WHAT HUNGER, weirdly satisfying and thoroughly revolting at the same time

WHAT HUNGER
CATHERINE DANG
Simon & Schuster (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: A haunting coming-of-age tale following the daughter of Vietnamese immigrants, Ronny Nyugen, as she grapples with the weight of generational trauma while navigating the violent power of teenage girlhood, for fans of Jennifer’s Body and Little Fires Everywhere.

It's the summer before high school, and Ronny Nguyen finds herself too young for work, too old for cartoons. Her days are spent in a small backyard, dozing off to trashy magazines on a plastic lawn chair. In stark contrast stands her brother Tommy, the pride and joy of their immigrant parents: a popular honor student destined to be the first in the family to attend college. The thought of Tommy leaving for college fills Ronny with dread, as she contemplates the quiet house she will be left alone in with her parents, Me and Ba.

Their parents rarely speak of their past in Vietnam, except through the lens of food. The family's meals are a tapestry of cultural memory: thick spring rolls with slim and salty nem chua, and steaming bowls of pho tái with thin, delicate slices of blood-red beef. In the aftermath of the war, Me and Ba taught Ronny and Tommy that meat was a dangerous luxury, a symbol of survival that should never be taken for granted.

But when tragedy strikes, Ronny's world is upended. Her sense of self and her understanding of her family are shattered. A few nights later, at her first high school party, a boy crosses the line, and Ronny is overtaken by a force larger than herself. This newfound power comes with an insatiable hunger for raw meat, a craving that is both a saving grace and a potential destroyer.

What Hunger is a visceral, emotional journey through the bursts and pitfalls of female rage. Ronny’s Vietnamese lineage and her mother’s emotional memory play a crucial role in this tender ode to generational trauma and mother-daughter bonding.

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

My Review: Adolescence is a time of Certainty covering terrified confusion, Outrage covering terrified hurt. The cultural Western headiness of slobbering pandering laser-focused attention on the adolescent, a malleable consumer/believer in the making, from all sides ignites the fuel into a solar-intensity conflagration of perspectiveless conviction that, unless *I* like/love/want it, it's a Plot to Ruin My Life.

I get lots of criticism for using Capital Letters in my writing. Here it's done, as it most often is, to highlight an emotional not a rational response evoked or intended by the author (me or other) to be evoked. Perspective needs to be earned and learned the hard way, so this is all perfectly understandable. It's also why so many of us can not stand coming-of-age stories, to the point where I recommend them to those most intensely averse to them in order to watch their manners pumps explode with the effort to say no without screaming at me. (Hiya Kath!)

In this story Ronny's ready-to-ignite rage goes critical in several incidents. The response to that criticality is, in keeping with the title, related to food choices...not unusual for adolescent females, but decidedly NOT the usual eating-disorder narrative I'm heartily sick of reading. It is if anything an inverted use of eating disorders I'm accustomed to. I've known no anthropophagic beings. Plenty of bulimics and anorexics.

What Hunger is a hilariously apt, darkly funny title for a deeply, darkly, eucharistically furious story. It's metaphor gone clear, in scientological jargon, and exteriorized. (Y'all, stick to Wikipedia to look up scientology stuff. DO NOT USE CHAT OR GOOGLE. The consequences are dire.) I'm not always interested in body horror used to explain rage, but this story worked the alchemy I need to get invested in the action. It was indeed gross at times.

Balancing that, and creating what felt to me an exquisite tension, was Ronny's family history of expressing love through gorgeously evoked meals that I damn near passed out from drooling myself into dehydration while reading. What a food vocabulary Author Dang has! It's a pleasure to read someone's upsetting writing when it then soothes me with food.

I'm easy. You might not be.

The most notable dissatisfaction I have is the pacing of the story after Ronny's, um, conversion? discovery? whatever, big change. Action slows to allow for introspection for quite a stretch, and it did not get back to work soon enough for this reader. There are developments that, in their absence of a world-building framework, just sorta...happen...which very seldom works out best for the narrative cohesion or character development. I mean, "ewwwww" is okay if it effloresces out of some Lovecraftian something, not so much done here.

