Review by Booklist Review
In the wake of "unnameable disaster," Mira still has multiple appellations, including the "after-after" plus "all versions of a mouthful" that include Mal's name, from "After Mal" to "Please Forgive Me Mal." Mira and Mal were once lovers, sharing Mal's childhood Queens studio. But after the decimating quakes and ongoing acid rainstorms every Tuesday, Mira returned solo and brokenhearted to Ma's Lower East Side apartment 9A in Building 4B of the Gratuitous Place housing projects. Oversized cockroach Shin gallantly vacates Mira's old room. Dead Grandpa Why grumbles, but he's not leaving--he and Ma now have their second chance at being a family. With a ham radio from Yee in 7B, Mira launches a weekly podcast about love; mostly she talks about Mal, sending her encoded messages. Meanwhile, Ma's downstairs friend, Lucinda, conjures ghosts, frantic for her son's return. Headless Sad, in 1A, with his aquarium tank, could provide the haven Mira needs. Poet Leung's polyphonic debut novel is undoubtedly strange, infused with a ubiquitous, desperate longing for connection, suggesting that creating community might be the only antidote amidst apocalyptic collapse.
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
In the mesmerizing, outré debut novel from poet Leung (Imagine Us, The Swarm), New Yorkers adapt to deadly acid rain and ghosts long for their old lives. It's set in an alternate present, where the rain destroys buildings in New York City and causes fatal burns. As the city goes into lockdown, Mira, the Chinese American narrator, leaves her girlfriend, Mal, in Queens to move back into her mom's Manhattan apartment. There, Mira launches a ham radio show called How to Fall in Love in a Time of Unnameable Disaster, offering relationship advice and hoping to reach Mal through encoded messages, in which she pleads for forgiveness. Intercut with Mira's narrative are threads featuring other residents in her apartment building, including those living and dead, human and insect. Among them are Mira's mom's friend Lucinda, who accidentally conjures a ghost but fails to help others contact the spirits of their dearly departed, and the ghost of a cockroach, who ruminates on his late, noncommittal lover. Meanwhile, Mira starts sleeping with a headless man named Sad, who pines for his dead fiancée. Amid the strangeness of these stories, a picture of genuine longing and unsettling pain comes through powerfully. This is a wildly original, disorienting rumination on love amid chaos. (Oct.)Correction: A previous version of this review mischaracterized the narrator's ethnic background.
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Review by Kirkus Book Review
Inhabitants of a New York City tenement band together to brave the "after-after." Earthquakes rock Manhattan, reducing the financial district to rubble. Then weekly acid rainstorms start corroding buildings, bridges, roads, and power lines. Cell towers go down, checkpoints go up, and travel between boroughs becomes difficult. Mira tries to convince her partner, Mal, to flee Queens--now an "At Risk" zone--and go stay with Mira's mother, Ma, on the Lower East Side, but their crumbling abode was orphan Mal's childhood home, and she can't bring herself to leave. Heartbroken but unwilling to die for Mal's nostalgia, Mira returns to her own childhood home: building 4B, apartment 9A of the Gratuitous Place housing projects. Mira feels lost without Mal, though, and begins hosting a ham radio show,How To Fall in Love in a Time of Unnameable Disaster, in hopes that Mal will hear. Instead, Mira's transmissions attract the romantic attentions of Sad--the headless man who lives in unit 1A. Excerpts from Mira's broadcast pepper Leung's ambitious debut, which unfolds via myriad perspectives and narrative fashions. From Ma to gleeful poltergeist Grandpa Why to the spirit of an oversized queer cockroach named Shin, each boldly drawn point-of-view character adds a new layer to the story and texture to the world in which it's set. Style occasionally overshadows substance, fuzzing the tale's focus, and readers seeking catharsis may be left wanting, but by and large, Leung's novel strikes a satisfying chord, harmonizing joy and optimism with despair and melancholia. Surreal imagery combines with poetic prose to illustrate what life and love look like when crisis becomes commonplace and everyone is grieving--even the ghosts. At once absurd and profound. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
