But the girl A novel

Yu's masterly debut follows an Australian Malaysian woman awarded a scholarship to visit the U.K., where she attends a month-long residency to work on a postcolonial novel. The unnamed narrator goes on leave from her literature PhD studies and settles in Scotland, where she meets other artists in the program, most of whom are white, and struggles to fit in. One, named Clementine, befriends her, but also mocks her in front of their peers by suggesting she knows something about the disappeared Malaysia Airlines flight MAS370: "Are you covering something up for the government? We can't trust them. How can we trust you?" The group also complains about popular artists getting "cancelled" over their racism. Clementine further disenchants the narrator by offering thoughtful feedback to others, but focusing her critique of the narrator's work on the narrator's "diverse" identity. After a bout of writer's block, the narrator eventually begins writing about her parents' lives and how they came to Australia, drawing inspiration from her belief that as a second-generation immigrant daughter it is her responsibility to carry and preserve her family's difficult past. Zhan's bildungsroman brims with striking insights and fully realized characters, exploring with nuance and self-deprecating humor the fraught reality of navigating academic and artistic spaces as a woman of color. This signals the arrival of a bold new voice. (Mar.)

A graduate student travels across the world to establish independence from her immigrant family--but finds herself unable to outrun her inheritances. The Malaysian Australian narrator of Yu's novel--referred to only as "Girl"--is pursuing a Ph.D. on Sylvia Plath when, out of the blue, she's awarded a Commonwealth scholarship and invited to a residency in Scotland, where she plans to write a postcolonial novel. Once there, she's met with a slew of well-meaning yet deeply painful microaggressions. Struggling to write, often finding her novel and Ph.D. topics "embarrassing," she spends much of her time reflecting on her family back in Australia--Ma, Ikanyu, and Ah Ma--who are simultaneously loving and overbearing. Girl grapples with the burden of being a second-generation immigrant expected to be wildly successful; she recalls the tough-love attitude with which her grandmother raised her and contemplates the tricky relationship between herself and her mother: "She couldn't completely understand me because she only understood me through the lens of herself. I was her double, her antagonist and her everything. It made me want to vomit and rise to the occasion." Yu's novel succeeds best in its examination of family ties and immigrant legacy--in what ways does Girl mimic or reject the behaviors and expectations of her family?--as well as in its stringent critique of the current cultural and political climate, shown primarily through Girl's conversations with fellow artists at the residency who consider diversity a "trend." But the novel's critique can sometimes become a little too involved in its own ironies, too complicatedly satirical for its own good: After receiving flowers from a program director whose intentions Girl is suspicious of, she wonders, "Was the vase racist? Could a specific breed of flower and type of vase be racist? I hated that I would also wonder about that." Considerations like these, amusing yet superficial, threaten to dull the sharpness of her more exacting analyses. A punchy, aching meditation on the stories we inherit and the stories others place upon us. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.