Xuan Juliana Wang

I liked everything about this collection. Thoughtful and thought-provoking and emotional and intellectual and varied in form but never kitschy and each of them exactly as long as it needed to be. Each of them in its own voice and perspective, each of them authentic.

Lines that caught my attention while I had access to a way to mark them down; not key points but things I liked.
"Girlhood taught me the art of straying off course."
"Everything I thought was cool was actually Berlin. Mitte gallery chic, graffiti murals, hookers wearing fanny packs."… (més)

I liked this a lot. The stories mainly center around Chinese young adults, some living in China and some immigrants, or first-generation living in America (or having returned to China, an interesting setup). But that's about where the similarities between the stories ends—they're all interesting, un-clichéd, and unpredictable, and there's enough intergenerational play to keep the stories from being too Millennial-centric. The writing is fresh, unpretentious and, again, often surprising. I absolutely didn't know what to expect from one page to the next, and the collection as a whole had a real sense of wisdom to it.… (més)