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Book Reviewed by:
Elisabeth Cook
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Nancy Au's debut collection is rich with scents, sounds, imaginative leaps, and unexpected angles of vision.
These seventeen stories present the challenges facing characters whose inner and outer lives often do not align, whose spirits attempt flight despite dashed hopes and lean circumstances. Marginalized by race, age, and sexuality, they endeavor to create new worlds that honor their identities and their Chinese heritage.
Au excels at inhabiting the minds and hearts of children and the elderly. In the title story, Sophie Chu dresses daily in her increasingly shabby elephant costume to ensure her missing parents recognize her upon their return. In "The Unfed," a village elder seeks to revive, with her dimming magic, a mountain community struck by tragedy. "Louise" follows, with deceptive hilarity (involving a one-eyed duck), the nuanced give and take between May Zhou and Lai, dissimilar yet passionate partners considering parenthood. The volume also offers sparkling speculative work that taps into the strength of nature—fox spirits and fire beetles, swollen rivers and rippling clouds—to showcase the sometimes surreal transformations of Au's protagonists.
Spider Love Song and Other Stories treads the fault line that forms between lovers, families, friends, cultures—exposing injuries and vulnerabilities, but also the strength and courage necessary to recast resentment and anger into wonder and power. Au's lyrical style, humor, and tender attention to her characters' fancies and failings make this powerful debut a delight to read.
Louise
May Zhou and her wife, Lai, ate lunch every Friday on a grassy corner of a city park two blocks from Oakland Community College, where they worked in the bursar's office as accountants. Today they'd met for an early lunch, an hour before noon, but the temperature was already boiling. A thin haze hung in the air, smothering May's appetite.
Lai peeled back the bread on her sandwich and sighed. "I wanted banana on my peanut butter."
"You already ate all the bananas."
May watched as her wife folded the sandwich in half and took a bite out of the center. Lai then lifted the sandwich up to her face and peered at May through the bread's oozing hole. May wondered how Lai, who had the spirited appetite of a teenage girl, and who would eat the horn off a rhino if she was hungry enough, remained so slender while May's own small frame had begun to widen the moment she'd turned thirty, so that she resembled a shrimp dumpling.
Lost in self-consciousness, May did not notice the approaching...
Au blends a lyrical style, like that above, with more matter-of-fact prose. Her stories have a purely aesthetic draw, but even those that are shorter and more poetic work to incorporate interesting plot arcs. Some stories evince a more natural momentum than others, but they all lead the reader to new territory, often stopping on unexpected notes...continued
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(Reviewed by Elisabeth Cook).
Jennifer S. Cheng, author of House A and Moon: Letters, Maps, Poems
Au's characters are rare and subversive in their multidimensionality, traversing the Chinese diaspora in subtle, complex, and magical ways, all sharing in the intimate condition of being waylaid by the world. Every sentence and image feels sculpted out of clay—careful, astonishing, and wondrously impressed with the fingerprints of their creator. May-lee Chai, author of Useful Phrases for Immigrants: Stories and Dragon Chica
Nancy Au writes about badass women, women born as damselfly nymphs in China who become grounded, wingless, in America, mothers and daughters and grandmothers who are sex, who are power, who are sarcastic beasts, who are us. Spider Love Song and Other Stories is a collection like no other. Read it and marvel. Muriel Leung, author of Bone Confetti
Darkly funny at times and always profound, Au's imagination lends us magic to feel our way through what it means to be queer, Chinese American, indebted to our mothers and ancestors, and always longing for something more. Peg Alford Pursell, author of A Girl Goes into the Forest
Foxes, turtles, ducks, oysters, fish, badgers, beetles, damselflies, bees: all manner of creatures scratch, swim, thrum, and shimmer through these tender and fantastic stories...I was spellbound by Au's unique vision and language that pay attention to the many wild, rich worlds that hold us.
Large-scale Chinese immigration to America began in the mid-1800s, partly in response to economic instability in China during the Taiping Rebellion, a civil war that lasted from 1850-1864. Like many others, Chinese immigrants were also drawn
by the California Gold Rush.
After the gold rush ended, many Chinese people stayed on in the U.S. to work jobs or start their own businesses. During this time, the Chinese gained a reputation as hard workers who would perform cheap labor. The truth was that many Chinese workers were exploited and given little or no choice in the conditions of their labor, being paid substantially less than white workers and forced to take on more dangerous tasks. When economic depression hit the country in the 1870s...
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