In “Indian Country,” Shobha Rao set out to accomplish more than just a conventionally satisfying murder mystery. Interrupting the plot’s progression are 12 lyrical interludes that take place between 1814 and 2003 and share an underlying preoccupation with the slippery nature of time, with colonial violence and crimes against women and girls recurring across eras. Read my review of the book in The New York Times, “The Perp in This Murder Mystery Might Be History Itself.”
For The New York Times, I review Peace Adzo Medie’s second novel Nightbloom: “If family figures as one creditor in the novel, and the suppressed memory of rape another, then Medie intertwines the two, fingers welded in one devastating grip.”
For The New York Times Book Review, I write on Code Switch co-founding editor Kat Chow’s memoir of grief and family, immigration and ancestors. Guided by the work of scholars in Asian American studies who have developed a theory of “racial melancholia,” elaborating on Freud, Chow links her own life and species of grief to their explanation of how identities are formed in immigrant families who try to preserve the memory of the places they left — in a sense to taxidermy the past. Seeing Ghosts gives flesh to this theory, the idea that loss of country and loss of loved ones can hook us with similar perpetual sorrow, through storytelling that brings alive both Chow’s mother and father, drawing their characters tenderly but with unflinching honesty.
For The New York Times Book Review, I consider poet Quyen Phan Que Mai’s debut in English, the novel “The Mountains Sing.”
For the New York Times Book Review, I wrote a piece about Valeria Luiselli’s novel in the shape of an archive and consider how it differs from other work (narrative nonfiction or testimonial poetry) that immerses us in the internal and external deserts that unaccompanied child migrants cross: “Which of us who has loved a child wouldn’t be moved by the evocative details of innocence snagged on the jagged fences of adult circumstance?”