Review: Bronze Drum (DNF)

Title: Bronze Drum: A Novel of Sisters and War

Author: Phong Nguyen

Genre: Historical Fiction

Trigger Warnings: Death, blood (mentions), confinement, injury, sexual content (not described), colonialism, suicide attempt

Note: Trigger warnings in DNF books only cover the part I read. There may be triggers further in the book that I did not encounter.

Read To: Page 184

Back Cover:

Gather around, children of Chu Dien, and be brave. For even to listen to the story of the Trung Sisters is, in these troubled times, a dangerous act.

In 40 CE, in the Au Lac region of ancient Vietnam, two daughters of a Vietnamese Lord fill their days training, studying, and trying to stay true to Vietnamese traditions. While Trung Trac is disciplined and wise, always excelling in her duty, Trung Nhi is fierce and free spirited, more concerned with spending time in the gardens and with lovers.

But these sister’s lives—and the lives of their people—are shadowed by the oppressive rule of the Han Chinese. They are forced to adopt Confucian teachings, secure marriages, and pay ever‑increasing taxes. As the peoples’ frustration boils over, the country comes ever closer to the edge of war.

When Trung Trac and Trung Nhi’s father is executed, their world comes crashing down around them. With no men to save them against the Han’s encroaching regime, they must rise and unite the women of Vietnam into an army. Solidifying their status as champions of women and Vietnam, they usher in a period of freedom and independence for their people.

Vivid, lyrical, and filled with adventure, Bronze Drum is a true story of standing up for one’s people, culture, and country that has been passed down through generations of Vietnamese families through oral tradition. Phong Nguyen’s breathtaking novel takes these real women out of legends and celebrates their loves, losses, and resilience in this inspirational story of women’s strength and power even in the face of the greatest obstacles. 

Review:

I struggled with this book from the very beginning. And normally when that happens, I decide to stop fairly early on. It’s part of my whole “only read books that I enjoy” goal – if I’m not enjoying it, why keep reading?

The problem here is that I really wanted to like this book. It’s such a fantastic concept. I had never heard the story of Trung Trac and Trung Nhi before, but a pair of sisters who raise an army of women to drive out the people occupying their country is such a fantastic story. Even better, this is based on real historical people and events! My knowledge of Vietnam is extremely limited, so I was excited to learn more about Vietnamese traditions and values. And not only is Vietnam an awesome setting, this is specifically Bronze Age Vietnam, which, as someone who finds ancient history much more interesting than anything that happened less than a thousand years ago, I found especially appealing. There are so many good ideas and good concepts and things I really, really wanted to love and immerse myself in.

However, it ultimately ended up being disappointing. Some of that was stylistic. The writing was very a folktale, oral tradition type of style – narrative heavy, switching perspectives with no warning, not identifying particular “main characters,” and telling you everything that goes on instead of actually showing you. Though there wasn’t an explicit narrator, there was a strong sense of the story, the setting, and anything that might have made it feel vibrant being mediated and muted through the lens of an omnicient storyteller. The characters and world, though interesting in concept, struggled to rise off the page.

This isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Sometimes this storyteller-narrator style could work – and it’s not an inherently bad choice for a story based in oral tradition like this is. It wouldn’t be easy to make it work in a 400-page novel, but it’s possible. In fact, I think it could have worked if it weren’t for this book’s second major problem: Nothing happens.

The back cover establishes that the death of Trung Trac and Trung Nhi’s father is when the story actually gets started. When I stopped reading, he was still alive. Nothing truly interesting happened until 150 pages into the book. The first 184 pages (and possibly more) were more like a slice of life in that time period. Trung Trac and Trung Nhi walked in the gardens, practiced fighting forms, learned from their tutors, fell in love, argued with each other, made occasional stupid decisions, had complex relationships with their parents, and generally just lived as Vietnamese young women under the Han invaders. Again, in itself, this isn’t necessarily a bad thing. If done right, having such a long period of “setting the scene” can make the rest of the story feel more important and impactful.

