries the emotional weight and core of this novel, and we are incredibly lucky that she is such an interesting character, one who models the kind of adaptation that is perhaps essential for a migrant’s survival. The final pages are masterfully understated, and Tam-Claiborne doesn’t overplay closure or reconnection in order to force some sort of unearned or treacly rapprochement (even if I wanted to see it LOL). Liz and Lin have gone through a lot, and we can only hope that their journey of growth may somehow still be interwoven with the other, as each moves forward. It is in this sense that I think Tam-Claiborne’s novel is truly refreshing. Romance plots and even genealogical ones seem to scaffold what is, at its center, a narrative about a friendship between the titular transplants, a platonic link that we hope endures across time and space and one big ocean. An absolutely sparkling debut novel. We’ll of course see much more from this talented writer

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uttararangarajan

Written by Stephen Hong Sohn
Edited by Uttara Rangarajan

Well, as I continue trying to balance all that speculative fiction reading, I’ve been doing, I’ve been turning to creative nonfiction. This imprint called Mad Creek Books over at Ohio State University Press has been putting out some high-quality publications in creative nonfiction. Such is the case with Grace Loh Prasad’s The Translator’s Daughter (Mad Creek Books, 2024), which is an outstanding memoir that covers her transnational life, the life of her parents, and the bonds she continues to construct in the wake of the deaths of family members. Let’s let the official marketing description give us more context: “Born in Taiwan, Grace Loh Prasad was two years old when the threat of political persecution under Chiang Kai-shek’s dictatorship drove her family to the United States, setting her up to become an “accidental immigrant.” The family did not know when they would be able to go home again; this exile lasted long enough for Prasad to forget her native Taiwanese language and grow up American. Having multilingual parents—including a father who worked as a translator—meant she never had to develop the fluency to navigate Taiwan on visits. But when her parents moved back to Taiwan permanently when she was in college and her mother was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, she recognized the urgency of forging a stronger connection with her birthplace before it was too late. As she recounts her journey to reclaim her heritage in The Translator’s Daughter, Prasad unfurls themes of memory, dislocation, and loss in all their rich complexity. The result is a unique immigration story about the loneliness of living in a diaspora, the search for belonging, and the meaning of home.”

This description perfectly encapsulates the basis for this memoir. Prasad’s father engages in translations of the Bible, so Prasad in effect always has someone in her family who can help her with linguistic deficits anytime she is in Taiwan. The opening of the memoir is remarkable for the story Prasad relays about being detained in Taiwan for accidentally bringing an expired passport. She wasn’t flagged before getting into the country, and Taiwan has very strict rules. Prasad would have to get her passport somehow flown to her within 24 hours or she would be forced to leave. Given the length of the flight and the challenges of international travel, she does anything she can to get the passport to her, which includes trying to flag down a locksmith and even calling upon an ex-boyfriend to find the passport in her apartment and to get it on a plane to her. I can’t recall whether or not she had to pay for a seat on a flight to get it to Taiwan, but I am hoping not. Despite these instabilities, she ends up being able to stay, and things go on as best as they can. Yet things do eventually take a turn: her mother’s Alzheimer’s begins to worsen, while her father struggles to as the primary caretaker. Prasad has to find a way to balance her commitments to her growing family in the United States as with her responsibilities to her aging parents. Another wrench is thrown into the transnational equation when her brother is unexpectedly diagnosed with cancer and dies in less than a year. Then, her mother passes away, not from the complications of Alzheimer’s but from a late-stage diagnosis of colon cancer. Writing about her mother’s illness progression, Prasad notes, “I, however, cannot reverse the decline. I have no magic that will physically bring my mom back to wholeness, back to life. My only choice is to re-member her, to re-constitute her, through my writing” (141). This moment is of course one of the pivotal ways that creative writing offers solace in the face of loss, however partial this salve may be. Prasad’s father will also eventually succumb to various complications that arise from Parkinson’s, leaving Prasad without any nuclear family anchors to Taiwan, even though she knows that this homeland calls not only to her but also to her children. One of the most affecting chapters then is the last one, which takes the epistolary form of a letter to her son. Prasad gives her son a kind of map for the places she knows he will be interested in, the places that have been formative for their family. In this way, Prasad prepares for the time when she may not be there to guide him and thus acknowledges the limits that we all face on Earth. An emotionally-wrenching and beautifully crafted memoir.

