My review pile overfloweth, so some shorter write-ups are in order to reduce it a little.
Bad Asians by Lilian Li
I really enjoyed Li’s 2019 debut, Number One Chinese Restaurant, which was longlisted for the Women’s Prize, an intergenerational comedy which followed the family owners and staff of a Chinese restaurant in Rockville, Maryland.
Her second novel, Bad Asians, follows four school friends, Diana, Justin, Errol and Vivian from a provincial neighbourhood rich in immigrant Asian families, who are graduating from High School and going up to college in the autumn, and how their lives are affected by Grace. Grace had won a place to study law at Harvard – quite the local ‘golden girl’ – but she dropped out.
She wants to make films, and persuades the foursome to let her film them over the summer. It’s 2009, and the internet is taking off as smart phones become ubiquitous. But what no-one expected was that her finished film, ‘Bad Asians’, would go viral, making them famous-infamous over the web, their private moments exposed and snarky comments becoming memes. All the attention splits them up, although Errol and Vivian retain an on-off relationship for ages.
We follow what happened next for the foursome as they go their own ways, but the publicity from the film lingers, and they long to be able to show themselves as who they’ve become, to remove the taint of their youthful naivety and silliness. They plan to make another film, along with Carrie and her cameraman Z. Carrie is an influencer in New York. It could all go very wrong … will Grace be able to come to their rescue?
The foursome are all totally different – Diana is the brittle one, Justin the gay one, Error the frustrated (coding) genius one, and Vivian the needy one. I must admit, I found the boys more sympathetically drawn than the girls, who were largely irritating. Grace, however, is a bit of an enigma at first, but grows as a character. Li certainly captures the zeitgeist of that period where the internet and YouTube is taking off, and the later cancel culture, but I wasn’t as engaged with this novel as her debut.
Source: Review copy – thank you! Pushkin ONE hardback, 320 pages. BUY at Waterstones via my affiliate link.
The Fury by Alex Michaelides
There were seven of us on the island. One of us was a murderer…
Now this was fun! Told by a knowing narrator with an idyllic setting, who tells us from the outset that it’s a whydunnit, except that we don’t know for sure until the end of this twisty tale.
Our narrator is Elliot Chase. His best friend is Lana Farra – a former movie star. Lana had been huge, married to a prize-winning producer, but gave it all up at forty. Otto died, she moved to London with their son. As the story begins, Lana has decided to go to the island for Easter, and is rustling up a companion , (Otto had bought her an island off Mykonos). First she rings Kate – a classical actress who is having a hard time getting to grips with her lines for a production at the Old Vic. Kate’s immediate reaction is to say ‘I’m booking my flight right now!’ There’ll be Kate, Lana, son Leo, new partner businessmanJason, housekeeper Agathi and Elliot on the island, you should know there’s no love lost between Kate and Elliot. The seventh person on the island will be Nikos, the live-in caretaker
Elliot realises he needs to tell us a bit about himself. He’s fortyish, a successful playwright, well of one lauded play, in which he skewered the late novelist Barbara West, whom he had lived with for some years – she was much older than him, and he hated her. Then he met Lana, and has loved her ever since, as most who meet her do.
So off to the island. Jason would rather be doing deals, and goes out with the shotguns to kill pigeons. Kate gets drunk and is spoiling for a fight. Elliot is happy to push all their buttons… and that’s all I’ll say.
This is a very clever and enjoyable thriller written in Elliot’s confessional style. He teases the reader all the way through, with red herrings aplenty, but gradually revealing could have and ultimately what did happen on the island. Loved it, and I’d like to read his other books now.
Source – own copy. Michael Joseph hardback (2024) 358 pages. BUY at Waterstones via my affiliate link.
