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alliearend

Publisher: Small Beer Press (February 23, 2021)

Length: 248 pages

ISBN: 9781618731821

Adult Horror/Fantasy/Science Fiction

I’ll always have a soft spot for Small Beer Press; it was the first press to re-release Ted Chiang’s story collection. In this post, I'll cover some of my favorite stories from a more recent release of theirs: Isabel Yap’s absolutely outstanding debut Never Have I Ever.

“Good Girls” opens the collection with a reconsideration of the Filipino folk figure the manananggal, which is a kind of female vampiric construct. In this story, Yap employs the manananggal to explore the friendship between Kaye and Sara, two girls who attend boarding school together. The story moves dips in and out of two temporalities: in one, Kaye deals with a hunger that pushes her to locate and feed off the unborn. In the other, Kaye and Sara attempt to forge a connection despite the fact that Kaye might be considered to be a monster.

“A Cup of Salt Tears” takes us to Japan where the main character, Makino, takes care of her dying husband, Tetsuya. Makino strikes a deal with a kappa, a kind of water spirit, to help save Tetsuya. The deal is successful, but Makino must also confront the complexities of her strange relationship with Kawataro, the water spirit.

“Milagroso” pushes us into a science fictional terrain in which a Filipino family lives in a future in which most foods have been genetically modified to the point where what is considered miraculous is the consumption of natural products.

My favorite story in the collection is hands down “A Spell for Foolish Hearts” which follows the on-again-off-again romance between two coworkers, Karl and Patrick. This story is set in San Francisco and showcases Yap’s masterful understanding of the cityscape. There’s startups, coffee, and lots of fog, and then there’s the slow burn connection between Patrick and Karl. This story made me wistful for my time in the Bay Area!

In “Have You Heard the One about Anamaria Marquez,” the collection moves into a more traditional ghost story in which school girls must consider the possibility of a vengeful apparition stalking the school grounds.

“Hurricane Heels (We Go Down Dancing)” is a fun one. This spritely story explores the lives of a group of women after they discover they have superpowers, as well as their desire to balance a normal life alongside their duties as superpowered women.

“All the Best of Dark and Bright” reimagines a pre-colonial origin story of the first man and woman.

One of the darkest but most engaging stories ends the collection. In “A Canticle of Lost Girls,” Yap tackles the traumas that can emerge when encountering the institution of Catholic schooling. The story employs supernatural spirits to enact a form of retributive justice.

Every story is outstanding, and I certainly plan to use this book in future courses. I haven’t read many texts which so deftly explore the murky boundaries between Filipinx folklore and speculative conceits, so it’s a real treat to have this book out in the world. A definite must-read!

Buy the book HERE.

Review by Stephen Hong Sohn
Edited by Allie Arend

alliearend

Publisher: HarperTeen (November 10, 2020)
Length: 480 pages
ISBN: 9780062821904
Reading Age: 14 and up

So, I saved reading this particular title for a time when I needed something entertaining. The Ever Cruel Kingdom is the second book in Chupeco’s Never Tilting World duology, following the titular primary installment, which I was a big fan of. This duology reminds me a bit of Kendare Blake’s Three Dark Crowns series which revolves around a set of sisters who, as in every generation, must battle each other to the death in order to ascend to the throne. In Chupeco’s duology, two goddesses are born each generation, one of whom must be sacrificed so that the world, known as Aeon, may persist. Let’s let the official marketing description give us some background:

“After a treacherous journey and a life-shattering introduction to a twin neither knew she had, sisters Haidee and Odessa expected to emerge from the Great Abyss to a world set right. But though the planet is turning once again, the creatures of the abyss refuse to rest without another goddess’s sacrifice. To break the cycle, Haidee and Odessa need answers that lie beyond the seven gates of the underworld, within the Cruel Kingdom itself. The shadows of the underworld may hunger to tear them apart, but these two sisters are determined to heal their world—together.”

