Review by Booklist Review
Asian characters grapple with desire, loneliness, acceptance, self-fulfillment, and obsession in these haunting, character-driven tales that lead readers on enticingly mysterious trajectories. Complex protagonists find themselves in strange situations tackling literal origins like race and culture, or in abstractions like emotions, behaviors, and viewpoints. In "Carrot Legs," two teenage cousins plot someone's demise while exploring the line between cruelty and the scrutiny of beauty. In "Mail Order Love," a grieving white widower purchases a Taiwanese bride who arrives in a box, and disappointments abound for both. In "You Put a Rabbit on Me," an au pair trying to find herself in Paris encounters and befriends her doppelganger. "Featured Background" stars an elderly Asian man whose estranged daughter is directing a film in which he is working as an extra. "Happy Endings" features a debauched white man who experiments with VR to satisfy his insatiable lust and discovers a surprising participant. "Casualties of Art" is a novella about a biracial male writer at a creative fellowship who unravels when he becomes involved with a married artist. Thought-provoking and astute, Chou's compelling latest (after her debut, Disorientation, 2022) leaves readers in capable hands.
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
The six stories and novella in this scintillating collection from Chou (Disorientation) explore themes of beauty, identity, and morality. In "Carrot Legs," a 13-year-old Taiwanese American girl visits her grandparents in Taipei, where she's indoctrinated by her manicured cousin, LaLa, into the city's ethos that "beauty was a choice." It's a message reinforced by the strange devices for sale at a local pharmacy, such as "funny-looking massagers designed to shrink your face." Taipei is also the point of origin for the mail-order bride purchased by an aging American man named Frank in "Mail Order Love." Ultimately, Frank gets more than he bargained for when his new wife, Bunny, adopts a liberating sense of self-confidence. Elsewhere, women's attempts to improve their circumstances lead to vexing situations. Elaine, a crestfallen American whose life has become like "a soggy newspaper discarded in the rain," travels to Paris to reinvent herself as an au pair only to encounter the horror of a doppelgänger who shadows her every move. Throughout, Chou's surrealism feels all too real, whether in the concluding novella, "Casualties of Art," an intimate exploration of an illicit affair, or in "Happy Endings," the story of a DNA researcher in Hong Kong who visits a virtual reality sex-bot brothel where intercourse is a "constant negotiation, a high-wire act with the thinnest of lines separating pleasure from violence." These expressive and atmospheric tales mesmerize. Agent: Ellen Levine and Martha Wydysh, Trident Media Group. (Aug.)
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Review by Library Journal Review
Following Chou's successful debut novel, Disorientation, comes a collection of six stories and a novella, all featuring intriguing Asian and Asian American characters. In "Mail Order Love," a 25-year-old woman named Bunny is shipped from Taiwan to Southern California in a crate after being purchased by 70-year-old Frank for $5,792.11, which includes shipping, taxes, and a warranty. "Featured Background" stars a struggling movie extra who finds his way onto the film set of his estranged daughter, a successful writer and director. In "The Dollhouse," the narrator relays to her nine-year-old daughter the story of her experience working in an illegal "birthing house," to which pregnant people would travel and pay thousands of dollars in order to give birth to their babies on U.S. soil. As in her previous work, Chou's writing maintains its humor while touching on serious, even taboo topics, such as interracial adoption, ethnocentrism, sex work, and fidelity. VERDICT Chou establishes herself as a writer to watch with another thought-provoking offering. For readers who can appreciate Chou's no-holds-barred approach to storytelling, this collection is an excellent book-club candidate.--Shirley Quan
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Review by Kirkus Book Review
A clutch of stories that starkly question assumptions about our identities. Chou's debut collection--following the novelDisorientation (2022)--is built on premises where characters' sense of self is rattled. In "Carrot Legs," a young woman discovers that her family tree doesn't branch in ways she was raised to believe. In "Featured Background," a man is determined to connect with his estranged daughter, an acclaimed movie director, by taking on an actor's persona. "Happy Endings" imagines a future where sex work is outsourced to technology, with hellish consequences for one john. Chou is gifted at storytelling with a surrealistic bent: "The Dollhouse" plays with Barbie tropes, zooming into the plastic world of toys and back out into reality to expose how women are objectified, while "You Put a Rabbit on Me" is a variation on a doppelgänger story, as a young woman in France working as an au pair meets a woman bearing an unsettling resemblance to her. Chou can play these premises for laughs: "Mail Order Love®" turns on a man who's disappointed with the purchase of the title. Is his new wife glitching, or just in possession of an independent mind, and how has technology fuzzed the line between the two? The closing novella, "Casualties of Art," at first seems straightforward, almost blandly conventional--its setup involves four artists at a retreat and their flirtatious hothouse relationships. But Chou uses her lead character to play with the meaning of autofiction and the way we rewrite history to serve our most self-flattering images. The collection's title is a classic microaggression--a way to box people as foreign or other. Nobody in the book actually utters the question, but throughout Chou cleverly exposes just how difficult humanity is to simplify, whatever our provenance. Sharp storytelling that bends and blurs genre expectations. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