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uttararangarajan

Written by Stephen Hong Sohn
Edited by Uttara Rangarajan

So, I was turned on to The Poet and the Silk Girl: A Memoir of Love, Imprisonment, and Protest via Brandon Shimoda’s work The Afterlife is Letting Go. Shimoda’s encyclopedic approach to that work listed a bunch of Japanese American authors and artists, including the aforementioned Ina, whose memoir I had not yet had a chance to read. As readers of AALF might have seen recently, I’ve been on a fictional palate cleanse, or at least balancing my fictional reading with creative nonfiction. Let’s let the official marketing description get us moving: “A compelling and prismatic love story of one family’s defiance in the face of injustice—and how their story echoes across generations. In 1942 newlyweds Itaru and Shizuko Ina were settling into married life when the United States government upended their world. They were forcibly removed from their home and incarcerated in wartime American concentration camps solely on account of their Japanese ancestry. When the Inas, under duress, renounced their American citizenship, the War Department branded them enemy aliens and scattered their family across the U.S. interior. Born to Itaru and Shizuko during their imprisonment, psychotherapist and activist Satsuki Ina weaves their story together in this moving mosaic. Through diary entries, photographs, clandestine letters, and heart-wrenching haiku, she reveals how this intrepid young couple navigated life, love, loss, and loyalty tests in the welter of World War II-era hysteria. The Poet and the Silk Girl illustrates through one family’s saga the generational struggle of Japanese Americans who resisted racist oppression, fought for the restoration of their rights, and clung to their full humanity in the face of adversity. With psychological insight, Ina excavates the unmentionable, recovering a chronicle of resilience amidst one of the severest blows to American civil liberties. As she traces the legacies of trauma, she connects her family’s ordeal to modern-day mass incarceration at the U.S.-Mexico border. Lyrical and gripping, this cautionary tale implores us to prevent the repetition of atrocity, pairing healing and protest with galvanizing power.”

The opening to this memoir is really important. Ina reveals that, in an earlier draft, her storytelling position was reduced. The editors who pushed her to include more of herself were spot on: the reason why this memoir gains its full heft is precisely because of her positionality as an archivist, contextualist, and analyst of her parents’ crucial archives. We are in a very fortuitous moment in the sense that the tide has absolutely turned. The descending generations of the incarceration experience refuse to be silenced and instead have worked to preserve the pasts that so many decided to hide or erase precisely because of racialized traumas. This excavation work is partly a need to repair the past, on the one hand, while also acknowledging more complicated family histories, on the other. Thus, Ina stands alongside so many others, including the aforementioned Shimoda, as well as the many emerging sansei and yonsei writers, who have offered what we might call representational correctives of incarceration. The openings of each chapter always involve Ina’s storytelling positionality, as she helps clarify the importance of a given chapter or provides an overview of what we are about to read. Much of the memoir is filled with letters, both in English and translated from the Japanese, that Itaru and Shizuko wrote to each other throughout their lives. Part of what Ina gets from these letters is a more fully figured sense of who here parents were, especially her father, who was so reticent about sharing the full range of his emotions. The time that it took to collate, translate, and then edit the letters themselves into this work is itself extraordinary and noteworthy. As a side note: one of the cleverest things that the husband and wife do to skirt censors is to sew some of the letters up into clothes. The upheaval that Ina’s family must go through in order to survive the incarceration is just catastrophic. Despite having read so many of these narratives, the level of xenophobia and racism that the US produces on its own subjects never fails to amaze me. In this sense, Ina’s work, as important as it is archivally, is also crucial right now, in this moment of heighted political polarization, rising white supremacy, and increased scrutiny at the border. Finally, I did want to praise Heyday Books for not scrimping on the production value in this volume. The hardcover is an incredible work of art, which includes high resolution pictures and high-quality page materials, the likes of which should remind us that analogue is far from dead. A+ on this one. Certain to attract both critical, popular, and pedagogical attention.

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uttararangarajan

Written by Stephen Hong Sohn
Edited by Uttara Rangarajan

As you might know, I’ve been adding a bunch more creative nonfiction to my reading lists. I decided to mix it up a little bit and shift toward a graphic memoir. In this case, I’m reviewing Tessa Hull’s truly amazing debut Feeding Ghosts (MCD, 2024). It’s been a while since I’ve read a graphic memoir like this one, and it ranks with the best of them: G.B. Tran’s Vietnamerica, Thi Bui’s The Best We Could Do, Belle Yang’s Forget Sorrow… these three are some that exist at the absolute pinnacle of the graphic memoir genre due to their textured explorations of transnational history and diasporic consciousness. Let’s let the marketing description assist us a bit further: “An astonishing, deeply moving graphic memoir about three generations of Chinese women, exploring love, grief, exile, and identity. In her acclaimed graphic memoir debut, Tessa Hulls traces the reverberations of Chinese history across three generations of women in her family. Tessa’s grandmother, Sun Yi, was a Shanghai journalist swept up by the turmoil of the 1949 Communist victory. After fleeing to Hong Kong, she wrote a bestselling memoir about her persecution and survival—then promptly had a mental breakdown from which she never recovered. Growing up with Sun Yi, Tessa watches both her mother and grandmother struggle beneath the weight of unexamined trauma and mental illness, and bolts to the most remote corners of the globe. But once she turns thirty, roaming begins to feel less like freedom and more like running away. Feeding Ghosts is Tessa’s homecoming, a vivid, heartbreaking journey into history that exposes the fear and trauma that haunt generations, and the love that holds them together.”

