THE PHOENIX PENCIL COMPANY, debut magical-realism Chinese culture novel...very worthy Reese's Book Club pick for #PrideMonth

THE PHOENIX PENCIL COMPANY
ALLISON KING
William Morrow (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.75* of five

The Publisher Says: A REESE'S BOOK CLUB PICK!

In this dazzling debut novel, a hidden and nearly forgotten magic—of Reforging pencils, bringing the memories they contain back to life—holds the power to transform a young woman’s relationship with her grandmother, and to mend long-lost connections across time and space.

Monica Tsai spends most days on her computer, journaling the details of her ordinary life and coding for a program that seeks to connect strangers online. A self-proclaimed recluse, she's always struggled to make friends and, as a college freshman, finds herself escaping into a digital world, counting the days until she can return home to her beloved grandparents. They are now in their nineties, and Monica worries about them constantly—especially her grandmother, Yun, who survived two wars in China before coming to the States, and whose memory has begun to fade.

Though Yun rarely speaks of her past, Monica is determined to find the long-lost cousin she was separated from years ago. One day, the very program Monica is helping to build connects her to a young woman, whose gift of a single pencil holds a surprising clue. Monica’s discovery of a hidden family history is exquisitely braided with Yun’s own memories as she writes of her years in Shanghai, working at the Phoenix Pencil Company. As WWII rages outside their door, Yun and her cousin, Meng, learn of a special power the women in their family possess: the ability to Reforge a pencil’s words. But when the government uncovers their secret, they are forced into a life of espionage, betraying other people’s stories to survive.

Combining the cross-generational family saga and epistolary form of A Tale for the Time Being with the uplifting, emotional magic of The Midnight Library, Allison King’s stunning debut novel asks: who owns and inherits our stories? The answers and secrets that surface on the page may have the unerasable power to reconnect a family and restore a legacy.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: I so very badly want Meng's superpower of Reforging that, once I encountered it, I was unable...okay, unwilling but really, really unwilling...to stop reading the story. Injecting an author's actual words directly into my veins?

Magical pencil me, Yun! (Or Monica, if you're now possessed of the power.)

So there you have it, laddies and gentlewomen. My officially enthroned favorite fantasy trope that utterly bypasses my usual Chosen-One Hidden Powers flush button. There really is a way around every prejudice. What didn't really ring for me was Monica's modern-day iteration of these magically delicious pencils made by Yun and her cousin Meng in 1937 Shanghai (all you Iris Chang readers know what the implications of that are already; if you haven't read Chang, go do so.) EMBR, Monica's boss's startup, seems to be a not-evil iteration of Facebook, in my own crude and unnuanced terms, and that's a concept so toxified by that fuck Zuck and his henchrats that I was preemptively squicked out by it.

It's a cool idea for a story, and one that feels like Author King has really gone into to develop her world's natural development. I think the decision not to go into how and what Meng and Yun have as a power paradoxically let me just accept it...use one of the pencils they created and in a future that's never defined by length or relationship, someone hip to the trick can utterly exist within the words you've created. Trying to build out a system around this would not have made it easier to believe.

As to *why* these pencils exist, this brings me to the almost-all-five starrèdness of the read: The entire book is suffused with a deep and highly loving sadness as memory, its utter unreliability, its undeniable centrality to one's identity and selfhood, are examined. Monica, Yun, all their ties and all the facts of their family's life, swept away in the fires of war; recoverable with this one astonishing instrument, writing itself entire in a new head. Monica's journey to understanding this...power, gift, supernatural geas...is tied back to Grandmother Yun and forward to new lover Louise. I've said elsewhere that reading is the act of thinking with another head.

Writing, creating stories, are under direct and explicit threat in a time of rampant and overly successful suppression of books, ideas, and fields of study. NASA's proposed budget eliminates entirely astrophysical research, funding for space-sciences fellowships, all Earth sciences research. Libraries suffer huge challenges to remove particularly queer books and media...all orchestrated and funded by certain religious groups. This is something I'm morally certain Author King is indirectly, and all the more effectively for it, commenting on with Yun and Monica's interconnectedness via the magic of stories to pass forward the truth and the facts of a violent past.

If you wonder how this can happen in the modern world, look at what's under attack...learning, information-gathering, all the weapons against ignorance and chaos. Resisting this, refusing to simply accept it, why this is a thing to be worked toward and desired, you should trust Shakespeare:

Not marble, nor the gilded monuments
Of princes, shall outlive this powerful rhyme;
But you shall shine more bright in these contents
Than unswept stone, besmeared with sluttish time.

When wasteful war shall statues overturn
And broils root out the work of masonry,
Nor Mars his sword, nor war’s quick fire, shall burn
The living record of your memory:

’Gainst death, and all oblivious enmity,
Shall you pace forth; your praise shall still find room
Even in the eyes of all posterity
That wear this world out to the ending doom.

So, till the judgement that yourself arise,
You live in this, and dwell in lovers’ eyes.

It is impious to speak after Divinity has spoken.