lightreads

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.

The True Queen

3/5. Sequel to her Sorcerer to the Crown. Amnesiac Malaysian sisters need to go to magical regency Britain to deal with a curse; they get entangled in deeply complicated faerie politics.

I had the same reaction to this as to the previous book: I found it delightful in its elements, but unsatisfying in its whole. And I can't figure out why? It's doing all sorts of things I like – sisters and loving difficult people and dealing lightly but not shallowly with the realities of being a person of color in Britain at this time, oh, and there's a cute lesbian romance. But somehow I don't finish these books and sigh in contentment? I just smile vaguely and think about how that one bit was entertaining, and wasn't it charming when.

Still worth reading, because the elements are that charming. Worth it for the dragons alone.