Wandering Souls by Cecile Pin

Published by Henry Holt and Co. on March 21, 2023

Wandering Souls is the story of a refugee family. It begins with a physical journey from Vietnam to England and ends as a life journey brings a refugee into late middle age.

Thi Ahn is one of the Vietnamese boat people who made it to Hong Kong. Her father’s plan was to divide the family, sending Ahn and her brothers Thanh and Minh first, followed by her parents, her two younger sisters, a baby brother and her brother Dao. Ahn’s boat arrives in Hong Kong after a brief encounter with Thai pirates who traffic in women. Her other family members drown when the boat that ferries them capsizes. Ahn learns their fate a few weeks after her arrival in Hong Kong when she is asked to identify their bodies. At sixteen, she becomes the guardian of her younger brothers.

While the story is primarily told from Ahn’s perspective, Dao occasionally chimes in with his concerns about Ahn and his other living siblings. Whether dead people should voice their thoughts as characters in a novel is, I suppose, a question of taste. I’m not a fan. I want dead people to keep their opinions to themselves, particularly their opinions of me which, I must assume, are unlikely to be favorable. Turning ghosts into characters makes me uncomfortable. Maybe it’s a personal problem, as chatty spirits are a common literary device.

My literary preferences notwithstanding, it makes sense in the context of the novel that Dao would comment from the afterlife on the observations he makes of his siblings. Dao is one of the wandering souls that give the book its title. I’m not sure it makes sense that his commentary would so often take the form of poetry, but who knows how ghosts communicate?

Dao's appearances contrast with American veterans of the Vietnam War who enter the story to express their remorse for setting up sound systems to disturb the souls of dead Vietnamese soldiers. Vietnamese cultural traditions/ superstitions teach that souls of the dead are condemned to wander until they have been buried in native soil. Disturbing their souls is meant as a form of psychological warfare. Dao is presumably wandering because his body washed up in Hong Kong, far from his homeland.

The understated story is largely free of drama, apart from the tragedy that turns Ahn and her brothers into orphaned refugees. Cecile Pin conveys Ahn’s fears but gives little attention to the atmosphere in the refugee camps in Hong Kong and England. Ahn has an uncle in New Haven but, not wanting to be around living relatives when much of her immediate family is dead, Ahn doesn’t mention him to the resettlement specialist. The US denies the family’s refugee application (likely because Ahn failed to mention her uncle) but England accepts them.

The story makes the point that each decision in a life opens a new timeline and forecloses others. Would the family have had a better life in America? The answer is unknowable. If her father had not sent the family to Hong Kong, would they all have survived in Vietnam? When Ahn flirts with guilt for abandoning her country, she is reminded that her family might have been sent to a forced labor camp if they had stayed. Each choice in a life opens a new door and closes countless others, but we never know what we would have discovered behind the doors we close.

Ahn’s siblings study English and, when Ahn turns eighteen, are granted Council housing in London. Ahn lives a life of sacrifice, taking a sewing job while her brothers attend school. One brother drops out at sixteen and begins to live a life that might be a bit shady. The other eventually makes a life of his own, although not the life he wants. Some choices are a function of opportunity and the opportunities we may desire are not always available.

Most of the story’s focus is on Ahn, whose life is narrated from the third-person. Ahn feels she has failed to raise her brothers properly, tarnishing her father’s dream that the boys would become doctors or scientists in America. Apart from letting us know what Ahn is thinking, Pin does little to give the reader a sense of the struggle that she endures. Or perhaps she isn’t struggling as she moves through the course of an average life (much of it lost to the reader in a flash forward), a life that begins in tragedy but becomes productive with the help of the Refugee Council.

The novel makes the case that helping refugees is essential. In a history lesson, we learn that Margaret Thatcher complained that giving council housing to the Vietnamese is unfair to white people. She thought Poles and Hungarians would assimilate more easily and feared that the Vietnamese would start riots. Thatcher carried on a British tradition of racism, a tradition that made British governments believe it was just fine to colonize and rule brown people around the world.

As the story nears its end, the perspective shifts to Ahn’s daughter Jane, who begins to narrate in the first person. Jane feels the weight of dead family members she never met, of human trafficking victims in Thailand of whom she has only read, of wandering souls in Vietnam during a war that ended before she was born. The reader assumes that Jane has likely been the narrator all along, a point of view that explains the sense of detachment from Ahn’s story.