The problem is that this book tries to do both. With the storyteller style, the reader isn’t getting a lot of emotional connection with the characters, so it needs to have a stronger, quicker-paced plot to make it work. To keep a long period of setup from getting boring, the reader needs to create strong emotional connections with the characters. But by doing both, the narrator/storyteller style toned down the emotions and kept me from forming a connection with any of these characters that would have engaged me in the minutiae of daily life, and having such a long period of setup left me with no plot or major central conflict to get invested in.

This is a really difficult book to review because I desperately wanted to like it. I really wanted to read this story about warrior sisters in Bronze Age Vietnam! But the telling made two choices that both individually make sense (storyteller style to emphasize its oral origins and long setup to familiarize Western readers with the place and time) that combined to make it dull. Not unreadable, definitely, but not really enjoyable either. I wanted so much to like this. I just didn’t.

Review: Black Water Sister (DNF)

Title: Black Water Sister

Author: Zen Cho

Genre: Contemporary Fantasy

Trigger Warnings: Death of parent (mentions), cancer (mentions), injuries, murder (attempted), blood (brief), violence, loss of bodily autonomy

Note: Trigger warnings in DNF books only cover the part I read. There may be triggers further in the book that I did not encounter.

Read To: 68%

Back Cover:

When Jessamyn Teoh starts hearing a voice in her head, she chalks it up to stress. Closeted, broke and jobless, she’s moving back to Malaysia with her parents – a country she last saw when she was a toddler.

She soon learns the new voice isn’t even hers, it’s the ghost of her estranged grandmother. In life, Ah Ma was a spirit medium, avatar of a mysterious deity called the Black Water Sister. Now she’s determined to settle a score against a business magnate who has offended the god—and she’s decided Jess is going to help her do it, whether Jess wants to or not.

Drawn into a world of gods, ghosts, and family secrets, Jess finds that making deals with capricious spirits is a dangerous business, but dealing with her grandmother is just as complicated. Especially when Ah Ma tries to spy on her personal life, threatens to spill her secrets to her family and uses her body to commit felonies. As Jess fights for retribution for Ah Ma, she’ll also need to regain control of her body and destiny – or the Black Water Sister may finish her off for good.

Review:

I read Zen Cho’s The Order of the Pure Moon Reflected in Water and was mostly impressed by how rich it could have been if it had taken more time to explore the characters and setting. So I decided to try a full-length novel and find out if the extra space would provide a better experience.

The good news is that a longer book made for a much better protagonist and a more interesting (although still not as great as I think it could be) setting. The bad news is, I didn’t particularly like everything else.

Jess herself is pretty good. She hasn’t told her parents that she’s gay, let alone that she has a girlfriend. She feels like a failure, she knows her parents are struggling financially (and emotionally, though her mother’s and father’s problems in that regard are different) and she’s determined to do her best to protect them. This is complicated by the spirit of Ah Ma, her mother’s mother, who is the meanest, most entitled character I’ve ever had the displeasure of reading about, especially since she needs Jess’s body to do anything. If having your consciousness shoved to the back of your head while someone else pilots your body is as triggering an idea for you as it is for me, there are several scenes you are not going to like.

I was also frustrated by Jess’s refusal to tell anyone about anything. This may be a personal gripe, as I’m a huge believer in the power of an open and honest conversation to solve a good 90% of problems, but Jess refused to tell anyone what was happening even when they asked. I do get not wanting to tell certain things to your parents, but at least her girlfriend should have been supportive, even if she didn’t really understand. To a point, I understand not wanting to talk about all of the ridiculousness happening, but Jess’s complete refusal to even ask questions that might provide useful information got frustrating. And the only person she ever did ask, Ah Ma, gave reluctant answers that were sometimes complete lies.

There’s also not a whole lot in terms of plot. It starts out with Ah Ma wanting to stop a sacred grove being bulldozed to build condos, But that goes out the window pretty quick, and all of the sudden we’re dealing with assorted deities, mafia wars, how complicated relationships get when you don’t tell people anything, and Ah Ma’s opinion that a little murder solves a lot of problems. I’m still not entirely sure what the main conflict even was, because after it gave up on the “save the sacred grove” ideas, it just seemed to be a hodgepodge of small problems slowing tearing Jess’s life apart.

