Adele_C

Everything in this book is so "southern nice". It's treacly and the tone and plot don't begin to capture the true horror of being forcibly detained and subject to damaging, invasive, and irreversible medical procedures.

But to start at the beginning: I was never going to get into this book because of the author's major structural choices. It's written in present tense, which is a tricky choice I associate more with fanfic writers trying awkwardly to lend a sense of urgency to the work. And present tense for a historical fiction book? What an odd, time space-confounding choice! In addition, although chapters were ostensibly written from a single character's perspective, the narration was omniscient throughout and the author would often stray into different characters' thoughts and perspectives.

And now to the characters: I have long believed that human beings are intrinsically deserving of respect and honor, regardless of how "respectful" or "honorable" they behave. A character shouldn't have to be a paragon of virtue for unjust treatment of that character to be wrong. I'm sure some of the women who were detained and forcibly sterilized were, like the two main characters in this book, completely free from any wrongdoing. However, I bet more were genuinely involved in behavior seen as prurient at the time, from working in brothels or speakeasies to having sex for pleasure. These women were not deserving of imprisonment just because they transgressed social boundaries. By largely omitting these women from the narrative (except for Lucy, the prostitute with a heart of gold), the author is (unintentionally) implying that only "pure" women deserve our pity in this situation.

The reverse is true as well: outside of horror novels, "evil" characters should be complex and have some redeeming qualities. This is moderately true about one of the antagonists, but the other antagonist is a vision of pure evil; with no backstory or explanation for her character, she comes across as a cartoon.

I know this seems like a one-star review, but by reading this book, I learned and was inspired to learn more about horrifying forced sterilization programs throughout the US, and especially in North Carolina, where they lasted until the 1970s! So props to the book for that.

Boring Asian Female by Canwen Xu has a premise that seems tailor-made for me: an unhinged, unreliable narrator, and a Columbia University setting that felt vividly nostalgic to me, an alum. And yes, anyone that went to Columbia is an unhinged overachiever in some manner, so it should have been highly relatable to me in that sense as well.

The novel follows Elizabeth, a deeply obsessive young woman who becomes fixated on clawing her way toward Harvard Law by any means necessary. Harvard Law isn't just Harvard Law — it represents to Elizabeth the culmination of her version of the American Dream. Xu clearly has sharp ideas about ambition, performance, race, and the suffocating pressure of being seen as legible, harmless, or "acceptable," and the title gestures toward that tension in a way that feels intentionally provocative, but the book never really does much to either subvert or confirm those expectations. Elizabeth's blandness is never really blandness at all; it is a mask, a social script, and in some ways a weapon.

That said, for reasons I still can't fully pin down, I never quite connected with the book. On paper, Elizabeth is exactly the kind of protagonist I usually enjoy: messy, delusional, self-justifying, and always one bad decision away from disaster. But although the novel keeps raising the stakes, I never felt the queasy, tightening dread that this kind of story usually thrives on. Part of that is because Elizabeth's plans never felt convincing enough to inspire real fear; at nearly every stage, I could see obvious holes in her logic and imagine a dozen ways she could be caught. And just when consequences seemed ready to land, the book often introduced convenient escapes that let her wriggle free. The result was a story that never gripped me. While it was intellectually interesting and had many sharp and trenchant opinions, it was missing the visceral tension that would have made Elizabeth's spiral truly unforgettable.

I really wanted to enjoy this book more than I did. I loved the worldbuilding, but the middle section of the book felt very aimless. I ended up DNF this one, but I would love to know if the plot ever picked up steam in the final third.