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Written by Stephen Hong Sohn
Edited by Uttara Rangarajan

On the way home from a longer plane ride, I was worried about not being able to have enough to read, and I sort of didn’t want to start a new book in the middle of a flight, so I brought along a YA series. It ended up being a good idea, because I ended up finishing Natasha Ngan’s Girls of Paper and Fire (Jimmy Patterson, 2018) and getting through part of the second book in the series, which I will review as well. As per usual, let us allow the marketing description do some work for us: “In this richly developed fantasy, Lei is a member of the Paper caste, the lowest and most persecuted class of people in Ikhara. She lives in a remote village with her father, where the decade-old trauma of watching her mother snatched by royal guards for an unknown fate still haunts her. Now, the guards are back and this time it’s Lei they’re after: the girl with the golden eyes whose rumored beauty has piqued the king’s interest. Over weeks of training in the opulent but oppressive palace, Lei and eight other girls learns the skills and charm that befit a king’s consort. There, she does the unthinkable: she falls in love. Her forbidden romance becomes enmeshed with an explosive plot that threatens her world’s entire way of life. Lei, still the wide-eyed country girl at heart, must decide how far she’s willing to go for justice and revenge.”

This description is probably too pithy for the level of world building that is required in Ngan’s work. Again, this one is part of that Asian-inspired high fantasy trend which is absolutely everywhere on the speculative fiction side. In this case, Ngan consistently uses pan-Asian elements, especially forms of dress (things like cheongsams and saris come up consistently) to let us know we’re not too far off from a place like Asia, even though there are of course demons and part-demons around. The power dynamics of this fictional world involve three castes. The highest caste is called the moon caste. These individuals are demons, who are associated with animals; there are bird-looking demons or leopard looking demons, and they have enhanced strength, size, and fighting skills. The middle group is the steel caste, which seem to be human-demon hybrids. The lowest caste is called paper, and therein lies all the humans, many of whom are enslaved to the moon caste. Every year there is a ceremony in which 8 teenage girls are taken to the palace of the demon-king, where they basically are instituted as his concubines. When the novel opens, the ceremony selecting the eight paper girls has already been completed, but a general spies the main character, Lei, and decides to take her, thinking that he can present Lei as a sort of ninth gift for the king. Because of Lei’s beautiful golden eyes, they make an exception and add a ninth girl. This book has a lot of really tough elements to it, the primary of which is the occurrence of sexual assault, given the fact that the girls are forced to be concubines. Ngan is well aware of the heft of this book, and there is a lengthy author’s note at the end of the text, but I would have preferred that note at the beginning, because if you aren’t careful about reading paratexts for this novel, you don’t even know what’s going to happen. I do think that this book might not have been published in this current moment, with such heightened scrutiny over book content. Despite the sensitive content, Ngan’s created a very spirited heroine, one in whom readers of the young adult paranormal romance genre will find much to like, and they will root for her on as she finds a way to best the king and, at the same time, manage to spark a same-sex romance with one of the other individuals selected by the ceremony. Despite the seemingly revolutionary conclusion, it’s clear that Ngan has surprises in store for readers, and that the work of deposing an evil king is far from over.

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Written by Stephen Hong Sohn
Edited by Uttara Rangarajan

So, this review is going to be a very short one for Kimiko Guthrie’s Block Seventeen (Blackstone Publishing, 2020). A different student wanted to read this book with me, so I am reviewing it just to give a little bit more coverage to independent and smaller presses. Blackstone’s history, which you can find out about it by clicking on the link below and browsing around the site, is an interesting one, and I’m always impressed by the ways that independent presses manage to grow and thrive. Let’s let the official marketing description move us along: “Akiko ‘Jane’ Thompson, a half-Japanese, half-Caucasian woman in her midthirties, is attempting to forge a quietly happy life in the Bay Area with her fiancé, Shiro. But after a bizarre car accident, things begin to unravel. An intruder ransacks their apartment but takes nothing, leaving behind only cryptic traces of his or her presence. Shiro, obsessed with government surveillance, risks their security in a plot to expose the misdeeds of his employer, the TSA. Jane’s mother has seemingly disappeared, her existence only apparent online. Jane wants to ignore these worrisome disturbances until a cry from the past robs her of all peace, forcing her to uncover a long-buried family trauma. As Jane searches for her mother, she confronts her family’s fraught history in America. She learns how the incarceration of Japanese Americans fractured her family, and how persecution and fear can drive a person to commit desperate acts.”

