Review by Booklist Review
Su's first novel, about a young woman who constructs her ideal mate (literally), is an entertaining, quirky mash-up of Frankenstein and Bridget Jones' Diary, made more substantive as a clever parable of self-discovery. Vi, flailing in the liminal space between childhood and adulthood, is alienated from both sides of her biracial identity and pathologically destructive in her relationships. She is a 24-year-old college dropout with little ambition and a tendency toward self-sabotage, personally and professionally. When Vi stumbles across an amorphous blob outside a bar, she impulsively takes it home, amazed to discover that it changes form based on her commands. Vi's disastrous efforts to engineer the perfect man force her to reckon with some harsh truths about herself and the maladaptive behavior that sustains her isolation. Su's uncharitable character study is tempered by Vi's acerbically funny personality and the outlandish situations Su places her in. This would appeal to fans of absurdist fiction, magical realism, and highly dysfunctional female protagonists. Some uneven pacing and over-exposition do not detract from Su's hilarious--and somehow also touching--debut.
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
In Su's marvelous debut, a Taiwanese American woman sculpts a seemingly perfect partner out of a sentient blob. Two years after failing out of college, Vi works as a hotel receptionist and wallows over a breakup. She often copes with her emotional insecurity by drinking heavily, and during a night out at a drag show, she finds a blob in an alley and takes it home. She names the blob Bob and orders him to do chores around the house. She also feeds Bob a diet of sugary breakfast cereals. Eventually, Bob grows into a human, one who resembles a handsome white movie star, Vi's ideal type. He accompanies her to a family dinner and agrees to let her parents think they're dating, though he chafes against Vi's homebody habits and starts showing up at her job. Meanwhile, Vi navigates lingering tensions with her family--her parents sold her childhood home without telling her, and her brother, a pediatric resident, is unwilling to console her. Su's clever conceit provides a catalyst for Vi's revelatory introspection, as she faces her self-destructive tendencies and the difficulties of being human. The result is a top-notch tale of arrested development. Agent: Samantha Shea, Georges Borchardt. (Jan.)
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Review by Kirkus Book Review
Vi Liu, the daughter of a Taiwanese father and white mother, navigates relationships, identity, and her early 20s in this touching, absurd debut novel. Reeling from the breakup of a two-year relationship with Luke Meyer, who gave her a "taste of what it felt like to be normal," Vi is spiraling. She's dropped out of college, missed the Peace Corps application deadline, and works at the front desk of a Holiday Inn--esque hotel. Her oft-flooding basement apartment, where she spends most of her time off, is grimy, strewn with dirty laundry and rotting leftovers. On a night out with her co-worker and her co-worker's estranged high school friend, Vi discovers a blob next to the trash cans in the alley behind the bar. Drunk and panicking, both terrified and curious, Vi takes the blob home. Soon, to her confusion, she discovers that the blob is sentient; it breathes and eats. Increasingly, Vi realizes she can mold and shape the blob: She tells it to grow a hand, then a neck, and it does, growing into a body that looks like a handsome, generic-looking movie star. At first, Blob follows Vi's commands, but as he becomes increasingly human, his desires shift accordingly; he feels trapped, and Vi's plan to create her perfect boyfriend inevitably backfires. Interspersed with this comic story are vignettes of Vi's troubled childhood--she was awkward, perpetually friendless, unlikable. These characteristics are supposed to explain why she is the way she is today: friendless, temperamental, quick to anger, a heavy drinker, sadistically self-deprecating. At times, these traits are humanizing and relatable, though they often feel too heavy-handed: "All the mistakes I made because I wanted to prove to myself what I never fully believed: that I belonged, that I was worthy." A funny, tender, unexpected--though somewhat flimsy--bildungsroman. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
