Gods of Want

Starred review from May 23, 2022
Chang (Bestiary) returns with a dazzling collection of stories within stories that draw on old myths to embody the heartache and memories of Asian American women. In “The Chorus of Dead Cousins,” the unnamed narrator is constantly disrupted by the ghosts of her dead cousins and tries to escape them by traveling with her storm-chaser wife to record a tornado. In “Episodes of Hoarders,” a woman nicknamed “little crab” grieves over her dead hoarder grandmother. A wild mother-in-law repeatedly pretends to die and makes married life a living nightmare for the protagonist of “Xífù,” who envies her lesbian daughter for being unattached to men. In “Anchor,” a young woman struggles with the verbal abuse of her aunt, who raised her after her mother died during childbirth. She’s also haunted by the ghost of a girl her aunt accidentally shot many years earlier, has delicate conversations with a nun at a nearby temple, and searches for the old toy gun her brother lost before he left for the military. Chang’s bold conceits and potent imagery evoke a raw, visceral power that captures feelings of deep longing and puts them into words. This stellar collection will leave readers hungry for more. Agent: Julia Kardon, HG Literary.

Starred review from May 15, 2022
Composed of 16 short stories that explore the immigrant experience, this book traces a line from old worlds to new worlds by means of the bloody umbilical cords that stretch between them. Chang returns to the thematic territory of her debut novel, Bestiary (2020), in these stories that unthread the tangled relationships between mothers and daughter, aunts and cousins, siblings and lovers in the broadly defined Taiwanese immigrant community now living in California. The stories progress through their antic, sometimes manic, often bloody, muddy, orgasmic, or chewed-up and spit-out paces. In "The Chorus of Dead Cousins," an endlessly proliferating infestation of dead cousins threatens to drive away the speaker's new wife with their poltergeist mischief, including farting in the minister's face at the wedding and replacing all of the wife's teeth with the red-dyed shells of melon seeds in the night. In "N�wa," named for the mother goddess of Chinese mythology who is often depicted as having a long, serpentine body, the train that passes the narrator and her sister Meimei's house at night may also be a snake who is responsible for devouring all the girls that have gone missing in their neighborhood. In "Resident Aliens," the speaker, her mother, and her seven aunts "share two bedrooms and rent out the basement--what had once been a slaughterhouse, with hooks that snagged on our shadows and no windows but our mouths," to a series of 26 widows, each upping the fairy-tale ante on the one who came before. Separated into three sections--"Mothers," "Myths," and "Moths,"--the book signals its lingual play from the table of contents on. Indeed, the ease with which the various narrators shift into poetic transcendence in their workaday descriptions coupled with the linguistic flexibility of non-native idioms repurposed for a new English in a new world is as much a part of the storytelling as the stories themselves. All this together leaves the reader with a lingering sense that language, as well as life, is infinitely adaptable, no matter the ground on which it is given to grow. Lurid, funny, strange, and deftly sorrowing--an important new voice.

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Starred review from June 1, 2022
Relationships between women--familial, beloved, strange, imagined--dominate queer Taiwanese American Chang's (Bestiary, 2020) explosive and bizarre first story collection. Three single-word, deftly exacting descriptors define three sections--""Mothers,"" ""Myths,"" ""Moths""--which organize 16 tales that challenge immigration and diasporic identity, confront inequity and dysfunction. "Auntland" opens "Mothers" with an aunt, among countless aunts, who demands that a dentist remove her tongue, which she flushes down a toilet, only to have it reappear years later on the evening news after being caught by a fisherman. "The Chorus of Dead Cousins" relentlessly harasses a bride and groom, farting in the minister's face and shattering a stained-glass window during the wedding. A mother-in-law repeatedly attempts suicide, a tactic to drive away her X�f� (daughter-in-law). In "The La-La Store," a daughter tries on various monikers via dollar-store key chains that will never match her own name. The fantastical "Myths" showcases an eighth-grader whose "talent is [she] can eat anything," two sushi-restaurant employees tasked with injecting dye into the fish to intimate freshness (in a desert!), and a woman determined to sleep her way through the calendar with month-named lovers. In "Moths," the standout is "Resident Aliens," in which the narrator's family rents their basement to a series of 26 widows. Chang glides effortlessly between the shocking and quotidian, demanding attention, deserving applause.

COPYRIGHT(2022) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.