That’s not to say it was all bad. I’m always down for stories about gods and spirits, especially ones I don’t know much about. The setting – or at least the bits of it that came through – was really interesting. I wish it could have been more vibrant, as it gives the impression that the author is so familiar with Malaysia that she doesn’t consider what foreigners might want to read about it, but what was there was great. I liked Jess herself, for the most part, and the guy who definitely would have been the love interest if Jess wasn’t a lesbian was a pretty cool character. I think I liked him the best.

There were good ideas here. The concept was solid, and I don’t think I’ve read anything set in Malaysia before (unless you count The Order of the Pure Moon Reflected in Water, which I don’t because I thought it was set in fantasy China until I read the author’s website). But Jess’s refusal to communicate anything to anyone and Ah Ma’s hateful disregard for Jess made this story more frustrating than anything.

Review: The Order of the Pure Moon Reflected in Water

Title: The Order of the Pure Moon Reflected in Water

Author: Zen Cho

Genre: Historical Fantasy

Trigger Warnings: War (mentions), violence, blood, death, genocide (mentions), sexual harassment (brief), gun violence, deadnaming

Back Cover:

Zen Cho returns with The Order of the Pure Moon Reflected in Water, a found family wuxia fantasy that combines the vibrancy of old school martial arts movies with characters drawn from the margins of history.

A bandit walks into a coffeehouse, and it all goes downhill from there. Guet Imm, a young votary of the Order of the Pure Moon, joins up with an eclectic group of thieves (whether they like it or not) in order to protect a sacred object, and finds herself in a far more complicated situation than she could have ever imagined.

Review:

This is a confusing little book. Not so much in the story, but in the details and context that aren’t actually in the story and that I only found while researching for this review. So there’s two parts to this review: What I thought of what’s contained between the covers, and the context that somehow didn’t end up in the book itself.

The Book

This book is very short – just under 4 hours in audiobook form, 176 pages according to The StoryGraph. It reads a lot more like a long fairy tale or folktale than a novel or novella. There is no urgency to the plot, the story is straightforward with only two minor events that could even be possibly considered twists (only one of which actually affects anything), and the characters are brief sketches more than fully realized people.

I think part of the problem was trying to pack so much into so little. This book is so short that there isn’t a lot of space for developing anything, and yet there is some kind of East Asian vaguely-fantasy setting, Guet Imm the nun and 4-6 bandit characters (I can’t remember how many exactly), and a journey plot that takes the group from where they met Guet Imm to a town to sell some goods and then to a third town to meet with a person. None of it gets fleshed out because there just isn’t time.

That said, I did actually enjoy this book. I’ve read a fair number of folktales, and reading it like a folktale – without the modern novel expectations of worldbuilding and character development and such – it was fairly enjoyable. It deals with a lot of heavy topics but doesn’t have enough development to get too serious, and the characters are fine to follow around without getting invested enough to feel too upset when they get hurt. It’s not the kind of book that becomes a favorite, but it was a perfectly acceptable reading experience.

Things I Learned While Researching For This Review

When doing my usual preliminary research for this review, I discovered Zen Cho’s website, where I learned there is some depth and context to the story that somehow didn’t make it into the book itself.

To start with, the back cover describes it as a “wuxia fantasy.” Wuxia is a Chinese fiction genre, so I assumed that the story was set in China, despite Gwet Imm not being a Chinese name. However, according to the author, the book is actually set in Malaysia – specifically during the Malaysian Emergency, a guerrilla war between the British and Malaysian independence fighters between 1948 and 1960. Which explains several things:

• The jungles that they keep walking through, as there are a lot more jungles in Malaysia than China.
• The “secret war” (obviously guerrilla warfare now that I have the context) that is mentioned but never encountered.
• The soldiers who are a different ethnicity from the native people and do things like destroy temples and genocide people.
• The “bandits” who are native people and part of the secret war by hiding in the jungles and attacking the soldiers.

