My dear you Stories

In these provocative stories, Khong (Real Americans) offers well-wrought and intricate depictions of Asian American and Asian life, often with a fantastical or speculative twist. "Serene" follows a worker at a Chinese factory for AI-powered sex dolls who grows attached to a doll whom she trains in conversation. In the wry "Colors from Elsewhere," a woman recovering from a miscarriage learns from her acupuncturist, Dr. Tang, and Dr. Tang's philosopher sister, that she's an alien, prompting her to ask the Tangs, who are Asian and share that they are also aliens, "Is every Asian an alien?" Two stories, "The Freshening" and "D Day," revolve around society-wide transformations: in the former, the U.S. government administers injections to make everyone look white; in the latter, God grows frustrated with the human race's wanton destruction and turns everyone into animals. The less successful stories don't develop beyond their conceits. "The Family O" falters under the weight of the elaborate revenge plot at its center, while "Good Spirits," about a haunted rubber-glove factory, rushes its ending. Throughout, Khong writes about her characters' ambivalence with precision, as when the protagonist of "Colors from Eleswhere" is "troubled" to realize that she's "beginning to feel like herself again." There's much to admire in this assured collection. Agent: Marya Spence, Janklow & Nesbit Assoc. (Apr.)

Ten stories explore premises surreal, profound, prophetic, playful, and provocative. In two preceding realistic novels--Goodbye Vitamin (2017) andReal Americans (2024)--Khong didn't quite let on how wild and woolly her imagination might be. This becomes immediately clear in the first story here, "My Dear You." "Something nobody tells you is that when you die a death in which your face and body are utterly maimed, you get to choose your face in heaven," the narrator brightly says, explaining that she will now remedy the too-wide space between her eyes that caused her to be tormented with the nickname "Hammerhead" as a child. But now that she's actually been eaten by a crocodile while on her honeymoon in Australia, she can have the face she wants: "I know what you're wondering, and the answer is yes: people in heaven are smoking hot." In the next story, a more topical premise is explored: The government has announced a "Freshening" initiative as a desperate measure to curtail a terrifying spike in racial violence. Everyone will be given a drug that causes them to see everyone else as a member of their own race and gender. Though the Asian narrator's white boyfriend voted against it, "the vast majority of white people, it turned out, wanted to go about their lives seeing only other white people." In "The Family O," a group of more than 20 Asian women join forces to get revenge on a man in their town who's dated every single one of them, taking each to an Asian restaurant corresponding to their culture, telling each the exact same story about his trip to a Buddhist temple, then seeming to stumble on a pet store where he buys them a fish that reminds him of them: "Exotic, with elegant, beautiful fins." Also irresistible is "Serene," where a sales clerk in an AI-sex-doll factory develops a profound attachment to one of the dolls. Uses the flexibility of the short-story form to wonderful and whimsical advantage. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.