Reading

A Review of Percival Everett’s James (Doubleday, 2024).

Written by Stephen Hong Sohn
Edited by Sam Higgins

As you know, we always throw in a title from other groups in order to cast a wide net and continue to operate with some element of inclusivity. We figured it would be a good opportunity to review Percival Everett’s James (Doubleday, 2024), the recent Pulitzer Prize winner. It’s been ages since I read The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and James is purported to be a kind of revisionist telling, told from the perspective of Huck’s friend, Jim, who is also a slave on the run. In any case, here is that marketing description:

“When Jim overhears that he is about to be sold to a man in New Orleans, separated from his wife and daughter forever, he runs away until he can formulate a plan. Meanwhile, Huck has faked his own death to escape his violent father. As all readers of American literature know, thus begins the dangerous and transcendent journey by raft down the Mississippi River toward the elusive and unreliable promise of the Free States and beyond. Brimming with the electrifying humor and lacerating observations that have made Everett a literary icon, this brilliant and tender novel radically illuminates Jim’s agency, intelligence, and compassion as never before. James is destined to be a major publishing event and a cornerstone of twenty-first-century American literature.”

Well, I have to say, I was absolutely gobsmacked by this novel! One of the best I’ve read in a while, partly because I just love revisionist literary works. Some of my favorite novels—Monique Truong’s The Book of Salt (which offers a counter to some of the writings of Gertrude Stein and the Alice B. Toklas cookbook) and Nghi Vo’s The Chosen and the Beautiful (a revision of The Great Gatsby from Jordan Baker’s perspective, who also happens to be Asian American in a fictional world filled with magic)—operate in this vein, and it’s so interesting to see a narrative taken from an entirely different perspective. In those long-ago days, I feel as though the only real interiority we got in Huck Finn was the titular character, who seemed a bit naïve, but over the course of the narrative starts to realize the darker ways of the world, whether it comes in the form of human bondage, con men, or what have you. But Jim remains a sort of flat character and is certainly not the protagonist in that work. So, we get a delicious retelling from Jim’s perspective, which gives you the expansive first-person interiority that so many readers may not have realized that they wanted but so desired. In this novel, you begin to see how Everett is playing with the historical framing of slaves as well as their intellect.

This text clarifies how so many African Americans employ code switching in order to survive, communicating in one way to the dominant white community and in another with fellow blacks. This mode of networking and insidership is sometimes complicated by the fact of passing, but their ability to speak to each other in coded variations serves as an instrumental tool not only for surviving but also occasionally the mode by which they flourish even in oppressive circumstances. Everett dives deeply into this form of representational corrective and gives the titular James (aka Jim) the kind of heroic arc that is both historically and representationally reparative. There is a moment in this text, especially in those concluding pages, where a reader of a particular type might not believe how it all ends. Indeed, a reader might pause to consider whether or not such an outcome is plausible, but I do believe that such suspicions would miss the point here. James is not only rewriting the past but also writing for this particular moment, when we need to see that oppressive structures of power can sometimes be partially skirted around and that resistance and revolution, however minor in its manifestation, can yet become a mode by which slavery is momentarily destabilized. Given the trials and tribulations faced by so many black characters in this novel, it is the kind of logical ending that we need, both then and now.

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A Review of Yiyun Li’s Things in Nature Merely Grow (FSG, 2025)

Written by Stephen Hong Sohn
Edited by Sam Higgins

For a while, I had kept up with every single one of Yiyun Li’s publications, but the radical increase in Asian American lit meant that I started to fall behind. I’ve missed, for instance, The Book of Goose, but when Things in Nature Merely Grow (FSG, 2025) was announced, I knew I had to read it. The topic of this creative nonfiction publication is obviously harrowing (for lack of a better word):

“Yiyun Li’s remarkable, defiant work of radical acceptance as she considers the loss of her son James.”

“There is no good way to say this,” Yiyun Li writes at the beginning of this book. “There is no good way to state these facts, which must be acknowledged. My husband and I had two children and lost them both: Vincent in 2017, at sixteen, James in 2024, at nineteen. Both chose suicide, and both died not far from home.”

