Stephen Hong Sohn's Blog

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Written by Stephen Hong Sohn
Edited by Sam Higgins


As you know, we always throw in a title from other groups in order to cast a wide net and continue to operate with some element of inclusivity. We figured it would be a good opportunity to review Percival Everett’s James (Doubleday, 2024), the recent Pulitzer Prize winner. It’s been ages since I read The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and James is purported to be a kind of revisionist telling, told from the perspective of Huck’s friend, Jim, who is also a slave on the run. In any case, here is that marketing description:

“When Jim overhears that he is about to be sold to a man in New Orleans, separated from his wife and daughter forever, he runs away until he can formulate a plan. Meanwhile, Huck has faked his own death to escape his violent father. As all readers of American literature know, thus begins the dangerous and transcendent journey by raft down the Mississippi River toward the elusive and unreliable promise of the Free States and beyond. Brimming with the electrifying humor and lacerating observations that have made Everett a literary icon, this brilliant and tender novel radically illuminates Jim’s agency, intelligence, and compassion as never before. James is destined to be a major publishing event and a cornerstone of twenty-first-century American literature.”

Well, I have to say, I was absolutely gobsmacked by this novel! One of the best I’ve read in a while, partly because I just love revisionist literary works. Some of my favorite novels—Monique Truong’s The Book of Salt (which offers a counter to some of the writings of Gertrude Stein and the Alice B. Toklas cookbook) and Nghi Vo’s The Chosen and the Beautiful (a revision of The Great Gatsby from Jordan Baker’s perspective, who also happens to be Asian American in a fictional world filled with magic)—operate in this vein, and it’s so interesting to see a narrative taken from an entirely different perspective. In those long-ago days, I feel as though the only real interiority we got in Huck Finn was the titular character, who seemed a bit naïve, but over the course of the narrative starts to realize the darker ways of the world, whether it comes in the form of human bondage, con men, or what have you. But Jim remains a sort of flat character and is certainly not the protagonist in that work. So, we get a delicious retelling from Jim’s perspective, which gives you the expansive first-person interiority that so many readers may not have realized that they wanted but so desired. In this novel, you begin to see how Everett is playing with the historical framing of slaves as well as their intellect.

This text clarifies how so many African Americans employ code switching in order to survive, communicating in one way to the dominant white community and in another with fellow blacks. This mode of networking and insidership is sometimes complicated by the fact of passing, but their ability to speak to each other in coded variations serves as an instrumental tool not only for surviving but also occasionally the mode by which they flourish even in oppressive circumstances. Everett dives deeply into this form of representational corrective and gives the titular James (aka Jim) the kind of heroic arc that is both historically and representationally reparative. There is a moment in this text, especially in those concluding pages, where a reader of a particular type might not believe how it all ends. Indeed, a reader might pause to consider whether or not such an outcome is plausible, but I do believe that such suspicions would miss the point here. James is not only rewriting the past but also writing for this particular moment, when we need to see that oppressive structures of power can sometimes be partially skirted around and that resistance and revolution, however minor in its manifestation, can yet become a mode by which slavery is momentarily destabilized. Given the trials and tribulations faced by so many black characters in this novel, it is the kind of logical ending that we need, both then and now.

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Posted by: samhiggins



Written by Stephen Hong Sohn
Edited by Sam Higgins

For a while, I had kept up with every single one of Yiyun Li’s publications, but the radical increase in Asian American lit meant that I started to fall behind. I’ve missed, for instance, The Book of Goose, but when Things in Nature Merely Grow (FSG, 2025) was announced, I knew I had to read it. The topic of this creative nonfiction publication is obviously harrowing (for lack of a better word):

“Yiyun Li’s remarkable, defiant work of radical acceptance as she considers the loss of her son James.”

“There is no good way to say this,” Yiyun Li writes at the beginning of this book. “There is no good way to state these facts, which must be acknowledged. My husband and I had two children and lost them both: Vincent in 2017, at sixteen, James in 2024, at nineteen. Both chose suicide, and both died not far from home.”

There is no good way to say this—because words fall short. It takes only an instant for death to become fact, “a single point in a timeline.” Living now on this single point, Li turns to thinking, reasoning, and searching for words that might hold a place for James. Li does what she can: “doing the things that work,” including not just writing but gardening, reading Camus and Wittgenstein, learning the piano, and living thinkingly alongside death. This is a book for James, but it is not a book about grieving or mourning. As Li writes, “The verb that does not die is to be. Vincent was, is, and will always be Vincent. James was and is and will always be James. We were, are, and will always be their parents. There is no now and then, now and later, only now and now and now and now.” Things in Nature Merely Grow is a testament to Li’s indomitable spirit.” Hmmm. I’m not sure if she would have approved of the last line of this marketing description. There is no triumphal tone to this work. The title really says it all. The other key element is that Li is not a fan of the word “grief” or “grieving.”