I found this novel pretty frustrating, even though the general conceit is interesting and the political dynamics of it are quite compelling. Guthrie’s part of a really talented generation of writers mining the incarceration experience in that latent way that comes with the territory of something traumatic being repressed. In this sense, we can add this work to other fictions produced by a bevy of writers, including but in no way limited to Julie Otsuka, David Mura, and Karen Tei Yamashita, who have explored the legacy of incarceration as it moves through time and impacts successive generations. This aspect of the novel is its most important. At the same time, readers may find themselves stymied by the slow progression of Jane’s self-awareness. Indeed, at times, I felt sometimes a couple steps ahead of her and wished that she would begin to fill in the dots that Guthrie makes already quite evident via the use of italics sections that take place in the distant incarceration past. The hallmark of Toni Morrison’s Beloved is all over this text, but Guthrie is hamstrung by Jane’s general malaise, which ultimately causes the narrative to burn more slowly than it should.

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Written by Stephen Hong Sohn
Edited by Uttara Rangarajan

Ah, so I’m lucky to have some former students who like to be in sort of informal book clubs! One such engagement leads me to review Amitava Kumar’s Immigrant, Montana (Knopf, 2018). Kumar has published quite a bit, but I’m not sure I have had a chance to review his work until this one, and what a doozy. Autofiction is a complicated, complex beast. Let’s go with the marketing description at this point: “Carrying a single suitcase, Kailash arrives in post-Reagan America from India to attend graduate school. As he begins to settle into American existence, Kailash comes under the indelible influence of a charismatic professor, and also finds his life reshaped by a series of very different women with whom he recklessly falls in and out of love. Looking back on the formative period of his youth, Kailash’s wry, vivid perception of the world he is in, but never quite of, unfurls in a brilliant melding of anecdote and annotation, picture and text. Building a case for himself, both as a good man in spite of his flaws and as an American in defiance of his place of birth, Kailash weaves a story that is at its core an incandescent investigation of love—despite, beyond, and across dividing lines.”

My former student and I were initially attracted to the title since there isn’t a place called Immigrant, Montana. We did think though that Montana would feature more heavily in this novel, but it doesn’t. This novel is more of the campus genre type, with the text moving through Kailash’s experience in graduate school and the various relationships that he has with women, as he moves through his dissertation writing. Many of the chapters are structured around these relationships. In “Jennifer,” we see how Kailash ends up in what seems to be a casual relationship with a bookstore employee. The relationship eventually gets complicated when Jennifer gets pregnant. She eventually decides to get an abortion, with Kailash not fully understanding that his relative apathy toward Jennifer’s pregnancy serves to suggest that Kailash is not serious enough about their long-term potential. In “Nina,” we see Kailash’s first relationship with someone who is also in graduate school and all the complications that might arise out of that dynamic. Whereas one might have described Kailash as somewhat aloof with Jennifer, the opposite is true with Nina. Kailash struggles to figure out how serious their connection might be, and eventually it becomes apparent that Nina does not seem to be as invested in their romance as Kailash is. With “Cai,” it would seem that Kailash has finally met someone who might be the appropriate match. The problem, as we discover, is that Kailash, has been an unreliable narrator pretty much all along. Kailash, while seemingly being invested in romance, has often had dalliances on the side, and we begin to see the catastrophic emergence of this habit with the way that his connection with Cai ultimately implodes. As someone who has gone to graduate school, I found this particular novel quite difficult to get through just in terms of subject matter. Yet, Kumar finds much richness in the messiness and the sensitivity of these connections, so he makes the most of these campus dynamics. His portrayal of major professors in a given program seems to verge somewhat on hagiography, but that might seem appropriate from the purview of the ways that graduate students tend to put their mentors on pedestals. You might be wondering: what about dissertation writing? Well, Kumar knows as well as anyone else that a novel that covered the trials and tribulations of this process would not be very compelling to read as entertainment, so he generally avoids giving us too much information about this process and for that, we in the know, thank him.