There is no good way to say this—because words fall short. It takes only an instant for death to become fact, “a single point in a timeline.” Living now on this single point, Li turns to thinking, reasoning, and searching for words that might hold a place for James. Li does what she can: “doing the things that work,” including not just writing but gardening, reading Camus and Wittgenstein, learning the piano, and living thinkingly alongside death. This is a book for James, but it is not a book about grieving or mourning. As Li writes, “The verb that does not die is to be. Vincent was, is, and will always be Vincent. James was and is and will always be James. We were, are, and will always be their parents. There is no now and then, now and later, only now and now and now and now.” Things in Nature Merely Grow is a testament to Li’s indomitable spirit.” Hmmm. I’m not sure if she would have approved of the last line of this marketing description. There is no triumphal tone to this work. The title really says it all. The other key element is that Li is not a fan of the word “grief” or “grieving.”

Once you get further into the book, Li discusses her beef with the terms, given that they potentially imply a kind of limited condition that will eventually be over. Li lives in something called the “abyss,” which is always in the now. While the book does explore the death of both children, Li does make it clear that this book is a way to engage with James’s death. Li writes a book in the aftermath of Vincent’s death, a tough novel called Where Reasons End. It’s been a while since I read it, but that one was more or less structured about a mother’s conversations with her child, who has passed away. It’s not a ghost thing, but rather a kind of philosophical approach toward life and death. The novel’s germination came partly from Li’s understanding of her first son as someone who is very invested in feelings and emotion. For Li, the same kind of book cannot be written for James precisely because he is more withdrawn and more logical. Li calls Vincent someone who lives feelingly, while James is someone who lives thinkingly. In this respect, Li essentially states there is no way to write properly for James in terms of the representational terrain because of this aspect of his personality. He cannot be recovered in the same way, nor could Li even venture to do so. For Li, then, this creative nonfictional work is the closest she can venture to him in the wake of his death. The other things I appreciated were when Li includes important missives and perspectives made my friends and loved ones, who help Li and her husband through different things that come up related to James’s death. They often speak with the kind of bluntness that one might need, even at such devastating moments.

There is one final section that I found the most powerful: the parts where Li calls out all of those who could not properly consider the state that Li and her husband were in and who reached out in violent ways. One example is when someone connects with Li to express condolences about her son’s passing and then mentions something about how they have a child who is also a writer and that they have taken the liberty of attaching a manuscript for Li to provide feedback on. I literally gasped reading this section. Li gives people like this one a lot of grace, far more than I would have had. This creative nonfiction is a very tough read, but I can say that this work is truly extraordinary in the way that Li opens up the reading world to her abyss. It is, in this sense, what we might call a dark gift.

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A Review of Natasha Ngan’s Girls of Fate and Fury (Jimmy Patterson, 2021).

Written by Stephen Hong Sohn
Edited by Sam Higgins

Here we are with the review for Natasha Ngan’s Girls of Fate and Fury (Jimmy Patterson, 2021), the final installment in this trilogy! Let’s move over to that very pithy marketing blurb:

“The final pages of Girls of Storm and Shadow brought a jaw-dropping conclusion that had the fates of Lei and Wren hanging in uncertainty. But one thing was certain - the Hidden Palace was the last place that Lei would ever consider home. The trauma and tragedy she suffered behind those opulent walls would plague her forever. She could not be trapped there with the sadistic king again, especially without Wren...The last Lei saw of the girl she loved, Wren was fighting an army of soldiers in a furious battle to the death. With the two girls torn apart and each in terrorizing peril, will they find each other again or have their destinies diverged forever?”

Lei is trapped back at the Demon King’s Palace, while Wren is figuring out how to forge ahead with the plan to depose the Demon King. Naturally, Ngan has to bifurcate the narrative perspectives, so we get Lei’s standard first person (my favorite just because I always find this viewpoint style to be immersive) and then Wren’s third person. Ngan basically has to figure out a way to get the two back together, so Wren’s section really deals with how she is rallying the troops together to try to get enough military support to take over the Demon King. Lei’s part involves just trying to stay alive.

The only benefit of being back in the Palace is that she’s back with the other surviving Paper Girls from book one, so we’re treated to the reunion with Chenna, Zhen, Zhin, Aoki, and Blue. Aoki is the real issue here because she’s basically become smitten with the Demon King and actually finds Lei’s presence there to be an issue because Lei has become a rival. The Demon King has not killed Lei because she’s become known around the kingdom as the moonchosen, and so it’s important to have her in his orbit for the larger support of others. Lei is eventually forced to become a pawn in the Demon King’s quest to retain power. In this process, she finds out that the Demon Queen has become pregnant. The issue is that she’s as much of a prisoner as Lei and the paper girls are, so Lei realizes that she not only has to save the paper girls but the Demon Queen as well. Eventually, the climactic battle occurs, with Wren trying to breach the Palace, and Lei leading an internal revolution from within the Palace. In this process, a number of lives are lost. Most notably, Chenna is killed, which leaves a lasting mark on Lei.