The complexity of the family's internal dynamics are the source of the extra half-star on the three and a half I was planning to award this very good but not outstanding tale. Ronny, like any adolescent, is still molding her responses around her family. She, like the most bearable adolescents I've ever known, is adaptable in her responses still, not hardening into adamant certainty. She has a very touching relationship with her mother and her auntie, both still morphing as she develops.

I don't know if everyone will enjoy the horror bits, or want to experience them getting the good relationship development, but if your stomach is strong this is a contender for your summer reading.

TONGUELESS, unnerving psychological novel of losing your home without leaving it

TONGUELESS
LAU YEE-WA (tr. Jennifer Feeley)
The Feminist Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$17.95 all editions, available now

Rating: 4.25* of five

The Publisher Says: A gripping psychological thriller that sheds light on the current political situation in Hong Kong.

Tongueless follows two rival teachers at a secondary school in Hong Kong who are instructed to switch from teaching in Cantonese to Mandarin—or lose their jobs. Apolitical and focusing on surviving and thriving in their professional environment, Wai and Ling each approach the challenge differently. Wai, awkward and unpopular, becomes obsessed with Mandarin learning; Ling, knowing how to please her superiors and colleagues, thinks she can tactfully dodge the Mandarin challenge by deploying her social savviness. Wai eventually crumples under the pressure and dies by suicide, leaving her colleague Ling to face seismic political and cultural change alone as she considers how far she will go to survive such a ruthlessly competitive work environment.

Sharp, darkly humorous, and politically pointed, Tongueless presciently engages with important issues facing Hong Kong today during which so much of the city’s uniqueness—especially its language—is at risk of being erased.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: China has been on a multigenerational project to Han-ize all the Sinosphere. Hong Kong's significant Anglophone population has been able to attract some out-of-China interest in the Han's Borg imitation, and from everything I've seen coming out about it in English, resistance is risky if not futile.

As little pale imitators, US fascists are doing their best to marginalize and poison the information space. No one in their dream world will know what to trust, therefore will accept their stupidification without the fuss and bother of rebellion and resistance to them. I think what's happened is that's scare a lot of people. Ones who weren't necessarily thinking about it before. Books like Tongueless can send painful shocks into the ideamakers that encounter it. Set in a very basic institution of Hong Kong culture, a language school, we are prepared in the set-up for those very reactions by those of the characters.

Teacher Wai is a very passive person, unable to put herself forward agreeably, or frame and present an idea persuasively. Her affect is so rigid that she's become faceless, just a messily-dressed part of the crowd. This works well enough while she's left alone to keep doing what she has learned to do. She is blindsided by the mandate to switch from her native Cantonese to the Han people now in charge's Mandarin. It's not like having to use Aussie or Indian slang and adapt to an accent. It's like having to learn, then teach in, Dutch. The alphabet and some words would look familiar but pronunciation let alone grammar? Not a hope. Wai, in her oddly passive way, sets about learning Mandarin but founders agonizingly slowly as the hopelessness of the task sinks in.

Ling's a Mean Girl. She's made it on marginal ability plus ruthless indifference to others' feelings or needs. She hides this behind a surface smarm...sorry, charm...that slips her in under peoples' radar. That route to her success is now closing off because it just won't teach her Mandarin. Poor Wai, with no interpersonal radar, is a prime victim for Ling to hate on. Ling's own focus on surface perfection and flawless presentation of self finds no echo in Wai. She doesn't understand the point of these things and lacks the flexibility to adapt to learning them (or Mandarin) to Ling's contempt...well-masked from others. Wai's failing attempts to survive in this horrible, cruelly indifferent new system lead to a true tragedy.

What's funny is that Ling is, on the surface, so good at masking that she presents herself as super-agreeable, and accepts that their language, Cantonese, is no longer going to be the one they're allowed to use...these're good Chinese girls, after all, and Authority Has Spoken. The manner of the adjustment is the difference between Wai's tragedy and Ling's desperate attempts to avoid failure, not the fact of its external imposition leading to resistance. It doesn't.