Once you get further into the book, Li discusses her beef with the terms, given that they potentially imply a kind of limited condition that will eventually be over. Li lives in something called the “abyss,” which is always in the now. While the book does explore the death of both children, Li does make it clear that this book is a way to engage with James’s death. Li writes a book in the aftermath of Vincent’s death, a tough novel called Where Reasons End. It’s been a while since I read it, but that one was more or less structured about a mother’s conversations with her child, who has passed away. It’s not a ghost thing, but rather a kind of philosophical approach toward life and death. The novel’s germination came partly from Li’s understanding of her first son as someone who is very invested in feelings and emotion. For Li, the same kind of book cannot be written for James precisely because he is more withdrawn and more logical. Li calls Vincent someone who lives feelingly, while James is someone who lives thinkingly. In this respect, Li essentially states there is no way to write properly for James in terms of the representational terrain because of this aspect of his personality. He cannot be recovered in the same way, nor could Li even venture to do so. For Li, then, this creative nonfictional work is the closest she can venture to him in the wake of his death. The other things I appreciated were when Li includes important missives and perspectives made my friends and loved ones, who help Li and her husband through different things that come up related to James’s death. They often speak with the kind of bluntness that one might need, even at such devastating moments.

There is one final section that I found the most powerful: the parts where Li calls out all of those who could not properly consider the state that Li and her husband were in and who reached out in violent ways. One example is when someone connects with Li to express condolences about her son’s passing and then mentions something about how they have a child who is also a writer and that they have taken the liberty of attaching a manuscript for Li to provide feedback on. I literally gasped reading this section. Li gives people like this one a lot of grace, far more than I would have had. This creative nonfiction is a very tough read, but I can say that this work is truly extraordinary in the way that Li opens up the reading world to her abyss. It is, in this sense, what we might call a dark gift.

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Posted by: samhiggins



Written by Stephen Hong Sohn
Edited by Sam Higgins


Here we are with the review for Natasha Ngan’s Girls of Fate and Fury (Jimmy Patterson, 2021), the final installment in this trilogy! Let’s move over to that very pithy marketing blurb:

“The final pages of Girls of Storm and Shadow brought a jaw-dropping conclusion that had the fates of Lei and Wren hanging in uncertainty. But one thing was certain - the Hidden Palace was the last place that Lei would ever consider home. The trauma and tragedy she suffered behind those opulent walls would plague her forever. She could not be trapped there with the sadistic king again, especially without Wren...The last Lei saw of the girl she loved, Wren was fighting an army of soldiers in a furious battle to the death. With the two girls torn apart and each in terrorizing peril, will they find each other again or have their destinies diverged forever?”

Lei is trapped back at the Demon King’s Palace, while Wren is figuring out how to forge ahead with the plan to depose the Demon King. Naturally, Ngan has to bifurcate the narrative perspectives, so we get Lei’s standard first person (my favorite just because I always find this viewpoint style to be immersive) and then Wren’s third person. Ngan basically has to figure out a way to get the two back together, so Wren’s section really deals with how she is rallying the troops together to try to get enough military support to take over the Demon King. Lei’s part involves just trying to stay alive.

The only benefit of being back in the Palace is that she’s back with the other surviving Paper Girls from book one, so we’re treated to the reunion with Chenna, Zhen, Zhin, Aoki, and Blue. Aoki is the real issue here because she’s basically become smitten with the Demon King and actually finds Lei’s presence there to be an issue because Lei has become a rival. The Demon King has not killed Lei because she’s become known around the kingdom as the moonchosen, and so it’s important to have her in his orbit for the larger support of others. Lei is eventually forced to become a pawn in the Demon King’s quest to retain power. In this process, she finds out that the Demon Queen has become pregnant. The issue is that she’s as much of a prisoner as Lei and the paper girls are, so Lei realizes that she not only has to save the paper girls but the Demon Queen as well. Eventually, the climactic battle occurs, with Wren trying to breach the Palace, and Lei leading an internal revolution from within the Palace. In this process, a number of lives are lost. Most notably, Chenna is killed, which leaves a lasting mark on Lei.