On Wren’s side, Merrin ends up sacrificing himself. Shifu Caen is killed by Lei so that he can avoid being tortured further. Finally, Ketai Hanno ends up dying in the final major battle. I was glad for a character like Nitta to make it, and if I have one beef about this series, it’s that so many of the minor ally characters end up dying. Even Nitta undergoes significant harm, as she becomes paralyzed. Fittingly, Lei gets to kill the Demon King, and readers will cheer at this moment. Ngan also takes a decent amount of time wrapping up storylines, which I very much appreciated. Ngan doesn’t treat the paper girls as discardable characters. In fact, we see that they develop a kind of alternative family in the wake of leaving the Palace, with all of them choosing to be together. The other issue is the reconciliation between Lei and Wren. Given all that they have been through and Wren’s sometimes questionable decision-making (e.g., taking the life of someone to fuel her magic), their relationship has been on the rocks. Ngan takes time to figure out how to make this reconnection feel earned. The best thing about these YA trilogies is that they ultimately try to imagine a more just future. Even as some may cast aside these books as lowbrow entertainment, their political messages seem ever more important in these turbulent times.

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A Review of Natasha Ngan’s Girls of Storm and Shadow (Jimmy Patterson, 2019)

Written by Stephen Hong Sohn
Edited by Sam Higgins

So, I eventually got back on the train to finish reviewing this series, and I continue with Natasha Ngan’s Girls of Storm and Shadow (Jimmy Patterson, 2019), which I was really happy with. It doesn’t suffer from some of the similar “middle syndrome” trilogy issues, for which I was really happy about. Let’s move to the very pithy marketing description:

“Lei, the naive country girl who became a royal courtesan, is now known as the Moonchosen, the commoner who managed to do what no one else could. But slaying the cruel monarch wasn't the culmination of her destiny — it was just the beginning. Now Lei, with a massive bounty on her head, must travel the kingdom with her warrior love Wren to gain support from the far-flung rebel clans. Meanwhile, a plot to eliminate the rebel uprising is taking shape, fueled by dark magic and vengeance. Will Lei succeed in her quest to overthrow the monarchy, or will she succumb to the sinister magic that seeks to destroy her bond with Wren, and their very lives?”

I’m not really sure why these descriptions are SO short, but hey, I guess they won’t keep things under wraps because it is, after all, a trilogy. Yet, I am providing my spoiler warnings here, so look away unless you don’t mind getting to know more of the plot elements. What the description doesn’t tell you is that our Demon King from book 1 somehow survived, and he is using his fleet of magic-wielding shamans to heal him. He hasn’t gotten away completely unscathed, as he has lost one eye. At the same time, Lei and Wren are now actively planning how they can take over the kingdom. Of course, they at first think that they only have to corral support from the remaining clans and rival groups jockeying for power, but things obviously are complicated when they realize that the king is alive. The best thing about this installment is that Ngan really muddies the waters about who is actually the villain. We’re obviously against the Demon King, but little do we realize that Wren and her father, Ketai Hanno, have some questionable ethics in terms of what they will do to ensure that the reign of the king is ended for good. Ketai Hanno’s basic ethos about warfare and conflict is that the ends justify the means, which also includes the potential sacrifice of their allies in case that is needed.

The second-best thing about this installment is the new introduction of these “allies.” There are two leopard demons, Nitta and Bo, who provide the much-needed comic relief, along with Merrin, a bird-demon. Finally, there is also the advisor to the Hanno clan named Shifu Caen. At one point, when the group is in a major jam, Hiro sacrifices himself in order to fuel Wren’s magical abilities as a Xia warrior. Ketai Hanno wouldn’t bat an eyelash about Hiro doing this because Wren, given her magical abilities, is so important to the cause, but Lei, being the moral compass of the novel, obviously has a problem with people dying for any reason. Bo will also die in a major sea-based battle, which will be the final straw for Merrin, who decides to leave the group after these multiple deaths. The group is ultimately splintered by the conclusion, with Nitta, Lei, and Merrin separated from Wren and the others in the heat of the battle. As is typical in the second installment in a young adult trilogy, the conclusion is pretty dark, and this aspect is very true for this series. Ngan also introduces a bunch of second-person perspectives, which I found less interesting, but it was also crucial for the plot. For instance, we have to know what is going on back in the Demon King’s area, so we get some third-person perspectives of characters out that way. The combination of complicating the villain and these new allies made this second installment a really entertaining read.

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