This graphic memoir is truly an ambitious, sweeping, and thorough excavation of both personal and structural histories. I especially loved the way that Hulls works painstakingly to show how her mother’s and grandmother’s lives were intimately wound through the major upheavals of Chinese modern history, including the Japanese invasion, the rise of the KMT and the ensuing political fissures (The Great Leap Forward/ The Cultural Revolution), and the rise of Mao Zedong. Sun Yi gains a measure of success from her memoir, but the many ghosts that are pursuing her become too much, and she begins to exhibit signs of mental illness that will later overtake her life. Sun Yi’s inability to recover from her mental illness, or at least have some form of treatment for it, causes her daughter (Hulls’ mother) to become Sun Yi’s caretaker for the most part. The problem with this dynamic is that Hulls’ mother lives in a perpetual state of interdependence and heightened anxiety, which will later be projected onto Hulls herself. This predicament leads to a complicated home life when Hulls grows up in coastal California. Hulls’s memoir is obviously deeply researched: not only does Hulls travel to China multiple times to get a stronger sense of the spatial past that involves her mother and grandmother, but she also works to learn Mandarin (to communicate with her family). She also obviously must learn much about Chinese history. Scaffolding Hulls’ compelling personal story and political engagements are her brilliant illustrations. There is so much detail going on here, and Hulls really drives home the hungry ghosts tropes throughout the text. Returning images as well as the motif of something Hulls calls the “ghost twin” help clarify the impact of intergenerational trauma on succeeding generations. While Hulls’ mother has this “ghost twin” to reign in challenging emotional experiences, Hulls’ alter ego is none other than a cowboy, who lives free and roams far and wide around the world. I wonder if Hulls must have read Scott McCloud’s work because Hulls also consistently breaks the fourth wall to interrupt the narrative and speak directly to the reader. I loved these moments, as they provided a break from the difficult subject material but also generated an analytical auto-theoretical voice that put her perspective into context with her mother’s. The nuance of this approach is that Hulls reveals how her mother’s viewpoint on a given topic could be radically different than her own and that Hulls could not claim to have the sole perspective. Another really compelling aspect of this memoir is that it is really clear how collaborative it was: Hulls knows that her mother had to be integrated deeply into this writing process and that she couldn’t just share whatever she wanted. There is a level of restraint and care in this memoir that shows us that to tell a family history is also to dwell in a place where ethics and representation must intertwine. In this delicate balance mediating confession and reticence, Hulls’ deeply imagined, exquisitely crafted memoir truly and brilliantly soars. A home run with bases loaded.

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lsobiesk

Written by Stephen Hong Sohn
Edited by Lizzy Sobiesk

I’ve been on a bit of a tear with Johanna Hedva’s work. They have had a particularly prolific set of years, returning to us with a creative nonfictional publication How to Tell When We Will Die (Zando, 2024). Let’s let the marketing description give us some key information: “In the wake of the 2014 Ferguson riots, and sick with a chronic condition that rendered them housebound, Johanna Hedva turned to the page to ask: How do you throw a brick through the window of a bank if you can’t get out of bed? It was not long before this essay, ‘Sick Woman Theory,’ became a seminal work on disability, because in reframing illness as not just a biological experience but a social one, Hedva argues that under capitalism—a system that limits our worth to the productivity of our bodies—we must reach for the revolutionary act of caring for ourselves and others. How to Tell When We Will Die expands upon Hedva’s paradigm-shifting perspective in a series of slyly subversive and razor-sharp essays that range from the theoretical to the personal—from Deborah Levy and Susan Sontag to wrestling, kink, mysticism, death, and the color yellow. Drawing from their experiences with America’s byzantine healthcare system, and considering archetypes they call The Psychotic Woman, The Freak, and The Hag in Charge, Hedva offers a bracing indictment of the politics that exploit sickness—relying on and fueling ableism—to the detriment of us all.”

While the description starts with “Sick Woman Theory,” the collection of nonfictional pieces certainly exceeds that particular piece. Indeed, if anything, Hedva is a writer who wants us to know “Sick Woman Theory” is just one small aspect of their collective writings, even if it happens to be one of the ones that has been the most well-read. Perhaps what is most crucial about engaging Hedva’s work on disability writings is the complications that arose in light of their popular dissemination. Hedva would be invited to many talks in light of their work’s impact, but the problem is of course access: Hedva is not always given the things they need to be able to go and do these talks, with entities supposedly interested in things like disability and impairment. To be sure, Hedva is not only critical. Indeed, they rightly celebrate the shift in thinking that has occurred, especially over the last decade on things related to disability, impairment, care work, access, and interdependence, but this publication is a clear clarion call that more must be done. Perhaps, one of the strongest messages to come out of this work is the problems under which the disabled must survive under neoliberal capitalism. How can the body that is in constant pain or one that cannot access certain forms of transit or be able to move independently be able to produce the labor that is necessary under neoliberal capitalism? Who cares for this kind of person, this kind of body, when it is one that may incur debt, more work, and requires further support? These questions are precisely that ones that Hedva so polemically telescopes for readers. Amongst such politically engaged writings, Hedva also graces us with some narratively luminescent pieces. There is a section on a complicated love affair with a drug addict, another poignant one that conveys the experience of grief that Hedva experiences after their mother dies, and finally, perhaps my favorite, Hedva’s trip to the island of Hydra where they commune with a local priestess. The piece on Hedva’s mother was particularly complicated given that their relationship was strained over time, given their mother’s abuse. The final thing I’ll end on how multifaceted this work is. Inasmuch as you’ll find out so much about care and care work, disability and impairment, Hedva gives us much to consider as a mixed-race Korean American, as someone involved in kink and the way that kink destabilizes power; Hedva is obviously well-read, an organic intellectual, and someone who can as easily discuss the uneven-ness of Sontag’s work alongside the narrative dynamics of pop culture horror movies. In this mixture of high and low, Hedva’s work glitters with the might of a cultural kaleidoscope.

