Review by Booklist Review
Chang's arresting 15-story collection follows her debut novel, Days of Distraction (2020), and explores similar territory--identity and relationships. Once-upon-a-time close friendships are precisely dissected in "Klara" as college bffs expect to meet again after drifting apart and in "Cat Personalities" when close colleagues reveal true feelings about one another by describing interactions with their felines. Parent-child bonds are tested in "A Visit" when an estranged father visits his daughter in the first home she can call her own; in "Persona Development," about a pregnant woman who watches her faraway parents on video cameras; and in "Flies," featuring divorced, increasingly acrimonious parents still living together. Ominous futures are suggested in "Unknown by Unknown," about a house-sitter in a remote California location, and "She Will Be a Swimmer" in which fatherhood marks "the year when his life ends." Promising young women falter in "Li Fan," which cleverly reveals a woman's life backwards, and "To Get Rich Is Glorious," which portrays a girl "capable of so much" who decades later lands in prison. Chang's sharp observations again transform her fiction into bitingly acute truths.
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Chang (Days of Distraction) explores the meaning of home in her powerful and delightfully strange debut collection. After the 30-something narrator of "Unknown by Unknown" loses her job to a more efficient software program, she takes a month-long house-sitting gig in a luxurious Northern California home. There, she lies out on the deck as "flat and still as a corpse in a bikini" and imagines herself "slowly cooking like an animal on a spit.... as though I were dissolving.... Occasionally, the sensation frightened me, but most of the time I was relieved." The elegant and compressed "Li Fan" starts with the death of a woman named Mrs. Shum from a stroke, then tells of how she came to live in a rundown boardinghouse and collect bottles and cans. The residents of the neighborhood where she picks up the redeemables call her "the Asian recycling lady," but they don't know she used to have a home there with her husband, that they came from Wuhan, and that she once nurtured dreams of a career in government. In "A Visit," a young woman reconnects with her peripatetic father after he travels from Northern California to see her in Upstate New York. It takes getting up close to recognize him; at first, all she sees are the "curves and juts of a skull... beneath weathered skin." Chang's distinctive style and wry tone bring her characters to startling life, all the while rendering the pain of their loneliness and desire for stability in stark relief. This is a triumph. Agent: Alexa Stark, Writers House. (Aug.)
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Review by Kirkus Book Review
The author of Days of Distraction (2020) explores timeless themes in short fiction. Unemployed after being replaced by a piece of software, a woman in her 30s is burning through her severance pay, spending her days eating weed gummies and binge-watching dating shows. When a former co-worker steers a housesitting gig her way, she finds the idea of an "escape into someone else's house, someone else's life" attractive. This job takes her to a secluded home in the hills owned by a couple embarking on a trip to Portugal. Our narrator is free to enjoy the home's amenities--meditation room, swimming pool, Peloton, professional espresso machine--as long as she agrees to stay out of the wife's painting studio and a dilapidated shed. Despite the contemporary details, this is a perfect setup for a gothic tale, and Chang delivers a story in which the unexplained takes on the power to chill because of how it occurs within the quotidian abnormality of extreme privilege. This story, "Unknown by Unknown," is the first in the collection, and it is far and away the best. The title story is also very good. In it, a series of rituals meant to honor ancestors forces a young girl to reckon with a massacre that occurred long before she was born--a massacre that her now-dead grandfather had tried to make her understand. The rest of the stories presented here are substantially less satisfying. Chang's debut novel was brilliantly executed. Most of the works we see here feel like warm-up exercises or not entirely successful experiments. The author seems to have a particular aversion to--or difficulty with--endings. The openness at the end of "Unknown by Unknown" feels both scary and weirdly thrilling. Elsewhere, though, stories end at a moment that is maybe supposed to seem portentous but comes across as arbitrary. An uneven collection from an exciting young author. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