The detachment is heightened by occasional pauses to teach history lessons: trafficking in Thailand, refugee statistics, Thatcher’s response to UN pressure to accept boat people into England. Pin adds academic discussions of the Iliad, transgenerational trauma, Joan Didion essays, and diverse cultural responses to death. Little of this resonates. The encounter with Thai pirates, for example, is so brief and uneventful that it creates no tension.

I sometimes had the impression that Pin was interested in showing off her breadth of knowledge, or perhaps in writing a novel that lit professors could use to illustrate various writing techniques, rather than telling an engaging story. The academic asides only enhance the feeling that we are glimpsing the story of a life that the narrator didn’t live. That narrative choice robs the story of the power it might otherwise have had.

Before the narrator’s final first-person intrusion into the story, the story wraps up with a brief return to the third-person point of view, perhaps a bit too predictably as the family contemplates their New Haven relatives and the need to give the wandering souls their rest. Trappings of a memoir round out the narrative.

Considered as a whole, Wandering Souls too often seems remote, depriving the reader of a strong connection to the characters or key events. The narrator’s detachment keeps the novel from being inspirational or truly moving, although — to be fair — not all difficult lives are inspirational or moving. At the same time, even an academic discussion of refugees in a time of crisis serves as an important reminder of lives less fortunate than those that most of us live. Simply calling attention to the boat people and the Vietnamese diaspora makes Wandering Souls worthwhile.

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Antimatter Blues by Edward Ashton

Published by St. Martin's Press on March 14, 2023

Antimatter Blues is a sequel to Mickey7. We learned in the first novel that a colony of humans is struggling to survive on a world that is inhabited by large worm-like creatures they refer to as creepers. In Antimatter Blues, the humans discover that the worms have relatives living a hundred kilometers to the south. The relatives resemble spiders, but that’s a product of design, as the worms and spiders are ancillaries that serve a leader. Both the worms and the spiders have trouble believing that the humans are not also ancillaries, much less that they traveled from another star.

Mickey7 is the seventh iteration of Mickey’s body. He joined the colony as an expendable, the guy who performs dangerous jobs that might end in death. Mickey7 died six times, each time uploading his memories before the mission so that his body could be dissolved and printed anew. Is each new Mickey a continuation of the original or a different person entirely? It seems like every recent sf novel I’ve read uses the Ship of Theseus as a metaphor, but it doesn’t work well here. New Mickeys are more like a new ship with the same captain (kind of like Kirk taking command of a new Enterprise every time he destroys the old one).

At the end of the last novel, Mickey made an agreement that he would no longer be an expendable. He enforced the agreement by making the false claim that the creepers had seized one of the colony’s nuclear bombs. Mickey also claimed that he was in communication with the creepers, an exaggeration that kept him alive. Now, thanks to a mishap, the colony needs the bomb and its fuel or it won’t survive the upcoming winter. Mickey is tasked with finding it. That should be an easy task except the bomb is no longer under the rock pile where he hid it.

To recover the bomb, Mickey must alternately enter into alliances with the worms and the spiders. Humans aren’t always good at alliances (even with other humans), as the worms and spiders both discover. The novel delivers entertaining action scenes as humans, who have superior technology but much smaller numbers, find themselves fighting with or against worms and spiders. Yes, there is a shout-out to the Spartans at Thermopylae, although the Spartans didn’t have the benefit of superior arrows.

The story is amusing, as Edward Ashton intends it to be. The action is fun. Mickey is a likeable character, as are his friends Berto and Cat and Mickey’s girlfriend Nasha. Each character has a distinct personality with all the depth they require for a story of this nature. The colony’s leader is a jerk, playing the role of a foil who contrasts with the decency of the likeable characters, but even jerks can be redeemed, at least in fiction. The novel’s modest attempts at poignancy are modestly successful.

Antimatter Blues works because it doesn’t overreach. It’s meant to be a comedic science fiction action story and, on that level, it reaches its goal. I would suggest reading Mickey7 before reading Antimatter Blues, but Ashton provides sufficient background to fill in readers who don’t want to bother with the first one.

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The Fake by Zoe Whittall

Published by Ballantine Books on March 21, 2023

The Fake is a novel about trust, its necessity and the consequences of its abuse. More importantly, it is a novel about emotional dependence and need.

