Old Wives' Tales

by Julie Zhou

In this brilliant sliding doors debut, a Chinese American couple's love story is told and retold

Elizabeth and Simon are newly married. Elizabeth is waiting for her green card and spends the winter in Chicago staining her fingers with pomegranate seeds, dreaming of home.

Elizabeth and Simon can’t get pregnant, and something unseen is leaving bruises on Elizabeth’s body as she sleeps, making rest impossible.

Elizabeth and Simon are having a new baby, and as they convert a closet into a nursery, Elizabeth is cursed with a magical second sight.

In these ten linked stories, echoing oral traditions from around the world, Julie Zhou re-spins old wives’ from Chinese folklore to nursery rhymes, from the myth of Persephone to “The Princess and the Pea.” The result is an astonishing feat of storytelling that reimagines fairy tale and reality, making both come to exuberant life on the page.

224 pages, Paperback

Expected publication March 9, 2027

About the author

Julie Zhou was born in Madison, Wisconsin, and despite summers spent in Shanghai and a fleeting love affair with New England, she has always found her way back to the Midwest. These days, she lives with a household of chosen family in Saint Paul, Minnesota, where she serves as a freelance writer for organizations working towards reproductive and gender justice, food justice, prison abolition, and the many intersections of those movements. She cultivates plants poorly, recipes well, anxieties often, and social media not at all.

Reviews

[Cat · Rating 4 out of 5]

*Marked as 4 stars but more like 4.5 that had to be rounded down for the sake of Goodreads rating system

A collection of short stories featuring different versions of the same characters, who spill over from the mundane to the fantastical. This book was a joy to read and reads like a book that would be called a modern classic. There's an intermingling of genres that makes it hard to pin down. There's elements of horror, if not only for the dancing shadow whose origins are unknown, and elements of the fantastical that grow and grow until the very last story, where you feel as if you have been pulled right into a fairy tale. Starting this book you think it is something more of a literary fiction and that the 'wives tales' are just going to be things that inspire the plot, but the further you read, the deeper you delve into a world quite removed from the ordinary.

Character wise, I really enjoyed that each chapter felt entirely separate but were so connected through both Elizabeth and Simon. It was like getting to see the many different lives that versions of them live and gave me a very alternate reality type feel. I will say it did confuse me at first and I thought I had missed something when I moved onto a new chapter and realised Elizabeth and Simon's story had totally changed, I scrolled back to check I hadn't been hasty in reading and then realised what was happening.

The writing itself, I felt, was very lyical and the prose were beautiful. There were lines and lines that made me feel like I was reading a new favourite of mine — which is also where I felt I was reading a modern classic, it felt like something that everyone could find appreciation in.

Overall, I really enjoyed this one and am very excited to see what comes next from this author!

Thank you to NetGalley, the publisher, and the author for this free uncorrected digital ARC in exchange for an honest review.

[Jen Grá · Rating 5 out of 5]

Elizabeth and Simon's story is retold in a range of short stories, borrowing from different lyrical traditions. They are all different but hold fragments of one another to create the most captivating book. From the fantastical to the mundane, it is beautifully written and emotionally poignant.
Thanks to VERVE books and NetGalley for the advanced copy in exchange for an honest review.