The description centers the twin sisters, Haidee and Odessa, but this novel actually boasts at least four different narrators; in addition to the twins, we get the viewpoints of both Haidee’s romantic interest, Arjun, and Odessa’s romantic interest, Lan. What I found most entertaining about this work is Chupeco’s ability to shift between so many first person perspectives while also maintaining the momentum of the narrative AND carving out the individuality of each storyteller. Each storyteller has their own idiosyncratic way of looking at the world. Odessa, for instance, is constantly fighting off the forces of evil that have pushed her to accept some gifts from the underworld. Arjun is a plucky, devoted hero, who is always up for an adventure, while Lan is a fierce and protective catseye, an individual with particular powers of healing and emotive connection. Haidee is probably the most optimistic of the bunch, with a sunny disposition.

The surrounding cast of characters is likewise fun, and includes Lisette, a character from Arjun’s ethnic background who also finds herself attracted to Haidee. Vanya, Haidee’s suitor, from the Golden City, has one of the best character arcs. I absolutely loved this minor character because he’s a lover and scholar of texts; he certainly could have been an English major if he didn’t hail from such a fantastically configured storyworld.

I’ll pause here for my requisite spoiler warning, so do not read beyond this line unless you want to find out more about what happens.

The conclusion I found to be particularly fitting. Readers definitely do not want to see Haidee or Odessa go the way of the dinosaur, so it was a huge relief to see it was Latona, Haidee and Odessa’s biological mom (Odessa was raised by Asteria, Odessa’s aunt and Latona’s sister), and Asteria take the hit for the problems set up by previous generations. Chupeco puts her own spin on the myths of Orpheus and Eurydice as well as Hades and Persephone, as the twins along with their allies travel into the underworld to seek a solution to Aeon’s troubles. The novel ends with some serious losses and several complications, but the solution to the need for a sacrifice is clever, logical, and fulfilling for readers.

Upon listening to a podcast this morning (in late July of 2021), Chupeco apparently has about four books in the works. How lucky are we!

Buy the book HERE.

Review by Stephen Hong Sohn
Edited by Allie Arend

alliearend

Publisher: Henry Holt (September 01, 2020)

Length: 368 pages

ISBN13: 9781627796415

Reading Age: 14 and up

I had a rough day one Saturday in the summer of 2021, so what I needed was something a little bit different. It had been awhile since I read a graphic novel, so I picked up Mike Curato’s Flamer, which turned out to be an absolutely wondrous but also painful read. Let’s let the pithy marketing description get this review started:

“It's the summer between middle school and high school, and Aiden Navarro is away at camp. Everyone's going through changes—but for Aiden, the stakes feel higher. As he navigates friendships, deals with bullies, and spends time with Elias (a boy he can't stop thinking about), he finds himself on a path of self-discovery and acceptance.”

As you might have guessed , the text is an exploration of a young teenager coming to terms with his budding queer sexuality. Curato employs a Boy Scout camping trip as the canvas upon which this emotional and fraught journey is painted.

Throughout the narrative, we get glimpses into Aiden’s past: his constant feelings of alienation; his shame about his body and the fact that he is overweight; and his self-denigration of his own effeminate mannerisms, a quality further policed by his male peers. Fortunately, he does have some strong friendships, but one night he ends up crossing the line with Elias, his male crush, and he has to consider not only what this friendship means now that he has complicated it, but also what do with these same-sex feelings.

Curato’s graphic novel is particularly affecting because Aiden is such an introspective and sensitive character. He fully understands that he’s not like many of his male counterparts. He wants to fit in but he can’t make himself do so. Much of this text is dedicated to struggling with the cisgender, normative masculinity that haunts Aiden.

The other standout aspect of this graphic novel is Curato’s artwork, which is the perfect vehicle for this story. There are often long panel sequences without any words, a quality which only enhances the poetic verve of the narrative. This text is also strongly reminiscent of other protoqueer and queer coming of age narratives such as R. Zamora Linmark’s Rolling the R’s, Rakesh Satyal’s Blue Boy, and Alexander Chee’s Edinburgh. Absolutely stunning!

Buy the book HERE.