Cammie is young, beautiful, sexy, and personable. She seems to be the perfect girlfriend until Gibson (older than Cammie and out of her league) realizes that she’s a nightmare. She’s the female version of George Santos (apart from running for office). Nearly every story she tells is an effortless lie. She’s also a thief and a con artist.

Cammie claims to be in remission from kidney cancer. She claims to be grieving for Morgan, a close friend who committed suicide. She claims her sister is dead. She claims she has been living with (and is leaving) an abusive boyfriend. She claims she sang on the recording of an Arcade Fire song. All lies, but that’s not the worst of Cammie.

Gibson lives in Toronto. He is in the process of getting a divorce from Veda. Before Cammie picked him up in a bar, Gibson was devastated by the divorce and wanted to reunite. Now Veda thinks that Gibson is handling the breakup better than she is. Gibson’s change of attitude is easily attributed to receiving Cammie’s nude selfies when they aren’t in bed together.

Shelby has always suffered from anxiety. Her wife Kate was the only person who knew how to make her feel better. Shelby has been in a deep depression since Kate’s death. Shelby resists contact with Kate’s homophobic family because they “cannot handle any emotional communication that isn’t positive, let alone admit the realities of life being a near-unending nightmare.” Shelby was extraordinarily dependent on Kate and is filled with self-pity because she has no other person to take care of her. She doesn’t seem equipped to take care of herself.

Shelby decides to attend a grief group. The star of the group introduces herself as “Camilla. Chatterbox, over-sharer, main character-syndrome-having Cammie.” Shelby falls for Cammie, but only as a friend who can help her cope with her anxiety. When Cammie claims to have been unjustly fired, Shelby persuades her friend Olive to interview Cammie for a production assistant position on a reality TV dating show. Cammie provides the link between Shelby’s story and Gibson’s.

Cammie differs from Shelby in that, by virtue of her manipulation, she always has someone to take care of her. Perhaps unintentionally, the novel raises questions about dependence: Cammie is dependent by choice (it’s easier than holding a job or staying in an honest relationship); Shelby is dependent because she needs a crutch against anxiety. There is an obvious moral difference between the two women, but is there a practical difference? Sure, people who need people are the luckiest people, but in both cases extreme dependence either destroys other people or becomes self-destructive.

The story follows Gibson and Shelby as they investigate Cammie’s lies and meet some of her (mostly former) friends and family. Their efforts lead to a well-intentioned intervention, but an addiction to lying is different from drug abuse, particularly when lying might be the product of a mental illness. Whether it is possible to change Cammie’s behavior is the question addressed in the story’s closing chapters.

Perhaps a more important question is whether interventions are meant to help the intervenors as much as the person who needs help. Gibson wants Cammie to change so he can keep sleeping with her. It may be that Gibson and Shelby, who suffer because they become dependent on Cammie, need self-interventions to learn how to move forward with their lives.

The Fake might be a good choice for book clubs whose members like to dissect characters and compare them to people they know. The novel’s interesting questions practically cry out for book club discussions. While the plot is a bit thin, characterization is solid. Readers might gain insight into dependent lives (and perhaps their own lives) by investing time in this short, well-written novel.

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Red London by Alma Katsu

Published by ‎ G.P. Putnam's Sons on March 14, 2023

Red London takes place after Putin, weakened by his fiasco in Ukraine, is replaced by Viktor Kosygin, another former KGB agent turned dictator. The richest Russian oligarch in London, Mikhail Rotenberg, has fallen into disfavor with Kosygin. Kosygin is demanding money from all the oligarchs but he seems to want everything Mikhail has. Mikhail survives when a Russian hit team invades his swanky London mansion, but the message has been sent.

In addition to Kosygin, the CIA, MI6, and parties unknown want to know where Mikhaiil's money is hidden. Lyndsay Duncan, a CIA agent starring in her second novel, is in London to run a Russian double agent (a subplot that drifts away without resolution). As long as she’s in London anyway, the CIA assigns Lyndsay to cozy up to Mikhail’s British wife Emily. Lyndsay finds it easy to infiltrate Emily’s circle of friends, as the circle is practically nonexistent. Apart from sending her to charity lunches that signal Mikhail’s standing among London’s elite, Mikhail shields his wife from the outside world. He only allows her to take their two kids on playdates where she can socialize with the judgmental wives of oligarchs. The British, including Emily’s parents, regard Russians as untrustworthy people who are ruled by “messily violent passions,” the antithesis of British Londoners who have eradicated passion from their very proper lives.