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lsobiesk

Written by Stephen Hong Sohn
Edited by Lizzy Sobiesk

Well, here, I am reviewing the final installment of the Drowning Empire trilogy with Andrea Stewart’s The Bone Shard War (Orbit, 2023)! Now, I will provide my requisite spoiler warning just prior to getting the marketing description here for us (so look away at this point unless you want to find out all the amazing secrets contained herein): “Lin Sukai has won her first victory as Emperor, but the future of the Phoenix Empire hangs in the balance – and Lin is dangerously short of allies. As her own governors plot treason, the Shardless Few renew hostilities. Worse still, Lin discovers her old nemesis Nisong has joined forces with the rogue Alanga, Ragan. Both seek her death. Yet hopes lies in history. Legend tells of seven mythic swords, forged in centuries past. If Lin can find them before her enemies, she may yet be able to turn the tide. If she fails, the Sukai dynasty – and the entire empire – will fall.”

So, by this point, we have learned way more about how the “magic” of this world operates. There are magical peoples called the Alanga. Though the Sukais attempted to wipe them out, some survived and their DNA can be found in some of the population. The Alanga’s powers are enhanced by their connection to their ossalen, which are these furry little creatures that evolve over time. Once they die, their bones and the dust from them seem to form the islands that the empire is literally based on. The magic from the ossalen does seem to infiltrate parts of islands, specifically with enchanted pools that heal. Lin is part Alanga, so is Jovis, but because Lin’s father, the former (and dead emperor) had tried to wipe out the Alanga, Dione/ Gio is trying to lead the Shardless Few, the revolutionary organization, to depose Lin. The other Alanga, the cloud tree monk known as Ragan has allied himself with Nisong with the hopes that they can claim the Empire as well. Phalue, the daughter of a governor on one of the Empire’s islands has tentatively aligned herself with Lin, while Phalue’s partner Ranami is trying to keep hold of power on their home island, while raising their adoptive daughter (and Alanga) Ayesh. The final major figure, Jovis, has basically been conscripted by Kaphra, leader of the mob group the Ioph Carn, to do his bidding. Kaphra has essentially taken Jovis’s ossalen, Mephi, captive, so Jovis seems to be stuck. He is also being controlled by bone shard magic and is forced to commit acts often against his will. The problem for Jovis is how he can escape Kaphra and perhaps finds his way back to Lin, especially when one of the bone shards commands him to stay away from Lin. *phew* That’s a lot! If you didn’t already figure it out: high fantasy is a lot about plot and setting up the chess pieces for apocalyptic battles. Fortunately, Stewart’s real royal flush is in her ability to generate complex characters, which ultimately allow you to identify with even the most problematic ones to a certain extent. I was thinking about how I found so many of Olivie Blake’s characters hard to like; they all seemed to hate each other and many didn’t mind killing each other. These weren’t mindscapes that I wanted to spend too much time with. In this text, there are some homicidal characters for sure (see Ragan), but other characters that are significantly destructive realize that their actions have consequences, and they even show remorse (e.g. Nisong and Dione/ Gio). Stewart’s novel retains a core of earnestness that I missed in a series like Blake’s. At the end of the day, one main message about this novel is to honor those connections that are constitutive and progressive. Even as we hurtle toward what will necessarily be a bloody battle, we never question where the novel’s heart will ultimately be, and Stewart gives us enough time to bask in the afterglow of what remains so that we can reflect back on the many relationships that have evolved while others have somehow persisted, even in light of incredible obstacles. A definite series to treasure and one to read alongside something like Fonda Lee’s Green Bone Saga.

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lsobiesk

Written by Stephen Hong Sohn
Edited by Lizzy Sobiesk

So, I eagerly picked up the second one after the first ended! I will begin with the spoiler warning. After the events of The Bone Shard Daughter (Orbit 2020), The Bone Shard Emperor (Orbit, 2021) opens with Lin in a new world. She is now the Empress, as she has killed and deposed her own father. At the conclusion of the first in the series, Jovis, the smuggler, has arrived on scene, working as a kind of informant for the Shardless Few (headed by a character named Gio). He happens to be at the right place at the right time: Lin desperately needs support, and so she hires Jovis on the spot as the captain of her Imperial Guard. She’s not an idiot; she knows she has to be careful, and her instincts are right, because at that point in the story, Jovis is a kind of double agent. He is still informing for Gio, while finding that Lin is not the evil entity that the Shardless Few have made her out to be. Of course, the intel that the Shardless Few had was based upon Lin’s father, who was definitely given the villain edit. So let’s let the marketing description give us some more information: “The Emperor is Dead. Long live the Emperor. Lin Sukai finally sits on the throne she won at so much cost, but her struggles are only just beginning. Her people don’t trust her. Her political alliances are weak. And in the north-east of the Empire, a rebel army of constructs is gathering, its leader determined to take the throne by force. Yet an even greater threat is on the horizon, for the Alanga–the powerful magicians of legend–have returned to the Empire. They claim they come in peace, and Lin will need their help in order to defeat the rebels and restore peace.”