It's a brutal story. It's told directly...I picture Ling, our PoV character, sitting before an inquisitional interview recounting this story directly to us, the "camera" so to speak, with many soft little smirks and touchings-up of her hair and make-up. Ling is the one who, in Author Lau's subtle hands, shows herself as a slacker caught in a new system that pitilessly highlights her basic failures and failings in relation to that system. The narrative shifts in time though not always seamlessly. The very first pages give away a giant spoiler, but it is needed to set up our time-hopping. Ling is undergoing before our eyes the fate her students, to whom she always showed a smooth face hiding her contempt, worked hard to escape...and she can not do what they tried to do.

Ling escapes Wai's fate. She does not escape the fate of social collaborators everywhere: She loses her camouflage and has no skin underneath it to protect herself. Hiding is not possible; no protection or help is forthcoming.

I sometimes felt the story was in fragments of time or shards of context that did not always scan with my idea of what I had read. There was a reason for that; I'm going to urge you to read the Translator's Note before you start the story. I don't want to spoil certain things but spoilers are part of the book from page one! However, if someone chooses not to follow my advice, they should be able to proceed as they prefer. I myownself think "spoilerphobes" are spoiled, but no need to rehash THAT conversation.

Politically this story of a bullying overbearing linguistic minority imposing its words, values, and culture on hapless victims caught in an economic and social trap, suffering the loss of long-unexamined and too-little valued traditions and freedoms, could not possibly be more timely to read for the entire Anglophone world.

BRING THE HOUSE DOWN, every level of the title's meaning is the truth of the story

BRING THE HOUSE DOWN
CHARLOTTE RUNCIE
Doubleday Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: A theater critic at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe writes a vicious one-star review of a struggling actress he has a one-night stand with in this sharply funny, feminist tinderbox.

Alex Lyons always has his mind made up by the time the curtain comes down at a performance—the show either deserves a five-star rave or a one-star pan. Anything in between is meaningless. On the opening night of the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, he doesn’t deliberate over the rating for Hayley Sinclair’s show, nor does he hesitate when the opportunity presents itself to have a one-night stand with the struggling actress.

Unaware that she’s gone home with the theater critic who’s just written a career-ending review of her, Hayley wakes up at his apartment to see his scathing one-star critique in print on the kitchen table, and she’s not sure which humiliation offends her the most. So she revamps her show into a viral sensation critiquing Alex Lyons himself—entitled son of a famous actress, serial philanderer, and by all accounts a terrible man. Yet Alex remains unapologetic. As his reputation goes up in flames, he insists on telling his unvarnished version of events to his colleague, Sophie. Through her eyes, we see that the deeper she gets pulled into his downfall, the more conflicted she becomes. After all, there are always two sides to every story.

A brilliant Trojan horse of a book about art, power, misogyny, and female rage, Bring the House Down is a searing, insightful, and often hilarious debut that captures the blurred line between reality and performance.

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

My Review: Well, that was fun. Eviscerating, puncturing schadenfreude.

How enormous a thing it must be to face the sum total of your flaws, and find that they were worse than you imagined, and obvious to everyone in the world except you. Maybe, like trying to look at the sun, it wasn’t quite possible yet for Alex to look at the truth about himself without experiencing so much pain that he then immediately had to look away again, dazzled by the brightness of his own cruelty.

See? There's just one problem. It's Hayley's book. Alex whimpers “Haven’t you ever done something you regret? Why am I the only one who has to learn something here?” at one point, though, and it really hit me. No, you're not; but you are the one resisting the lessons. And Hayley's just the one to deliver them. She's decided that his misogynistic takedown of her show is misogynistic for the sake of it; therefore must be resisted and retaliated against. She takes no stock of his points. Self-examination would tell her she has a far more insidious enemy within the gates that poses far more of a threat to her future in the form of her partner Josh.

So I don't think this is a truly good story. It's mean, satisfying fun, though. Flaws and all I laughed where Author Runcie wanted me to, I winced at the pains inflicted and received, and stared in quiet hostility at the enemy within.