Review by Stephen Hong Sohn
Edited by Allie Arend

alliearend

Publisher: Margaret K. McElderry Books (November 17, 2020)
Length: 464 pages
ISBN13: 9781534457690
Grades: 9 and up

Chloe Gong’s These Violent Delights (Margaret K. McElderry Books, 2020), which is not to be confused with Victoria Namkung’s These Violent Delights, is an auspicious YA debut that riffs off of our favorite star-crossed Shakespearean Romance. For those of you attuned to the phrasing in Gong’s title, “these violent delights” also appears as a common refrain in HBO’s Westworld. In any case, let’s let the marketing description give us some context:

“The year is 1926, and Shanghai hums to the tune of debauchery. A blood feud between two gangs runs the streets red, leaving the city helpless in the grip of chaos. At the heart of it all is eighteen-year-old Juliette Cai, a former flapper who has returned to assume her role as the proud heir of the Scarlet Gang—a network of criminals far above the law. Their only rivals in power are the White Flowers, who have fought the Scarlets for generations. And behind every move is their heir, Roma Montagov, Juliette’s first love…and first betrayal. But when gangsters on both sides show signs of instability culminating in clawing their own throats out, the people start to whisper. Of a contagion, a madness. Of a monster in the shadows. As the deaths stack up, Juliette and Roma must set their guns—and grudges—aside and work together, for if they can’t stop this mayhem, then there will be no city left for either to rule.”

Those familiar with Romeo and Juliet will have to give Gong credit for her fun transformation of Elizabethan contexts. In 1926 Shanghai, you don’t have the Capulets and the Montagues, you instead have the Chinese gang, the Scarlet Flowers, who go by the surname Cai, against the Russian gang, the White Flowers, who go by the surname Montagov(a). Unfortunately for Gong, there wasn’t going to be an Asian last name that would approximate "Capulet," but she gets an A+ for effort here.

The novel takes a bit to get off the ground, but Gong throws in some interesting generic hybridity here. It’s not just a romance; there’s also a plague storyline AND a monster storyline to keep things interesting. The complications between Juliette and Roma are exacerbated by the political and economic dynamics of the time. Shanghai is becoming a major commercial hub. The rise of Communist influence increases tensions between the two gangs. And while Juliette and Roma dance around the fact that their gangs are rivals, they must also work together to figure out the cause of the deadly outbreak of disease.

The science fictional elements of this text were the biggest surprise for me, as Gong makes this particular narrative really reverberate alongside the COVID contexts we’re living in. The scientist for the White Flowers, a man by the name of Lourens, is Gong’s analogue for Friar Laurence—who, coincidentally, I channelled in high school in a dramatic monologue for extra credit. Gong’s Lourens is trying to figure out what the deal is with the infectious disease and how it operates. As the novel moves toward the conclusion, Juliette and Roma find a way to reconcile, while also realizing that their enemy may be more complicated than they thought. Gong’s novel benefits from juggling between both Juliette’s and Roma’s points of view, giving us a more expansive sense of what each of the gangs is up against.

The set up for part two is certainly tantalizing, and I know we’ll be looking to review Gong’s second installment as soon as it arrives! A fun, speculative reimagining of the Shakespearean play that goes beyond the source material in its depiction of 1920s Shanghai!

Buy the book HERE.

Review by Stephen Hong Sohn
Edited by Allie Arend

skim666.livejournal.com

Review of Peter Tieryas’ United States of Japan (Angry Robot 2016)

Peter Tieryas’ new science fiction novel, The United States of Japan (USJ), opens in a Japanese American prison camp in 1948, written from the perspective of internees who are by turns angry, scared, and conflicted. Then, the American soldiers disappear and the Imperial Japanese Army arrives to announce that the U.S. has surrendered in the face of attacks by mecha-like giant robots unleashed by Japan. Reactions of the newly-freed internees are mixed. I was hooked.