So, the second in a trilogy is often saggy (as I mentioned in other reviews). The sagginess of this one is related to the fact that Stewart now has created a kind of narrative problem: the new Empress is not relying on bone shard magic to fuel the constructs, so she basically has no army with which to protect her empire nor does she have then the element of fear that she put into the larger population of governors who exist under her rule. She has to spend the rest of the novel currying favor with governors, even as a new threat arises in the form of Nisong/Sand. This character is one of the POVs from the first installment, and she has gained full sentience and knowledge that she was basically left to rot on an island without her full memory capacity, and she’s MAD about it. She wants to take over the empire and doesn’t mind a high body count in this process. The other problem is related to the mysterious appearance of a cloud monk named Ragan, purportedly of Alanga descent. The Alanga were the people that the Empress’s family had battled in the process of taking over. They were eventually killed off, or so everyone believed. They were WRONG! There are Alanga among the Imperials all over the place! In fact, Lin thinks she’s at least part Alanga, and so is Jovis. A telltale marker of being Alanga is apparently the fact that each Alanga derives magical power through their bond with something called an ossalen: a furry creature that looks at first like an otter. So, now, we understand Mephi from the first book as well as the emergence of another character, Thrana, of the same species as Mephi, who becomes Lin’s close companion in the second. They are all Alanga, but Ragan has a totally different motivation than Lin does, so that becomes the wrinkle in this second installment. Lin has a battle on three fronts. First, she has to gain allies among the governors, who will then provide her with guards who will help fight the threat that’s coming from Nisong/Sand, as Nisong/Sand takes over some of the islands. Second, she has to battle Nisong/Sand to maintain control of the empire. Third, she doesn’t realize Ragan’s true intentions until the climactic battle with Nisong/Sand at the end of the second installment. Ragan, being Alanga, actually wants to kill all Imperial citizens given the fact that they had tried to kill off all the Alanga! Finally, Lin is in a bad spot in that final battle because Jovis is finally revealed to be a double agent, and Lin isn’t having any of THAT! So, by the time that Stewart has gotten all the chess pieces together, the battle is ready and poised to be fought. When all is said and done: Stewart leaves us these nuggets for the final publication: Nisong/Sand has still survived… will she be coming back? Gio is revealed to be Alanga, and Lin’s father basically killed Gio’s entire family. The last one is called Bone Shard War, and I have to imagine that either Nisong/Sand return and/or Gio is going to be leading the charge to depose Lin. A new battle awaits, and I am here for it! Again, I am really enjoying the series. Stewart has some masterful tricks up her sleeve to keep the readers engaged, and the originality of the world building continues to accrue further textures in this installment.

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lsobiesk

Written by Stephen Hong Sohn
Edited by Lizzy Sobiesk

So, I’m getting up there, and I’ve finally learned the lesson: Complete the review of a series only after it’s done. Right now, I’m stressed out that there will never be a book three in Akemi Dawn Bowman’s Infinity Court series. What is up with that? Does anyone have the details? E-mail me: ssohn2@fordham.edu. Akemi-wan: you’re our only hope! The other one I got dunked on was Wesley Chu’s Time series, which unceremoniously ended after book 2 on a major cliffhanger. I actually slid into Chu’s DMs to ask him: what is up with book 3, only to find out there is no book 3. If I’m punchy it’s because it’s been a rough week. At the time of this writing, Los Angeles has been on fire all week; I have family members who have had to evacuate, and then obviously know a ton of others either (A) directly affected or (B) live in the area and understand all too well the stress and the sadness that comes with yet another devastating fire. To keep my mind off of things I started Andrea Stewart’s The Bone Shard Daughter (Orbit, 2020), which is the first in what I think is called the Drowning Empire trilogy. Let’s let the marketing description do some work for us: “The emperor's reign has lasted for decades, his mastery of bone shard magic powering the animal-like constructs that maintain law and order. But now his rule is failing, and revolution is sweeping across the Empire's many islands. Lin is the emperor's daughter and spends her days trapped in a palace of locked doors and dark secrets. When her father refuses to recognise her as heir to the throne, she vows to prove her worth by mastering the forbidden art of bone shard magic. Yet such power carries a great cost, and when the revolution reaches the gates of the palace, Lin must decide how far she is willing to go to claim her birthright - and save her people.”