As gold diggers go, Emily is a reasonably sympathetic character. She comes from minor aristocracy. Maintaining the family estate is expensive and family wealth is dwindling. Emily knows that, unlike her siblings, she has average intelligence and no talent. If beauty is her only potential route to success, she might as well use it. Having caught Mikhail’s attention, she can’t find a practical reason to turn down a proposal from one of the world’s richest men. If he’s ruthless and a probable criminal in his business dealings, she doesn’t want to know about it. Emily might be a bit of a stereotype, but she is a stereotype with flesh. Sadly, she isn’t quite smart enough to understand that she will lose more than she will gain by bearing an oligarch’s children.

Lyndsay’s spy mission is complicated when she finds Emily keeping company with Dani Childs, a former CIA agent. Dani is working for a private company that hires former spooks. Dani also wants to get a handle on Mikhail’s wealth but she doesn’t know who hired the firm to obtain that information. Lyndsay also finds herself working with an MI6 agent who still carries a torch from the fling they had in Beirut. Those complications add spice to a modestly intriguing plot.

Lyndsay’s sympathy for Emily creates an interesting conflict between her duty to country (as her bosses see it) and her desire to help a woman who is stuck in a dangerous life. While Alma Katsu sprinkles in some gunfire as the predictable ending approaches, Red London is more a low-key spy/relationship novel than a thriller. Katsu makes token references to tradecraft but (apart from the occasional walkabout to expose tails) incorporates little into the story, depriving readers of the sense that they are reading about a field agent who has been trained at Langley rather than a bureaucrat who was told to do her best. Ultimately, the unchallenging plot and conventional ending of Red London are secondary to the relationships that give the novel its value.

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I Will Find You by Harlan Coben

Published by Grand Central Publishing on March 14, 2023

I Will Find You sounds like a line from a movie delivered with threatening force by Liam Neeson or with understated assurance by Daniel Day Lewis. The unfortunate title aside, I Will Find You is a creative marriage of the “missing child” thriller and the “wrongly accused prisoner” story.

David Burroughs didn’t put up much of a defense when he was accused of taking a bat to his three-year-old son’s face and literally beating his brains out. David’s wife Cheryl was working the night shift at a hospital. All David recalls is drinking too much, passing out, and waking up to find Matthew’s unrecognizable body. He has no recollection of committing the crime, but he blames himself for not protecting his son and feels he deserves a life in prison. Nor does he recall burying the bat in his yard, despite his neighbor’s testimony that she saw him do it.

David is five years into his bit when Rachel, his former sister-in-law, visits him for the first time. She shows David a photograph taken at an amusement park. In the background is an eight-year-old kid who has Matthew’s distinctive facial birthmark. Could David have been framed for a murder he didn’t commit and, if so, who is the dead kid in his bedroom?

That’s a reasonably good thriller premise despite the holes that keep the story from being a smooth ride. It’s no less plausible than the average modern thriller, meaning not very plausible at all. Harlen Coben overcomes those problems by keeping the story in motion, leaving the reader with little time to say, “Hey, wait a minute.” Coben makes a valiant and reasonably clever attempt to explain the mystery while tying up most of the loose ends.

Naturally, David needs to bust out of prison, a problem that becomes more urgent after one of the guards tries to kill him. It seems that someone wants David to die before he learns the truth. Fortunately, the break-out isn’t difficult, thanks to the happy coincidence that the warden is David’s godfather. The warden isn’t convinced that Matthew is still alive but he also doesn’t want David to be murdered in prison.

David is assisted in his version of the search for a one-armed man by Rachel, the only other person who believes Matthew is still alive. Rachel has some baggage of her own, having sacrificed her career as a journalist by pushing a rape victim to tell her story, leading to a regrettable result. Cheryl has remarried and doesn’t want to think about Matthew, leading to a confrontation between the two troubled siblings.

Starting with the woman who testified about the buried bat, David and Rachel move from clue to clue. The plot twists nicely when David realizes that finding the person who framed him won’t necessarily help him find the kidnapper.

Harlan Coben’s standalone novels tend to be hit or miss with me. About half are misses. Constant motion, adequate attention to characterization, and clever plotting move I Will Find You into the hit category. David never actually says “I will find you,” making it unnecessary to decide whether Neeson or Lewis should play his part if the book is filmed.

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