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Book Review: Unquiet Spirits: Essays by Asian Women in Horror edited by Lee Murray and Angela Yuriko Smith, foreward by Lisa Kroger

Cover art for Unquiet Spirits: Essays by Asian Women in Horror edited by Lee Murray and Angela Yuriko Smith

Unquiet Spirits: Essays by Asian Women in Horror edited by Lee Murray and Angela Yuriko Smith, with a foreword by Lisa Kroger.

Black Spot Books Nonfiction, 2023

ISBN-13: 978-1645481300

Available: Hardcover, paperback, Kindle edition

( Bookshop.org | Amazon.com )

 

I read an uncorrected ARC of this book.

 

Unquiet Spirits is a collection of 24 personal essays by women across the Asian diaspora, grounded in the authors’ family history, relationship to their culture, and the supernatural.

 

One of the takeaways from reading this is that the Asian diaspora is far from monolithic. Each of the authors has a distinct background and set of circumstances: one certainly cannot speak for all.

 

Some of the authors include Nadia Bulkin, who is Javanese-American, Geneve Flynn, who is a Chinese-Australian born in Malaysia, Rena Mason, who is a first-generation immigrant to America of Thai-Chinese descent, and Tori Eldridge. who was born in Hawaii and is of Hawaiian, Korean, and Norwegian descent, all of whom approached their essays differently.

 

The diversity of the authors and their choices of what each individual focused on is what really drew me in. That I read almost 300 pages in tiny print on a PDF is a testament to the quality of the writing.

 

I learned a lot from these essays: in Lee Murray’s essay on displaced spirits I learned that Chinese immigrants to Australia expected to be returned to China for burial, or become hungry ghosts, and from Nadia Bulkin’s essay that the terms “amok” and “latah” originated in Indonesia, to name just a few. The authors wrote about growing up feeling out of place, feeling unwilling or unable to meet expectations about filial duty, marriage, and motherhood. They wrote about hungry ghosts, fox demons, and yokai
They wrote about finding and using their voices.

 

I read this a few essays at a time. There’s a lot to think about in each one, so I think that’s a good way to approach this book. I highly recommend taking the time to do so.

 

Reviewed by Kirsten Kowalewski

Posted on January 7, 2023 by , Reply

Book Review: Jawbone by Monica Ojeda translated by Sarah Booker

cover art for Jawbone by Monica Ojeda

Jawbone by Monica Ojeda., translated by Sarah Booker

Coffee House Press, 2022

ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1566896214

Available: Paperback, Kindle edition

( Bookshop.org  | Amazon.com )

 

Fernanda wakes up, disoriented, to discover she has been kidnapped by Miss Clara, her literature teacher. Figuring out how she got there is the first step in navigating a twisty narrative.

 

Fernanda, her close friend Anne, and their friends had found an abandoned, isolated house where they told horror stories, participated in violent dares, and worshipped the White God (as friend groups of teenage girls do). Fernanda and Anne pushed their limits further than the other girls, but Fernanda finally reaches hers.

 

Anne is forced to take extra lessons from Miss Clara after the teachers discover an irreligious drawing of an insect god in drag. Miss Clara has closely modeled herself on her mother and has anxiety and frequent panic attacks that result in repetitive and neurotic behaviors and self-harm, making her a perfect target for Anne, who is angry with Fernanda for drawing boundaries. Anne uses her conversations and assignments with Miss Clara to manipulate Miss Clara’s anxieties and turn her focus on Fernanda as a villain victimizing Anne…

 

The writing varies in style. Parts of the book record Fernanda’s therapy sessions; conversations between Anne and Clara;  and a long essay on “white horror” by Anne for Clara. Others get into the mental state of Clara or Fernanda which are quite disorienting, vivid, and sometimes gut-punching, with insect and body horror. The descriptions of physical responses to anxiety and panic attacks are hard to read. It gets harder and harder to trust any perception of events.

 

There is so much left to the imagination that it creates a real sense of unease. The violence keeps escalating but a lot of it happens off the page. This is generally effective but left me confused with the ending. There is so much left to the imagination that it creates a real sense of unease.

 

This is far from being a straighforward narrative, Readers who enjoy experimental narratives and unreliable narrators will find much to recommend it, though. ,.

 

 

Reviewed by Kirsten Kowalewski

 

Editor’s note: Jawbone was a finalist for the 2022 National Book Award in Translated Literature. 

Posted on November 9, 2022 by , Reply

Book Review: The School for Good Mothers by Jessamine Chan

The School for Good Mothers by Jessamine Chan

 

The School for Good Mothers by Jessamine Chan ( Amazon.com |  Bookshop.org )

Simon & Schuster, 2022

ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1982156121

Available: Hardcover, paperback, Kindle edition, audiobook

 

This book was like living through a nightmare trainwreck.

 

Single working mother Frida is separated from her two year old daughter Harriet after she leaves her home alone for more than two hours with the back door open. She is sentenced to a year at the School of Good Mothers, a new program that monitors neglectful parents as they work through a sadistic and brutal parenting curriculum that requires them to mother human-appearing child robots while depriving them of actual contact with their children. Mothers who don’t finish or pass will have their parental rights terminated and appear on a neglectful parent registry.

 

This has a similar feel to The Handmaid’s Tale, and the teachers, social workers, and administrators are the absolute worst versions you could come up with for those roles. The difference is, it is set in the present day, and it’s not impossible to imagine something similar actually taking place. The individual characters don’t matter as much.as the overall picture.

 

Frida is lucky in that her parents, ex, and his wife are all supportive of her, but even so, the end is inevitable.

 

Obviously no one  should leave a toddler at home unsupervised for two hours, but the state shouldn’t be rigidly and arbitrarily prescriptive and cruelly controlling of the ways we parent our children. The lessons of The School for Good Mothers are more damaging to Frida and her daughter than reparative.

 

The story flowed well, but it is chilling, a difficult read in our real world environment that is colder to women, and children, every day. Highly recommended.

 

Contains: suicide, suicidal ideation, murderous thoughts, racial slurs, solitary confinement, violence, mentions of pedophilia.

 

 

Reviewed by Kirsten Kowalewski

Posted on August 17, 2022 by , Reply
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