This pithy description does little to reveal that there are actually FOUR different perspectives basically covered throughout this novel. Lin gets a first person POV, and we’re obviously anchored to her storyline because she is the center of power, or at least her dad is. Lin’s memory is messed up, and so she questions whether or not she can ever ascend to being the heir to the Empire if she cannot remember who she is, but recovering her memory will reveal some SHOCKING secrets (spoiler warning, so you’ll see those below). The second is given to Jovis, a smuggler, who is still looking for his long-ago abducted wife Emhala (a spelling approximation). Jovis is on the run from a black-market organization called the Ioph Carn. He strikes up a lovable friendship with a sea creature who he names Mephi. Then there’s Phalue, who is the daughter of the governor of one of the islands within which is governed by the Empire. Phalue is trying to court Ramani, who is in cahoots with the Shardless Few, which is a rebel organization trying to take down the empire. The final is given to Sand, who is somebody trapped on an island without her memories. At first, I thought Sand might just be Lin in a different time period, but that guess was wrong, but not entirely wrong (I suppose). I was scared about all these POVs because sometimes you end up liking one more than the others. Jovis’s is also in first, but the other two are in third, so there was that discursive complication as well. Fortunately, Stewart knows how to craft a compelling story, and two of those storylines do converge. The other real treat about this high fantasy series is that there are some cool speculative world building elements. The first is the bone shard magic, which operates via the actual bones harvested from the empire’s citizens. Basically, these artificial cyborg constructs of various types are energized by the citizen’s bone shards at the cost of the shortening the lives of the individuals from which the bones were harvested. Each bone shard ends up being the source of a command for the construct, so when those commands initiate, the life force of the individual drains quicker. Because some commands are used more often than others, some citizens get unlucky and die far quicker than they normally would have. One of the other major energy sources is witstone, which seems to be a kind of fuel that enables people to travel across the water and each island. Then there seems to be some vague source of magical power inherent in certain people, the likes of which aren’t fully conveyed until book 2 possibly. The construct element is definitely one of the coolest magical novums I’ve seen, and this particular work is the very promising start of a high fantasy/ science fictional series with the so-called “Asian-inspired” elements.

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lsobiesk

Written by Stephen Hong Sohn
Edited by Lizzy Sobiesk

Yume Kitasei’s The Stardust Grail (Flatiron, 2024) is definitely one of the most entertaining reads of the year. I’ve always loved science fictional narratives that involved space-faring, and this one is no different! The marketing description provides us with some pithy information that can get us started: “Maya Hoshimoto was once the best art thief in the galaxy. For ten years, she returned stolen artifacts to alien civilizations—until a disastrous job forced her into hiding. Now she just wants to enjoy a quiet life as a graduate student of anthropology, but she’s haunted by persistent and disturbing visions of the future. Then an old friend comes to her with a job she can’t refuse: find a powerful object that could save an alien species from extinction. Except no one has seen it in living memory, and they aren’t the only ones hunting for it. Maya sets out on a breakneck quest through a universe teeming with strange life and ancient ruins. But the farther she goes, the more her visions cast a dark shadow over her team of friends new and old. Someone will betray her along the way. Worse yet, in choosing to save one species, she may condemn humanity and Earth itself.”

The biggest reviewer compliment I can give to a speculative fiction is about worldbuilding. In this case, I can say unreservedly that Kitasei’s worldbuilding is truly exceptional. There are colonies, interstellar webs, alien races, and underground crypts filled with booby traps. One of the cover blurbs essentially calls this one Indiana Jones in space, which I think is apt. The other thing that Kitasei has to propel the reader is a keen sense of comedy. In this way, Kitasei clearly shows her range as a creative writer. Her first publication (The Deep Sky), which I also loved, is also set in space, but is more of a thriller set in the near future. The Stardust Grail is set in the far future when interstellar travel is possible, but the tone is a mix of action, drama, and comedy. Maya’s a kind of huckster. She’s a failed academic with a keen sense of adventure, so when Auncle, from an alien race called The Frenro (one of six advanced races that have achieved space travel) comes calling for her to help her find the titular stardust grail, she can’t say no. Maya also survived an infection, which gives her a keen connection to the Frenro, and she absolutely believes that Auncle’s desire to find the grail is crucial. A novel like this one doesn’t work without a band of merry characters on this quest, and Kitasei populates her novel with a bunch of memorable ones, including one of my faves, who is a sentient robot who happens to desire to gain more emotional programming elements. The concluding arc is undoubtedly the strongest, only because there are a ton of revelations, including ones that are the hallmarks of posthumanist alien cultural productions. That is, the ways in which these alien beings survive and proliferate and operate in the world are just so different that we do not fully understand what is at stake, especially with respect to space-faring and our desire to remain mobile in the galaxy and beyond. While remaining vague (out of a desire to avoid spoiler), I hope I’ve given you enough information that you’ll consider reading it. This book is the kind you can easily devour on a plane ride, train ride, or relaxing on a beach with an umbrella drink in your hand.

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lsobiesk

Written by Stephen Hong Sohn
Edited by Lizzy Sobiesk

Weike Wang has already graced us with her third novel Rental House (Riverhead, 2024)! As always, her economically precise prose grounds yet another intriguing and complicated character story. Let’s let the official marketing description do some work for us to get the ball rolling: “Keru and Nate are college sweethearts who marry despite their family differences: Keru’s strict, Chinese, immigrant parents demand perfection (‘To use a dishwasher is to admit defeat,’ says her father), while Nate’s rural, white, working-class family distrusts his intellectual ambitions and his ‘foreign’ wife. Some years into their marriage, the couple invites their families on vacation. At a Cape Cod beach house, and later at a luxury Catskills bungalow, Keru, Nate, and their giant sheepdog navigate visits from in-laws and unexpected guests, all while wondering if they have what it takes to answer the big questions: How do you cope when your spouse and your family of origin clash? How many people (and dogs) make a family? And when the pack starts to disintegrate, what can you do to shepherd everyone back together?”

