July 1, 2021: Volume LXXXIX, No 13

“Choi’s stories are both closely observed and expansive, a feat of narrative engineering that places her next to Alice Munro.” skinship

quickly determines that Grieg spent part of the evening with an unidentified female companion but can’t figure out who it was or whether she was the perp. But the fog of doubt is no deterrent for local crime lord Carl Schmidt, whose drug money Grieg had been carrying. Preferring as usual to remain in the shadows himself, he commands his son, Grieg’s buddy Connor Schmidt, to find out who the woman was and retrieve the cash with extreme prejudice. Now it’s only a question of who’ll catch up with Git first: the police, armed with a warrant for her arrest, or Connor Schmidt, armed with sadistic enforcer Augie Barboza.

A breathless suspenser that’s also a painfully acute evocation of the wrong side of the tracks.

EDGE CASE

Chin, YZ Ecco/HarperCollins (320 pp.) $26.99 | Aug. 10, 2021 978-0-06-303068-8

SKINSHIP Stories

Choi, Yoon Knopf (304 pp.) $25.95 | Aug. 17, 2021 978-0-593-31821-8 The rare story collection that draws you in so completely that the pages turn themselves.

That’s the happy experience of reading Choi’s debut book of eight luxuriously long stories that chronicle the lives of Korean American families. Tolstoy wrote, “All happy families are alike; each

y o u n g a d u lt

A Malaysian immigrant in New York embarks on a journey of self-discovery after her husband walks out on her.

Edwina comes home one day from her exhausting job at a New York tech company and finds that her husband, Marlin, has gone missing. He’s been acting strangely for months now, ever since his father died, talking about “spirit guides” and wielding a crystal pendant. Edwina just wants her old Marlin back, the logical engineer who complemented the liberal arts major in her perfectly. When she eventually does track him down—he’s crashing at a friend’s place in Queens—he refuses to even look at her, much less talk to her. To make matters worse, things at work are going poorly: She’s the quality assurance analyst—and the only woman—at a startup called AInstein, which is creating a joke-telling robot. When she informs the oblivious or downright boorish software engineers that their robot’s jokes are sexist, she’s told to focus on her own job. But time is running out on her and Marlin’s work visas; they need their employers to sponsor their green cards or they’ll have to return to Malaysia or become undocumented. And Edwina is trying to hide everything from her mother, a judgmental woman who constantly criticizes her for being fat. Amid all this, Edwina reconsiders everything she thought she knew: her identity, her relationships, and her feelings about her adopted country. Chin’s novel is littered with genuinely funny moments; Edwina’s voice is a chatty, engaging one that belies her depth. “It wasn’t the first time I’d hoped for psychic transformation and ended with diarrhea,” she cracks after eating far too many Chicken McNuggets in an attempt to understand Marlin’s drastic change (he’s vegan, she’s vegetarian). The novel also presents a layered view of racism: Marlin is detained at a New York airport for his dark skin (he’s half Chinese, half Indian), while Edwina has a run-in with racist cops but gets away without injury. Malaysian culture, though, has its own “atmosphere of…poisons”: “In Malaysia I was supposed to go back to China. In America I was supposed to return to Malaysia. Was this progress? If I moved to China,

would they tell me to piss off to America, thus resulting in some sort of infinite loop?”

An endearingly offbeat story with particularly timely themes.

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