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Written by Stephen Hong Sohn
Edited by Uttara Rangarajan

I seem to have slightly overdone the creative nonfiction thing because I ended up reading four fictional works in a row, and I’m in the middle of a fifth. The first I am reviewing is actually a re-read of a novel: Tiffany Tsao’s The Majesties (Atria, 2020). I read this not long after the book came out, but I realize that I never actually reviewed it, so here I am. I can’t believe how much I forgot, especially the last chapter with the major, Shyamalanesque reveal (no, she doesn’t see dead people, but there’s something like that, and I will spoil it all). Let’s let the marketing description propel us further: “Gwendolyn and Estella have always been as close as sisters can be. Growing up in a wealthy, eminent, and sometimes deceitful family, they’ve relied on each other for support and confidence. But now Gwendolyn is lying in a coma, the sole survivor of Estella’s poisoning of their whole clan. As Gwendolyn struggles to regain consciousness, she desperately retraces her memories, trying to uncover the moment that led to this shocking act. Was it their aunt’s mysterious death at sea? Estella’s unhappy marriage to a dangerously brutish man? Or were the shifting loyalties and unspoken resentments at the heart of their opulent world too much to bear? Can Gwendolyn, at last, confront the carefully buried mysteries in their family’s past and the truth about who she and her sister really are?”

This description does not provide much information about the ethnic and transnational elements of this text. Most of the story concerns the rich Sulinado family who are Chinese Indonesians. Estella and Gwendolyn seem to be close sisters, though Estella ends up marrying a man that distances her from the family at large. The marriage is still supported by the Sulinados because Estella’s husband is none other than the son of another rich family, but that family’s wealth craters. For her part, Gwendolyn ends up managing one side of the family business, which involves animated jewelry. If that phrase doesn’t make sense to you, that’s okay. Animated jewelry is exactly what it sounds like. Imagine that the necklace you’re wearing can briefly take flight and then return around your neck. That’s exactly what Gwendolyn’s business designs. To make these unique creations, Gwendolyn actually has to cultivate a kind of fungus that is known to make insects turn into zombies, as their mobile functions and actions are taken over. The whole point is that the fungus can be used to move things and thus make jewelry in new ways. Not surprisingly, the venture is a success and Gwendolyn’s business thrives. Estella is way more ambivalent about her family’s affluence and searches for an aunt who may or may not be alive. Taking Gwendolyn with her, Estella finds out where this aunt is hiding, and they discover the very complicated and tragic story that led her to break complete ties with the Sulinados. Suffice is to say that wealth brings a lot of privilege, including the possibility that the family can orchestrate the apocalyptic ending of any relationship that it does not approve of (in this respect, it does remind me of something from C. Pam Zhang’s Land of Milk and Honey). Now, to that ending (and another spoiler warning)! So, the novel is written en medias res and sort of anachronically. The last chapter gets us to the point essentially of where we started the novel, with the entire Sulinado family, sans Gwendolyn and Estella, dying What we discover is that Gwendolyn and Estella are actually*drum roll please*the same person! Yes, so we have one of those split identity stories that I’ve seen a number of times (see An Na’s The Place Between Breaths and Emiko Jean’s We’ll Never Be Apart for variations on this plot). I wasn’t entirely sold on it, but hey that’s just me! Unfortunately, when I looked up some of the links to this book, a lot of the reviews mentioned Crazy Rich Asians. This novel is definitely not that one, and I think anyone who comes into it thinking that it would be the same has not read any of the actual marketing materials. Tsao has written transnational, Asian American class satire, one that drives home the ethical quandaries that derive out of affluence.

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Written by Stephen Hong Sohn
Edited by Uttara Rangarajan

It’s been a little bit of time since I reviewed anything by S.L. Huang, so it was great to be able to spend the last week reading her high fantasy book The Water Outlaws (Tor, 2023), which is a retelling of the classic Chinese novel Water Margin. Some names are the same; others are changed, and Huang takes the core idea from the earlier text and then remixes it with a lot of speculative elements: “Lin Chong is an expert arms instructor, training the Emperor's soldiers in sword and truncheon, battle axe and spear, lance and crossbow. Unlike bolder friends who flirt with challenging the unequal hierarchies and values of Imperial society, she believes in keeping her head down and doing her job. Until a powerful man with a vendetta rips that carefully-built life away. Disgraced, tattooed as a criminal, and on the run from an Imperial Marshall who will stop at nothing to see her dead, Lin Chong is recruited by the Bandits of Liangshan. Mountain outlaws on the margins of society, the Liangshan Bandits proclaim a belief in justice—for women, for the downtrodden, for progressive thinkers a corrupt Empire would imprison or destroy. They’re also murderers, thieves, smugglers, and cutthroats. Apart, they love like demons and fight like tigers. Together, they could bring down an empire.”

