OptionalBooks

So divine, you should want to be reading this book

The sixteen short stories in this collection are split into three sections, Mothers, Myths, and Moths. But these section headings cannot do the stories they contain justice. Each of them is such a Kaleidoscope of images and ideas that they will leave your head spinning. While the stories do each have a main narrative or idea that they follow, it won't be long until you'll be yanked on a small digression, that—even when it's often just a sentence long—is so vivid and tactile as to immediately take you with it.

Because the plot and its digressions move at such breakneck speeds, you will encounter tons of imaginative scenes like racoons sailing through a flood, a widow with acidic saliva, a bleeding train, and an aunt flushing her tongue down the toilet. Every single vignette is fresh and playful, even when darker topics like death, addiction or suicide come up.

The strongest thematic threads running through these stories are family heritage and relationships, and gender and queer identity. Most often, the first person narrators of these stories are young American women with Asian roots. Their family members talk about—or even directly embody—cultural myths and superstitions. In some stories the narrator will make explicit mention of their queer identity, which—without being directly challenged—has to contend with these myths and remarks by other characters, which leave ambiguous how much these characters understand the narrator's identity or what exactly their opinion on it is. In one story, for example, the mother of a gender-questioning daughter is offered a son as a bribe. The mother replies “I have a son already, it's just that my son is my daughter.”

While these themes are prevalent throughout many stories, reducing this collection down to these hardly does it justice. These themes are prevalent and interesting, but they never seem forced or take the spotlight. Furthermore, they are hardly the only themes. Each story combines and jumps between a plethora of magical and ordinary themes, vignettes, and emotions. Not for the sake of throwing everything in a mix that exists to please everyone, but to create a fascinating and overwhelming experience.

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