The structure of this novel is what interests me the most. It reminds me a bit of Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse in that there is a section that occurs in the middle in which time passes. The interlude section allows readers to get a glimpse into the way that the relationship between Keru and Nate has changed over time as well as how their general families have evolved as they have aged. In the first section, we see the two in the earlier stages of their relationship, where they are on more equal footing, especially with respect to their careers. Their in-laws meet them in quick succession, with Keru’s parents coming first. Notably, their in-laws do not overlap, which is not surprising. The challenge of integrating one figure of the couple with their in-laws is precisely what drives the first half of the spare novel forward. They all do their best, but there’s naturally some complications and tension. Keru also has this very weird habit of throwing things at strange moments, and the first section ends rather abruptly in the wake of another throwing episode. The second section sees the pair now moving into middle age. Keru has advanced into a very lucrative professional career as a business consultant, while Nate, though also successful as an academic in the sciences, nevertheless does not command such a big salary. The shift in their economic locations is certainly at play in this section, with Keru preferring the creature comforts of more luxurious accommodations, while Nate prefers something more simple. Whereas the first section involved successive visits with in-laws, the second involves visits with other couples. The tensions and complications that grounded the first section reappear here in different ways. For instance, Keru and Nate end up spending some time with strangers (a man, his wife, and their toddler child) in neighboring bungalows. The man, Mircea, and his wife, Elena, are of Romanian background but actually live in the Netherlands; they have come to the United States on a contracted job, bringing along Lucian, their young child. Their conversations sometimes turn to the nature of American identity, with Keru not always agreeing with their assessments and at one point leading to a kind of mild rupture between them. Wang also includes a strange section toward the conclusion which seems to suggest that there could be multiple endings to this particular story. It reminded me a little bit of Sigrid Nunez’s The Friend in that regard. I’ll offer a gentle spoiler warning here, so turn away unless you want to know about the second ending. The first ending is pretty underwhelming, but the second involves Nate’s estranged brother Ethan arriving alongside his girlfriend Morgan. Ethan arrives clearly with an intent in mind, but it’s not sure what that is until they have all spent a good amount of time together. Ethan has always been a challenge for Nate, as Ethan has bounced around from job to job and has generally always relied upon the financial assistance of their mother. Ethan ultimately reveals that he is hoping that Nate and Keru will invest in his idea for a gym; Nate does not want to support him, but Keru thinks some sort of limited help might be okay. Whatever the case, Ethan and Nate end up fighting, with Keru having to mediate a kind of détente between the two. The novel strangely ends here, but I suppose it maintains the abruptness of the first section. Wang’s keen ability to dive into the emotional stickiness of our human relationships is what makes this book such a great read. Even without a dynamic plot, you’re propelled by the ways in which you see these characters develop and how they interact with others. In this sense, Wang has not strayed away from her tried and true prose formula. After all, Joan is Okay and Chemistry are ultimately narratives grounded in character over plot, with Wang’s prose always providing that crystalline anchor. You can easily knock this one out in one sitting, which, if you end up starting the book, I bet you will.

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lsobiesk

Written by Stephen Hong Sohn
Edited by Lizzy Sobiesk

I think Sarah Chihaya’s Bibliophobia (Random House, 2025) is the first book published in 2025 that I am here to review and what an excellent one to start this year of publications off. What a gut punch and what a complex rendering of what it means to both love and fear books. Let’s let the official marketing description do some work for us: “Books can seduce you. They can, Sarah Chihaya believes, annihilate, reveal, and provoke you. And anyone incurably obsessed with books understands this kind of unsettling literary encounter. Sarah calls books that have this effect ‘Life Ruiners.’ Her Life Ruiner, Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, became a talisman for her in high school when its electrifying treatment of race exposed Sarah’s deepest feelings about being Japanese American in a predominantly white suburb of Cleveland. But Sarah had always lived through her books, seeking escape, self-definition, and rules for living. She built her life around reading, wrote criticism, and taught literature at an Ivy League University. Then she was hospitalized for a nervous breakdown, and the world became an unreadable blank page. In the aftermath, she was faced with a question. Could we ever truly rewrite the stories that govern our lives?”