On Wren’s side, Merrin ends up sacrificing himself. Shifu Caen is killed by Lei so that he can avoid being tortured further. Finally, Ketai Hanno ends up dying in the final major battle. I was glad for a character like Nitta to make it, and if I have one beef about this series, it’s that so many of the minor ally characters end up dying. Even Nitta undergoes significant harm, as she becomes paralyzed. Fittingly, Lei gets to kill the Demon King, and readers will cheer at this moment. Ngan also takes a decent amount of time wrapping up storylines, which I very much appreciated. Ngan doesn’t treat the paper girls as discardable characters. In fact, we see that they develop a kind of alternative family in the wake of leaving the Palace, with all of them choosing to be together. The other issue is the reconciliation between Lei and Wren. Given all that they have been through and Wren’s sometimes questionable decision-making (e.g., taking the life of someone to fuel her magic), their relationship has been on the rocks. Ngan takes time to figure out how to make this reconnection feel earned. The best thing about these YA trilogies is that they ultimately try to imagine a more just future. Even as some may cast aside these books as lowbrow entertainment, their political messages seem ever more important in these turbulent times.

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Posted by: samhiggins



Written by Stephen Hong Sohn
Edited by Sam Higgins

So, I eventually got back on the train to finish reviewing this series, and I continue with Natasha Ngan’s Girls of Storm and Shadow (Jimmy Patterson, 2019), which I was really happy with. It doesn’t suffer from some of the similar “middle syndrome” trilogy issues, for which I was really happy about. Let’s move to the very pithy marketing description:

“Lei, the naive country girl who became a royal courtesan, is now known as the Moonchosen, the commoner who managed to do what no one else could. But slaying the cruel monarch wasn't the culmination of her destiny — it was just the beginning. Now Lei, with a massive bounty on her head, must travel the kingdom with her warrior love Wren to gain support from the far-flung rebel clans. Meanwhile, a plot to eliminate the rebel uprising is taking shape, fueled by dark magic and vengeance. Will Lei succeed in her quest to overthrow the monarchy, or will she succumb to the sinister magic that seeks to destroy her bond with Wren, and their very lives?”

I’m not really sure why these descriptions are SO short, but hey, I guess they won’t keep things under wraps because it is, after all, a trilogy. Yet, I am providing my spoiler warnings here, so look away unless you don’t mind getting to know more of the plot elements. What the description doesn’t tell you is that our Demon King from book 1 somehow survived, and he is using his fleet of magic-wielding shamans to heal him. He hasn’t gotten away completely unscathed, as he has lost one eye. At the same time, Lei and Wren are now actively planning how they can take over the kingdom. Of course, they at first think that they only have to corral support from the remaining clans and rival groups jockeying for power, but things obviously are complicated when they realize that the king is alive. The best thing about this installment is that Ngan really muddies the waters about who is actually the villain. We’re obviously against the Demon King, but little do we realize that Wren and her father, Ketai Hanno, have some questionable ethics in terms of what they will do to ensure that the reign of the king is ended for good. Ketai Hanno’s basic ethos about warfare and conflict is that the ends justify the means, which also includes the potential sacrifice of their allies in case that is needed.

The second-best thing about this installment is the new introduction of these “allies.” There are two leopard demons, Nitta and Bo, who provide the much-needed comic relief, along with Merrin, a bird-demon. Finally, there is also the advisor to the Hanno clan named Shifu Caen. At one point, when the group is in a major jam, Hiro sacrifices himself in order to fuel Wren’s magical abilities as a Xia warrior. Ketai Hanno wouldn’t bat an eyelash about Hiro doing this because Wren, given her magical abilities, is so important to the cause, but Lei, being the moral compass of the novel, obviously has a problem with people dying for any reason. Bo will also die in a major sea-based battle, which will be the final straw for Merrin, who decides to leave the group after these multiple deaths. The group is ultimately splintered by the conclusion, with Nitta, Lei, and Merrin separated from Wren and the others in the heat of the battle. As is typical in the second installment in a young adult trilogy, the conclusion is pretty dark, and this aspect is very true for this series. Ngan also introduces a bunch of second-person perspectives, which I found less interesting, but it was also crucial for the plot. For instance, we have to know what is going on back in the Demon King’s area, so we get some third-person perspectives of characters out that way. The combination of complicating the villain and these new allies made this second installment a really entertaining read.

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Posted by: uttararangarajan

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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Posted by: uttararangarajan

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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Posted by: uttararangarajan

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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Posted by: uttararangarajan

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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Posted by: uttararangarajan

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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Posted by: uttararangarajan

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. 

 

Buy the Book Here 

 

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