Ever start watching a movie, say on television or one of the older airplanes where they show everyone in the cabin the same thing rather than let you choose your own show on the seat back television, part way through: it’s sort of engrossing but also frustrating. If so, then you’re well set for Yuki Chan in Brontë Country by Mick Jackson, which starts right in the middle of a musing on revolving restaurants. Okay. Revolving restaurants. Wacky and retro. Then the Brontës. Some snow. Visiting seniors prior to appropriate visiting hours. Who pays for Yuki’s visit to the NHS? Some flashbacks about how Yuki has fainted, two entire times, in the past. Dogs. Pellet guns. Snow. Does it just seem like I’m listing off random things here? I guess it’s because I didn’t really see the point of this book. In one way, it’s like those nineteenth century Russian naturalist novels where everything is detailed, no matter how tiny, like a perfect, little portrait on a tiny piece of scroll work. But in another way, so what?

The fundamental issue here is that the idea of the book, that Yuki is a psychic detective investigating her mother’s earlier, psychic detective, journeys around London and the English countryside, is far more intriguing than the actual book itself. When nothing comes of the book, the disappointment of a good idea wasted is too much. All the snow, the atmosphere, it’s very The Little Match Girl by Hans Christian Andersen, except at least the little match girl dies at the end. Yuki, I guess she learns one fact about her mother she didn’t know before. Of course, it isn’t really anything she was looking to find out.

And why exactly is Denny so interested in following Yuki around in the first place?

Too many questions. Too little resolution. Sure, just like life, but frustrating nonetheless.

Yuki Chan in Brontë Country by Mick Jackson went on sale January 21, 2016.

I received a copy free from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

A book which should probably be subtitled One Malaysian-Taiwanese-Chinese dude’s belief that Yu Dafu is still alive, explored in a fictitious setting. Because did Yu Dafu survive his likely assassination by the Japanese Imperial Army in 1945 and then go on to continue writing on banana notes or tortoise shell backs or forced to a small Malaysian island to convert to Islam and never write Chinese characters again? Because that’s what the stories in this book are about. Pretty much all of them. Variations on the theme of Yu Dafu’s non-death.

What causes such an obsession to write and write stories about one thing? I know I write and write stories about bad mothers again and again because of my own insecurities. Maybe Kim Chew Ng imagines that he’s an illegitimate son of Yu Dafu, in some fashion, and writes these stories out of these fantasies. Maybe Kim Chew Ng has a whole other roster of stories not about Yu Dafu and these ones were collected together because of their thematic similarities? I don’t know enough about contemporary Malaysian-Taiwanese-Chinese literature to know for sure.

To be fair, it isn’t that I don’t know enough about contemporary Malaysian-Taiwanese-Chinese literature; I know nothing about contemporary Malaysian-Taiwanese-Chinese literature. So the whole collection was sort of a surprise. I guess I wasn’t expecting it to be humourous. It isn’t laugh-out-loud funny, but the characters get themselves into ridiculous situations, like a researcher pretending to be a monkey while trapped on an island with a visually impaired Yu Dafu-esque figure in order to get closer to Yu Dafu without Yu Dafu realising it. Or characters getting themselves abducted by an elderly female pirate and her crew. Or a character being sexually aroused by turtle shells. It’s odd and entertaining, but still a bit distancing because of cultural barriers. Like I didn’t know what the May 4th Generation was, so sometimes I felt a bit lost. But usually just pleasantly lost, like wandering around a pretty, different city, with lots of wondrous stuff to look at. So it was pleasant, my first foray into a collection by an overseas Chinese from Malaysia now living in Taiwan.

In the last story, the only one that I was disappointed in, because it just stopped and I was confused by its abruptness, a character makes a video game to run through all the possibilities for an overseas Chinese coolie living in Malaysia/Singapore sixty, seventy, eighty-odd years ago. This book feels like that but for Yu Dafu. And so, now I know a lot more about Yu Dafu, and the possibilities that may have existed if he didn’t really die way back in 1945.

Slow Boat to China and Other Stories by Kim Chew Ng went on sale March 8, 2016.

I received a copy free from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

Ooooooh …. spooky!

Normally I shy away from multi-author fiction collections since the quality and tone tends to vary so markedly. I can’t really remember why I decided to give this horror collection a try. Probably because it said Best of, so I figured it wouldn’t be awful. And it wasn’t awful; it was pretty good. I read through it quickly in two evenings. I can’t say that there were any stand-outs for me, but overall, the tone wasn’t overly genre. This was more like reading literary fiction in the horror realm than pure slash-em-aliens-ghost-psychic pulp. And there were some slash-em stories, and alien stories, and ghost stories, and psychic stories, a good variety of different plots and points-of-view. Nothing too frightening though (although I doubt anything is going to be as frightening as me being eleven, alone in the dark, and reading about Danny getting trapped in the snow tunnel The Shining). Just mild thrills. A good diversion.

The Best of Horror Library: Volumes 1-5 edited by R.J. Cavender went on sale May 6, 2015.

I received a copy free from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

I guess I am still unstuck in time because as I read the first few pages of Ghost Summer: Stories by Tananarive Due I thought to myself just in time for black history month. Except it was March. So oops. I amended my thoughts to Just in time for International Woman’s Day after I realised about half-way through Nalo Hopkinson‘s introduction that Ghost Summer: Stories, that Tananarive Due is female. I don’t know. I can’t really say I’ve been on the ball lately.

I feel like just going meh about this review and leaving it at that. I could have probably guessed I’d go meh after Hopkinson’s Introduction, because that’s how I feel about Hopkinson’s work as well. I don’t hate it. Just nothing grabs me. Going back to my complete obliviousness, I’d thought Ghost Summer: Stories would be more of horror stories, probably because of the ghost in the title. They’re kind of spooky, but nothing really terrifying, so that likely added to my assessment of meh. The stories don’t necessarily speak to my experience, which is fine; I don’t expect all books and all stories to be geared towards me. Perhaps if I were a WOC, specifically a black woman from the Southern US, I would feel some of the horror more acutely, like how certain stressors (like reactions to racist violence) can be passed down bloodlines.

But the real meh for me comes in the fact that most of these stories are less self-contained stories than starting points. Due can set up such a intriguing idea and then the story just ends. Reading Ghost Summer: Stories is like talking to that friend of yours who has so many cool ideas and then just doesn’t do anything with them. There’s a story about a disagreeable baby who gets possessed by a calming spirit and that’s it. The baby gets possessed. Nothing more. There’s a story about a boy who knows the day he’s going to die. It’s in four years. That’s it. Nothing more. There’s a story about a boy in quarantine who is a Patient Zero for an epidemic. Then his doors are left unlocked, so he walks out of the ward. That’s it. Nothing more. See what I mean? All these are just the starting point. They aren’t stories. They are half-stories, a whole (in my copy) two hundred and seventy three pages of starts with not one of those pages devoted to a proper ending. Not even ambiguous thought-provoking or discussion-provoking endings. Just stops. It’s crazy-making!

The most interesting part of this collection is the, for lack of a better word, bios Due writes at the end of the each story, about why or where or how she wrote the stories. At least those are more complete than the stories themselves.

Ghost Summer: Stories is a great poster-child for the We Need Diverse Books movement. I’m glad I read it. But I can’t say I’m really happy with the stories themselves. Maybe short fiction just isn’t where Due should be since her ideas need more room to grow.

Ghost Summer: Stories by Tananarive Due went on sale September 15, 2015.

I received a copy free from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.