A well-spent afternoon of reading.

FISHING FOR THE LITTLE PIKE, Finnish language translation of folk/cozy horror-tinged fantasy murder mystery...no, really

FISHING FOR THE LITTLE PIKE
JUHANI KARILA (tr. Lola Rogers)
Restless Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$9.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: In the utterly original, genre-defying, English-language debut of Finnish author Juhani Karila, a young woman’s annual pilgrimage to her home in Lapland to catch an elusive pike in three days is complicated by a host of mythical creatures, a murder detective hot on her trail, and a deadly curse hanging over her head.

When Elina makes her annual summer pilgrimage to her remote family farm in Lapland, she has three days to catch the pike in a local pond or she and the love of her life will both die. This year her task is made more difficult by the intervention of a host of deadly supernatural creatures and a murder detective on her tail.

Can Elina catch the pike and put to rest the curse that has been hanging over her head since a youthful love affair turned sour? Can Sergeant Janatuinen make it back to civilization in one piece? And just why is Lapland in summer so weird?

Fishing for the Little Pike is an audacious, genre-defying blend of fantasy, folk tale, and nature writing.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: I'm endlessly absorbed in stories about the Arctic, and learning to be so about stories in the Sámi culture. The more I learn about these complex interrelationships, and the fascinating people and cultures they produce, the more acutely aware of climate change's personal costs I grow.

At no time was I sure what was going on. That's by the author's design. Is the mythic world of the Sámi real? I mean on the consensus-reality scale, none of what happens ought to happen; so is the Sámi model of reality real? It is to Elina, and the consensus-reality world of the story's framing device can't account for the stranger events, so....

It's just delightful to be in that "no, that thing can not exist but she's...omigawd, what?!" head when there's a police detective from the consensus-reality world as flummoxed as we are, as stymied as possible in the execution of an apprehension, and just as bewildered as we are. The people of Vuopio don't hesitate to gossip around her, like the time the mayor, well...her consensus-reality mind doesn't accept that.

The nature writing in this story is evocative enough to make me feel summer sunburnt and skeeter-bit, colorful enough to fit seamlessly around the frankly disturbing delineation of Sámi supernatural entities, and the gestalt becomes as immersive as The Man Who Spoke Snakish. I'm charmed, I'm unnerved, I've laughed, I've stressed my limbic system into believing I've Seen Things.

Slabber Olli told her about the places he had been. He had been to the bottom of the sea and wandered endless gardens of stars in outer space. He said that human time as we know it was over. That the waters would rise and then fall, and then fiery waters would come. The Earth would be reshaped into something new. Mud would flow. Boiling canyons would open up.

"The mountains are already starting to move,” Slabber Olli said.

He told her about creatures that used to live in the sea, like reptiles with two mouths, a horizontal one and a vertical one. He told her about creatures at the bottom of the sea shaped like elm leaves, with five eyes and long, bendy elephant trunks and scissors on their heads.

About sharks with anvils growing on their backs. Flightless birds three meters tall that ran after deer on graceful, muscular legs that bent and stretched, bent and stretched, their beaks opened wide. He told her about the rockets people would build to shoot themselves off to other planets, and how badly it would turn out. Humans would continue their journey. They would find doors to knock on and portals that wouldn't open when they knocked, and the humans would break them down, and the ones they couldn't break they would build keys for. And all the while, humans would be changing. Humans would be changed not just by time but by humans themselves, and before long you'd have to call them human derivatives, and then something else entirely. In the end, it was just matter rearranging itself over and over. What was the Earth? Nothing more than an entrance hall where humanity had once briefly waited.

The consensus-reality world doesn't knowingly or willingly contain these things. Elina, in her calm way, accepts this deluge of weirdness, and then goes on about being in Lapland to prevent a curse from activating and ruining her life.

After all, why else are there raskels, or frakuses, or that bloody murderous knacky who's trapped her into the highest-imaginable stakes card game? And was the mayor of her hometown really...disappeared...by a wraith? The consensus-reality detective, who just wants to bring Elina in for questioning as there's reason to believe she's, um, involved in a murder, certainly thinks so. The villagers say so, too. (The wraith thing not the murder, although....)