Admittedly, I haven’t read Water Margin, so I don’t know too much about how to read this text as a kind of revision and a reimagining of it, but I did really enjoy it simply on the level of the plot. This novel does have a lot of gore, torture, and death, so the author includes a trigger warning early on, which I felt was more than fair and warranted. What was maddening about this book is the level of corruption and self-interest that motivates powerful governmental officials. The plot gets into motion because Lin Chong, a talented instructor of arms, basically refuses to be sexually assaulted by a high-level bureaucrat named Gao Qiu. Lin Chong is labeled a traitor to the empire under a false claim made by Gao Qiu, and she is originally slated to be executed. A plea by her friend Lu Junyi reduces the sentence, and she will be sent to complete hard labor in a prison camp, but what Lu Junyi doesn’t know is that Gao Qiu is already a step ahead and has planned for the guards who are escorting her to the prison camp to execute Lin Chong before she events get there. Lu Junyi had managed to send Lu Da, a lower-level military fighter to ensure that Lin Chong makes it to the prison camp, and it is Lu Da’s intervention (and the power of something called god’s teeth) that allows Lin Chong to survive that trip. Lin Chong ends up convalescing amongst the ragtag bandits of Liangshan. Back in the Empire, Cai Jiang, another high-level bureaucrat, is focusing on some experiments related to the scholar’s stone, which seems to be a kind of variation of the power that emanates from god’s teeth. Cai Jiang pushes Lu Junyi into this task, and it is Cai Jiang’s quest to harness this power that ends up the biggest source of antagonism for the Liangshan bandits. The Liangshan bandits end up getting into a tussle related to a group of soldiers that Cai Jiang needs to gain more resources, and so Cai Jiang ends up targeting them. The concluding arc sees Cai Jiang essentially use Gao Qiu as a pawn so that he can use the power of god’s teeth to destroy the Liangshan bandits. For their part, the Liangshan bandits put up a great fight, and the final sequence is impressively paced.

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Written by Stephen Hong Sohn
Edited by Uttara Rangarajan

This one’s going to be a very short review of Mako Yoshikawa’s Secrets of the Sun. I managed to find a relatively affordable used copy of this one and wanted to give this book a shoutout. We reviewed one of Yoshikawa’s novels on AALF a long time ago, and I was really happy to see that she had published another full-length work. Let’s move to the marketing description: “Mako Yoshikawa’s father, Shoichi, was a man of contradictions. He grew up fabulously wealthy in prewar Japan but spent his final years living in squalor; he was a proper Japanese man who craved society’s approval yet cross-dressed; he was a brilliant Princeton University physicist and renowned nuclear fusion researcher, yet his career withered as his severe bipolar disorder tightened its grip. And despite his generosity and charisma, he was often violent and cruel toward those closest to him. Yoshikawa adored him, feared him, and eventually cut him out of her life, but after he died, she was driven to try to understand this extraordinarily complex man. In Secrets of the Sun, her search takes her through everything from the Asian American experience of racism to her father’s dedication to fusion energy research, from mental illness to the treatment of women in Japan, and more. Yoshikawa gradually discovers a life filled with secrets, searching until someone from her father’s past at last provides the missing piece in her knowledge: the story of his childhood. Secrets of the Sun is about a daughter’s mission to uncover her father’s secrets and to find closure in the shadow of genius, mental illness, and violence.”

I’ve slowly been making my way through a lot of Mad Creek titles, which is an imprint out of Ohio State University Press, and I’ve really loved them all. This one is no different despite being one of the most challenging, because Yoshikawa is truly working hard to find a way to understand her very difficult father who suffers from bipolar disorder. Despite the complicated feelings that Yoshikawa has for her father—and she indeed questions whether or not she has any truly deep feelings for him given their history—the extraordinary work of care is evident here, especially in the way that Yoshikawa works painstakingly to find out what might have driven her father to make some of the choices that he did. This investigative work will ultimately take her to Japan, where critical information from her father’s sister (her aunt) leads her to realize that she has not fully understood her his family background A stunning memoir that burns brightly and exposes the multifaceted contours of an Asian American family.

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