I don’t think Zen Cho is capable of writing a book that isn’t a fascinating and stylish delight.
Black Water Sister is her latest, and it’s a striking, appealing narrative of family, displacement, “home”-coming, coming-of-age… and ghosts.
Jess has grown up in the USA, the only daughter of Malaysian Chinese immigrants. Her memories of Malaysia are holiday snapshots. She’s just finished college, and her girlfriend has moved to Singapore. And now Jess is moving back to Malaysia with her parents in the wake of her father’s brush with cancer, to live with her father’s younger sister’s family in George Town. Jess is not out to her parents, or to any of her family, and she’s feeling dislocated enough with the move to Malaysia before she starts hearing voices.
Sleeps With Monsters: Two Books About Family Situations
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Sleeps With Monsters: Making Good Choices
tor.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from tor.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Sleeps With Monsters: Making Good Choices
tor.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from tor.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
The Hidden Palace is Helene Wecker’s long-awaited second novel. Wecker’s debut,
The Golem and the Jinni, was published to no small acclaim in 2013. Those of us who remember that novel and its fantastic blending of myths from different traditions in the grounded setting of immigrant communities in late 19
th-century New York have been anticipating
The Hidden Palace for quite some time.
It lives up to its predecessor.
The Hidden Palace spans fifteen years, between 1900 and 1915. It continues to follow the golem Chava Levy and the jinni Ahmad through their lives in, respectively, the Jewish and Syrian immigrant communities in New York. But it also follows Sophia Winston, the young Park Avenue heiress whose brief encounter with Ahmad left her with an affliction that leaves her cold and shivering even in high summer; and the family the daughter of Rabbi Altschul. Rabbi Altschul inherits the books of Rabbi Meyer, who had helped Chava, and eventually comes to construct a golem of