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lightreads) wrote2024-10-18 11:56 am
lightreads) wrote2024-10-18 11:56 am
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Black Water Sister by Zen Cho
Black Water Sister
4/5. A young closeted woman begins to hear the voice of her dead grandmother when she returns to Malaysia with her parents. This leads to encounters with gangsters and gods, and some family reckonings.
Ah, now this is the Zen Cho book I’ve been waiting for. My wife absolutely adores her short fiction, but neither of us have been really impressed with any of her novels. But this one. It’s depiction of this extended Asian family – its secrets and lies and religious conflicts and the gifts and failings of its women – ah. It’s so specific and perfect. I also particularly recommend the audio, which lends a wonderful cadence to the dialogue, much of which is spoken in English translation for the reader, but is not in English within the story.
All of that wraps what is at its heart a simple story of a girl working her way around to come out to her conservative parents in a blanket of complexity and nuance. Lovely.
Content notes: Threatened rape, allusions to past domestic violence/rape/murder, homophobia and fear thereof.
4/5. A young closeted woman begins to hear the voice of her dead grandmother when she returns to Malaysia with her parents. This leads to encounters with gangsters and gods, and some family reckonings.
Ah, now this is the Zen Cho book I’ve been waiting for. My wife absolutely adores her short fiction, but neither of us have been really impressed with any of her novels. But this one. It’s depiction of this extended Asian family – its secrets and lies and religious conflicts and the gifts and failings of its women – ah. It’s so specific and perfect. I also particularly recommend the audio, which lends a wonderful cadence to the dialogue, much of which is spoken in English translation for the reader, but is not in English within the story.
All of that wraps what is at its heart a simple story of a girl working her way around to come out to her conservative parents in a blanket of complexity and nuance. Lovely.
Content notes: Threatened rape, allusions to past domestic violence/rape/murder, homophobia and fear thereof.