I'd give this truly wacky, fun, off-kilter setting all five stars alone. I can't get that high because Elina's curse is unsatisfyingly acquired and self-perpetuated. She's taken it on to process a set of guilts that do not properly belong to her. I'm down for the fantasy aspects of the story but I draw the line at emotionally self-sabotaging women.

I'm as close to all five stars as that grunt of dissatisfaction will allow me to get. I'll read anything Author Juhani Karila writes that's translated, though, because I had a fine old time with this story.

ANGEL DOWN is hands-down my favorite WWI novel

ANGEL DOWN
DANIEL KRAUS
Atria Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now...the paperback comes out on 12 May 2026 for $18.00! Preorder at this non-affiliate Bookshop.org link.

WINNER OF THE 2026 PULITZER PRIZE FOR FICTION!

A New York Times 10 Best Books of 2025 selection!

Rating: 4.5* of five

A New York Times 100 Notable Books of 2025 selection

The Publisher Says: The critically acclaimed author of the “crazily enjoyable” (The New York Times) Whalefall returns with an immersive, cinematic novel about five World War I soldiers who stumble upon a fallen angel that could hold the key to ending the war.

Private Cyril Bagger has managed to survive the unspeakable horrors of the Great War through his wits and deception, swindling fellow soldiers at every opportunity. But his survival instincts are put to the ultimate test when he and four other grunts are given a deadly venture into the perilous No Man’s Land to euthanize a wounded comrade.

What they find amid the ruined battlefield, however, is not a man in need of mercy but a fallen angel, seemingly struck down by artillery fire. This celestial being may hold the key to ending the brutal conflict, but only if the soldiers can suppress their individual desires and work together. As jealousy, greed, and paranoia take hold, the group is torn apart by their inner demons, threatening to turn their angelic encounter into a descent into hell.

Angel Down plunges you into the heart of World War I and weaves a polyphonic tale of survival, supernatural wonder, and moral conflict.

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

My Review: I learned early in life that humans are vile, irredeemable homunculi, ruled by hatred, greed, and envy. Church was a solid training ground, thank you Jesus. So the story of the men in this tale wasn't a revelation or a surprise, nor an insulting calumny on humankind. It merely felt like I was hearing from a cheerier, more forgiving soul-sibling of mine.

Did anyone I know read Ducks, Newburyport? That hugely long sentence has a smaller sibling now in Kraus's latest, weird-stop-full-out toccata for literary pipe organ. It's about greed and hate and jealous loathing and fear...it's about humans trying to cope with transcendent realities while in the mire of fantastical pestilential mud. It's what your soul wants and your body resists while you can't even see a yard ahead because you need not to be slaughtered.

Unlike Lucy Ellmann's genius work of transcendence in the quotidian...I'm too intimidated to review it, there's just too much in there I want to read aloud to you!...this sentence is more compressible. It feels like Author Kraus did what Warhol did in Empire...turned on the camera after framing the shot then went away...but the point of this story is not to watch as time passes but watch as feelings, desires, emotions pass. It's a Zen in-joke. It's the kind of technique that some bounce off hard. It's meant to enable you as reader to get inside a flow of experiences of reality without ever feeling you are limited to just one. White space is your resting point; the absence of periods/full stops is your clue to the emotional reality of the Great War these people are utterly mired in, consumed by, entrapped entombed enmeshed inside.

The experiences are all, mental emotional psychical transcendent one and all, all of them are brutal and honest and unsentimentally crudely Earthy. In the midst of a grinding torturous killing machine with no end to the horror pain cruelty waste dehumanization, how else could they be? An angel from God in Her Heaven wounded and suffering? A divine being in need? A war experience that encompasses this! An actual angel laid low and so accessible to the traumatized men in need of a miracle....