I wish this book had been longer. With this context, there is so much that could have been done with the story that just didn’t happen. I didn’t even put together that there was a guerilla war going on in the background, let alone that this was a people fighting for their independence from a colonial power. Heck, I didn’t even work out that this was set in Southeast Asia and not some fantasy version of China. The limited length of this story did it a disservice, and there could have been so much more depth and interest to this story if it had been allowed to expand beyond sketches of characters on a simple delivery quest. I liked the story for itself, but now that I have the context and see what it could have been, I find myself disappointed by the lost potential.

Review: The Chosen and the Beautiful

Title: The Chosen and the Beautiful

Author: Nghi Vo

Genre: Magical Realism

Trigger Warnings: Alcohol use, drunk driving, death (mentions), ghosts, blood (mentions), blood consumption (mentions), smoking, heterosexual sexual content (explicit), homosexual sexual content (mentions), gun violence (mentions), infidelity, racism/xenophobia, car accidents, domestic abuse

Back Cover:

Immigrant. Socialite. Magician.

Jordan Baker grows up in the most rarefied circles of 1920s American society–she has money, education, a killer golf handicap, and invitations to some of the most exclusive parties of the Jazz Age. She’s also queer, Asian, adopted, and treated as an exotic attraction by her peers, while the most important doors remain closed to her.

But the world is full of wonders: infernal pacts and dazzling illusions, lost ghosts and elemental mysteries. In all paper is fire, and Jordan can burn the cut paper heart out of a man. She just has to learn how.

Nghi Vo’s debut novel The Chosen and the Beautiful reinvents this classic of the American canon as a coming-of-age story full of magic, mystery, and glittering excess, and introduces a major new literary voice.

Review:

This is a retelling of The Great Gatsby from the perspective of Jordan Baker – but a Jordan Baker who is a Vietnamese adoptee and unapologetically bisexual, set in a just slightly off-kilter version of Jazz Age New York where the elite drink demon blood whiskey, electricity is more strange than magical lights, and good friends can spend an afternoon floating around the ceilings of the house.

I do not like The Great Gatsby. I read it at age 14 in the worst English class I’ve ever taken, found it boring and didn’t understand any of what the analysis in class said it was about, and decided that it wasn’t necessarily a bad book but had no business being as popular as it was. However, my husband adores it, and the fact that he’s been pestering me to give it another chance and this book’s premise of a queer Vietnamese Jordan Baker convinced me to give this book a shot.

And overall, I’m glad I did. From what I remember of the original Great Gatsby, The Chosen and the Beautiful holds pretty closely to the major plot points – excepting differences in perspective, since this one is told by Jordan Baker. I liked the background of Jordan growing up as a Vietnamese adoptee in turn-of-the-century Kentucky, the subtle and not-so-subtle racism and exclusion she experienced for being Vietnamese despite also being a daughter of a rich and prestigous family, and how she coped – weaponizing her “exotic” beauty, unapologetically embracing her sexual desires for both men and women, and donning emotional armor so as not to care what anyone else may say or think about her.

There are some themes of racism and xenophobia in this book, but up until the end they’re mostly undercurrents. For most of the book, i’ts mostly about wealth and decadence and love and magic and how Jay Gatsby’s inability to let go of a past love causes the deaths of three people and deeply wounds the woman he loved. Which, if my memory serves, is pretty spot-on to the original book, except for the magic.

Even though this is a new book (released less than two months ago), it reads like an older book, very similar in style to the original Great Gatsby. And I think that’s why I didn’t like it as much as I should have considering how many things this book has I do like (like magic as a metaphor for cultural identity, queer girls, and love interests who may or may not have sold their souls to demons). The Chosen and the Beautiful was far too faithful to The Great Gatsby for what it was trying to be. It didn’t reimagine anything besides Jordan Baker herself, instead taking the entirety of The Great Gatsby and painting a varnish of magic and queerness on it that is very careful to not obscure too much of the original.

This book wasn’t bad, but it could have been so much more. It isn’t so much a reimagining as it is a boringly faithful retelling with just enough imagination to appeal to people who like fantasy but not The Great Gatsby (like me). I liked it enough to finish it, but I’m mostly disappointed because I think this could have been so much more. Or maybe you just have to like the original book to fully appreciate this one.