I’m a fan of Philip K. Dick, and as the back of the book notes, USJ takes its initial cue from the premise of The Man in the High Castle. But just as Dick’s 1963 classic reflected its own time period’s values and concerns (particularly in its fetishization of the I Ching), USJ is a text of the twenty-first century. Social forces, ideas, ideals, and texts are suffused throughout social networks, personal electronic devices (called “porticals” in the novel), and decentralized webs, and thus impossible to pin down. Yet, stubbornly, characters continue to search for meaning, connection, and justice..

The bulk of the narrative takes place in 1988 Los Angeles, in which Beniko “Ben” Ishimura, is a Captain in the Japanese Imperial Army, Office of the Censor, and Akiko Tsukino, an agent of the Tokko, or the Japanese imperial secret police. Although a talented programmer, Ben is something of a disappointment; he is the only person in his class from the Berkeley Military Academic for Games Studies who has not reached the level of colonel. As a child, Ben had turned in his parents to the authorities for speaking against the empire. But despite this early show of loyalty, he meanders through life in a state of ambivalence and borderline paranoia. Agent Akiko Tsukino, in contrast, is a true believer; in wielding the torture and bioweapons that are the tools of her trade, she finds grim righteousness as well as scorn for her weak victims.

When Ben is contacted by his former boss, General Kazuhiro Mutsuraga, about the death of the general’s daughter Claire, Akiko is sent to question him. There is an unauthorized video game circulating called the United States of America, which not only imagines that the U.S. won in 1948 but also trains people to fight to overthrow the Empire in the present. This game is tied to the George Washingtons, or GW’s, an underground resistance movement, and the now missing General Mutsuraga is suspected of having created this game. Ben, due to his proximity to the General and his facility with games, is by association also suspect. But in pursuing Mutsuraga, the GWs, and the video game, neither Ben nor Akiko – nor the reader – find what is expected.

Amid complex layers of political and personal dynamics, these initial narratives unravel to explore what it means to be mixed race, to be a cyborg, to be loyal, to be a patriot, to be a resistance fighter, to be a gamer, to a be a human being. The novel is great fun – intellectually, ethically, and aesthetically – and I’ll be pondering its implications for a while.

As other reviews have noted, the novel pays homage to Japanese pop culture as well as classic science fiction. But what resonates most with me are the political-ethical-philosophical questions raised by an early, unresolved conversation debate early in the novel:

            “Think about the way the Americans treated us. Even when we weren’t in camps, they’d always call us nips or chinks, vandalize our stores, and harass us. They think we all look the same – Chinese, Japanese, Vietnamese, Korean.”
            “But America stood for something, a dream that goes beyond race or background,” Ezekiel said.
            “Something even they didn’t believe when it came time for action.”
            “It’s what they were striving for.” (USJ, 28)

As much and more than ever, this captures the central conundrum we face in the U.S. Peter Tieryas, author of the award-winning Bald New World and Watering Heaven, has given us an Asian American sci-fi classic that draws on the best traditions of speculative fiction to meditate seriously on what any of us can/should think and do in a world of repression, surveillance, disillusionment, and uncertainty.

Buy the book here: https://www.amazon.com/United-States-Japan-Peter-Tieryas/dp/0857665332 ;

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alliearend - A Review of Isabel Yap's Never Have I Ever (Small Beer Press, 2021)
alliearend - A Review of Rin Chupeco’s The Ever Cruel Kingdom (HarperTeen, 2020)
alliearend - A Review of Mike Curato’s Flamer (Henry Holt, 2020)
alliearend - A Review of Chloe Gong's These Violent Delights (Margaret K. McElderry Books, 2020)
skim666.livejournal.com - Review of Peter Tieryas’ United States of Japan (Angry Robot 2016)

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Asian American Literature Fans

A Veritable Literary Feast

Entries tagged with asian american

A Review of Isabel Yap's Never Have I Ever (Small Beer Press, 2021)

A Review of Rin Chupeco’s The Ever Cruel Kingdom (HarperTeen, 2020)

A Review of Mike Curato’s Flamer (Henry Holt, 2020)

A Review of Chloe Gong's These Violent Delights (Margaret K. McElderry Books, 2020)

Review of Peter Tieryas’ United States of Japan (Angry Robot 2016)

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July 2025

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