So now, this being the case, what do these men do? Why do they hesitate or even reject doing the "obvious" and stopping the War? but a nagging voice insists it’s a miracle, which only pisses him off, he’ll be goddamned if he’s going to start believing in miracles here in hell

Bagger is our PoV. He is not one bit better than he is forced to be. He is canny, savvy to the ways of the world; he has a limited intellect, and if he has a soul, I saw no evidence of it. Arno, his foil, is Lumpenproletariat on legs, though more redeemable in my eyes than Bagger.

So how to explain my four and a half stars, when everything I've said either points all the way up or all the way down? I'm missing one key thing to make it the holotype war-fantasy story to rule them all: Why? Within the story, the why? never comes. I understand it's deliberate, it's a choice not a lapse. I still think a "why"...why Bagger, why now, why angel not demon...anchors a story set in a brutally real setting better than a lingering question does.

Gore, wickedness, horror, and all, it's one of my favorite reads of 2025.

THE PROPAGANDIST, a careful personal inquiry into that weird addiction, Hate (with a capital-H)

THE PROPAGANDIST
CÉCILE DESPRAIRIES (tr. Natasha Lehrer)
New Vessel Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$17.95 all editions, available now

Rating: 3.75* of five

The Publisher Says: In a grand Paris apartment, a young girl attends gatherings regularly organized by her mother. The women talk about beauty secrets and gossip, but the mood grows dark when the past, notably World War Two, comes under coded discussion in hushed tones.

Years later, the silent witness to these sessions has become a prominent historian, and with this chilling autobiographical novel she sets out to unmask enigmatic figures in and around her family. Why, she seeks to understand, did they betray their Jewish neighbors and zealously collaborate with the Nazi occupation of France, remaining for decades hence obsessive devotees of that evil lost cause.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: Very much like My Dinner with Andre, only French and about Nazi collaborators, in their own damning words.

What a book to write from one's own experiences. I'm amazed she was not more vilified, as it seems her brother had the most powerful negative response to publishing what amounts to the filthiest of dirty laundry. The author "is a specialist in Germanic civilization and a historian of the Nazi occupation of France. She is the author of several historical works about the occupation and the Vichy regime. Born in Paris in 1957, The Propagandist is her first novel," though certainly not her first book (publisher's provided biographical info). I think my favorite title of hers is "Ville Lumière, Années Noirs" or roughly "City of Light in Years of Darkness" about the Nazi occupation. I wish someone would translate it because my days of slugging through big honkin' books in French are gone.

Lucie, the Propagandist of the title, was married to an Aryan named Friedrich before the convenient marriage to the narrator's rich father. It was Friedrich, the One True Love of Lucie's life and an early eugenics researcher, who formed the future matriarch's attitudes ever after. Lucie and her female relatives all use the corruption of French legal and social systems (this is the land of the Dreyfus Affair and the LePens' evil racism, recall) to benefit materially from the vanishing and lack of return of Parisian Jews.

Probably the best time I had reading about these vile people as they sat around discussing their necrotic morality was the details of how exactly the collaborators accomplished this feat of theft. "Listening" to them as they bemoaned being called collaborators and spewed hatred was, frankly, unpleasant. It's a lot like people in the US not protesting ICEstapo's disappearing of people the scum risen to the top don't like. If you're wondering what those "good Germans" and ordinary French collaborators thought of just sitting back and not speaking out, look in a mirror.

The last third of the book dragged past me. The horrified fascination of learning what these entitled sleazebags got up to in order to hide from justice while keeping their ill-got gains wore off; the stars fell from my eyes and my rating. The absence of a central conflict got to me at last. I can't help but praise the author and the book, while tutting over the story as a story.

What I want to say and do at this passage in US political history is very much what the author has done here: Hold an unsparing mirror to the inner workings of "good people" who make excuses for their inaction. Its consequences are real. The Gestapo, loyal only to The Leader, and constrained by no laws, is operating now.

What are you doing to resist it? Are you sitting in your comfy world tutting? At least sending money to help refugees somewhere? Anything? Or are you these detestable Parisian ladies' spiritual descendant?

THE SOUTH, Booker-Prize longlisted first queer love in Malaysia

THE SOUTH
TASH AW
Farrar, Straus and Giroux (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

One of The Guardian's The best fiction of 2025 list!