I overlapped briefly with Chihaya in an online reading group. Though we didn’t have substantive time to interact, at that time, Chihaya was at Princeton as an Assistant Professor. This book clarifies some of the things that have happened since, while situating the ways in which Chihaya interfaces with books, especially from the perspective of someone who has dealt with depression for a good portion of her life. Each chapter has at least one major book that anchors its meditations. The first is perhaps structurally the most important, as the memoir has a kind of en medias res quality. We know that Chihaya has experienced a nervous breakdown. In the wake of that event, she, though once consuming books voraciously, finds that she cannot read. What ensues after this chapter is the exploration of different books that have been formative for Chihaya’s life. The “life ruiner” chapter is obviously one of the best, but all show a level of verve and vulnerability that make for the best memoirs. Another chapter explores Chihaya’s relationship to the Anne of Green Gables series, while another considers Anne Carson’s long poem “The “Glass Essay,” and how Chihaya turns to this work in the wake of a breakup. Another chapter foregrounds the centrality of A.S. Byatt’s Possession, while yet another, perhaps my favorite given my own scholarly interests, covers Chihaya’s experiences with Ozeki’s A Tale for the Time Being. As Chihaya grapples more directly with depression and suicidal ideation, other publications come to the fore, including another one of my favorites, Li’s Dear Friend, from My Life I write to You in Your Life. I recalled thinking how little I know about authors, especially when they step out in front of their characters. Chihaya drops a lot of deep insights on this text, particularly for readers, who may sometimes put too much emphasis on how their own lives are directly connected to the things they read. Chihaya reminds us that there are crucial separations to make, that we of course aren’t characters nor are the people who populate our lives, and that our lives are not meant to be understood as plots inasmuch as plots aren’t supposed to be understood as lives. These nuggets may seem obvious to many, but for those who come to rely on books as something akin to “friends,” Chihaya’s memoir is both revelatory and prescriptive. Though a shadow book seems to haunt this one—the apparent first scholarly monograph that is supposed to “save” one’s professional life that Chihaha never completes—what I can tell Chihaya is that such a book may not have changed the “plot” anyway, as I can attest from the position of someone who did publish a book and got denied tenure anyway. Whatever the case, the last thing that the book leaves us all with is that complicated question: what separates scholarship from creative work, especially of the nonfictional variety? Is it the number of citations? Is it the semblance of objectivity, which we all know is a false one? Chihaya herself provides an excerpt from that shadow academic book, and I laughed out loud when she reveals her own good feelings for consigning that section to a footnote in this memoir. Yet one can’t help but wonder if the shadow book is really this one and this book is the one that should have been more than enough for any academic program, whether in the Ivy League or anywhere else. Indeed, Chihaya, though seemingly covering a different topic (concerning de-narrativization), has necessarily written a book that is hardly linear in its manifestation and one that only accrues deeper richness on re-reads. If anything, Chihaya would agree with us: all books worth reading are worth re-reading, and Bibliophobia certainly merits these return visits.

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lsobiesk

Written by Stephen Hong Sohn
Edited by Lizzy Sobiesk

I went into Dinesh Thiru’s Into the Sunken City (HarperTeen, 2024) having avoided much paratextual material. I just knew it was sort about diving and the water (just by looking at the cover LOL), so as I got further into the book, I started to get confused. Why was there so much rain? Why was it also raining in Arizona? I then began to slowly piece together that we are in a dystopian fictional world set in the far future. HA! Surprise was on me =). In any case, sometimes I like to go into books without much context and just figure things out as I go. In any case, let’s let the official marketing description give us some further crucial information: “For Jin Haldar, this life is nothing new—ever since her father died in a diving accident, she’s barely made ends meet for her and her younger sister, Thara. Enter Bhili: a drifter who offers Jin and Thara the score of a lifetime—a massive stash of gold hidden in the sunken ruins of Las Vegas. Jin knows it’s too dangerous. She stopped diving after her father’s accident. But when her sister decides to go, Jin’s left with only one choice: to go with her. A ragtag crew is assembled—including Jin’s annoyingly hot ex-boyfriend. From there, a high-stakes heist ensues that’s beyond even Jin’s wildest fears. Crumbling ruins, sea beasts, corsairs, and a mysterious figure named João Silva all lie in wait. To survive, Jin will have to do what she promised herself she’d never do again: dive.”

This YA novel is billed as a “fantasy adventure,” but I’d actually consider it a dystopian science fiction. The novel is pretty dark. In this future, a failed cloud seeding effort ultimately resulted in the world being in sort of an endless rainstorm, with most of the continents being flooded over. Arizona, which you and I all know as a place of desert landscapes and arid environments, is mostly covered by water. Money is hard to come by and most of what was the United States is dominated either by military entities or pirates. Jin and her younger sister Thara are barely able to survive, as they own an inn that occasionally still gets the occasional straggler. When Bhili, one of these stragglers, comes into their life, she offers them coin, which provides them a limited measure of stability, until of course, the people who know about her and her money come after her. Bhili, in fact, has knowledge of an incredible treasure is still buried under the water in what was Las Vegas. Bhili is able to convince Jin, Thara, Jin’s ex Taim, as well as Thara’s romantic interest Saanvi to try to get the loot, but Silva and his corsairs eventually crash the party. Silva is a particularly dastardly villain, and here I will start to reveal some spoilers. At one point, realizing that Saanvi will have no role in their upcoming ventures that will take them into the titular sunken city, Silva and his allies kill Saanvi point blank. Thiru’s novel is thus established as this kind of violent world, and we’re in a future in which climate catastrophe has limited the possible trajectories of anyone who is alive. Fortunately, Thiru has created a very spirited protagonist, the kind that you know will be able to do what it takes to support the people she loves and potentially even to make it to the last page. The sequence that takes us under the water and into Las Vegas is quite thrilling, and Thiru throws in some extra obstacles that those into seafaring adventures will find compelling. As a note, the main characters are clearly of South Asian descent, and Thiru fills out his cast with a diverse crew. An interesting detail is that Jin’s father—who we discover has died in a diving accident before the events that begin the main narrative—is one who takes inspiration and solace in the Vedas, which are Hindu religious texts. It would seem that most characters are at least tangentially marked ethnically, with Silva being revealed to be of Brazilian background. A definite page-turner anchored by a strong narrator. Fans of dystopian science fiction will enjoy Thiru’s worldbuilding and ecocritics will ultimately gravitate to the environmental warning that Thiru’s text mobilizes.

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