Time's The 100 Must-Read Books of 2025 selection

A New York Times 100 Notable Books of 2025 selection

Longlisted for the 2025 Booker Prize.

Rating: 4.25* of five

The Publisher Says: A luminous and intimate novel about the weight of inheritance, the bonds of loyalty, and the awakening of love, set against the backdrop of a changing Malaysia.

The South unfolds during a visit by the Lim family to their rural clan estate after a long absence. Jay, in his mid-teens, and his two older sisters are less than thrilled to leave their city for the remote house in the south, but their parents, Sui Ching and Jack, are adamant.

Jay finds he's expected to share a room with Chuan, the son of the estate's overseer, a bit older than Jay but seemingly much more mature and capable in the world. The two soon form an intense bond, but with their very different backgrounds, and even more disparate expectations for the future, the course of their relationship is always an unspoken question.

Meanwhile, change presses in, including the destruction of the farm's beloved orchards, and the sale of the estate is mooted. The relationships between Chuan's father and Jack and Sui Ching go deep, but pressures both internal and external threaten to sever old bonds and upend an entire way of life. The South, at once sweeping and intimate, is a masterful portrait of a family navigating a period of great transformation.

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

My Review: Farms feed us. At the vast, unceasing exaction of labor, they feed us. Do they feed farmers? That is, do farmers get fulfillment and satisfaction from the labor they do? (Are there people being farmers in 2025?) And the cost of that labor, the relationships it bends to exigencies city-dwelling consumers don't worry their pretty heads about, how is it borne? Never equally...Nature seems to forbid anything like ease in farming, droughts, excesses of rain, it is literally always something on the socially elite Lim family's inherited land.

Author Tash Aw has done that thinking in this story. He observes and occasionally examines the workings of a family with a farm in Malaya (as it was at the beginning of the narrative) as they farm, live, love, doubt, together and apart. It's a book of calm, eerie stillness as the characters live lives they begin to question...is this necessary? am I necessary to it? am I doing good for the world?...and analyze how things are and aren't making them happy. Love is in the air between boys whose families have known each other most all their lives; loves slides out of mom Sui and dad Jack's grasp; love, true to its reputation, ruins everything with its exquisite torturous promises of pleasure, happiness, belonging that are so elusive to the Lim siblings. “We feel as though our entire world changes when we get older, every object, every person, has been rearranged into some strange new configuration, but in fact nothing at all has changed.” Nor will it ever. That realization stymies and disheartens many. I find it exhilarating in its challenge to redistribute attention, wisdom, knowledge within the unchanging reality of Life.

Maybe Jay Lim won't get Chuan, the boy he loves (In that moment, forever seems like a comforting notion. But at that age, what does either of them really know about time?), maybe Jack Lim will stop him as his culture demands despite his own complicated past, maybe Sui Lim won't be able to move past regrets for things undone. Maybe Malaysia's long tradition of relative harmony among its constituent groups is about to blow up into full-on Sinophobia. What will the Lims do then? We can't call it an orchard if it no longer bears fruits pretty much sums up the dilemmas in the whole book.

Family drama is evergreen because family is universal. Jay's older sisters are plumping for connection in the form of religious nuttery, the other in the embrace of rejection. (Parents believe this, so she rejects it; a stance adolescence damn near demands.) Jay's struggles with finding queerness in his world, knowing it's there and just out of his reach, is how I know the author understands me across generations and cultures: "This emptiness feels like hunger but Jay thinks that it is really a longing, though he doesn't know what he is longing for."

I was delighted to read this story of queer self-discovery against a backdrop of cultural and economic shifts that both enable and inhibit the journey. It is not a negative, but an observation, that hearing from so many points of view does not center queerness in the story quite the way I'd thought it would based on how it's marketed. It wasn't enough Jay to make the queer angle the only one in the telling, so I took three-quarters of a star back.

But how very beautiful and quietly profound and enfolding this read was! I recommend it to all including the "eww-ick" homophobes.