Silver Repetition

The pensive debut novel from poet Wang (Saturn Peach) brims with delicate imagery and flights of imagination. Narrator Yuè Yuè is studying at a university in Canada after immigrating with her family from China. Her relationship with her handsome, easygoing classmate Johnny, who repeatedly ghosts her, magnifies her anxiety about fitting in. The present-day narrative is splintered with flashbacks to significant events in Yuè Yuè’s childhood involving her younger sister, Emily, who was born in Canada, and their ill mother (details of their mother’s condition and her fate come out later). As children, their mother favors Emily, which stirs deep resentment in Yuè Yuè. Sometimes, she dissociates, and “Little Yuè Yuè” speaks for her. The bulk of this timeline is purposely fuzzy and fragmented, and the novel returns to the present and Yuè Yuè’s fears that Johnny is “turning me into a ghost” without offering much resolution. Still, the language is both poetic (“Grass shines silver in the field, silver apple, bice green, tall and rustling against the salvaged lumber strewn around the farmhouses”) and playful (the sound of footfalls is indicated with the onomatopoetic Chinese word dēng; later, seven-plus pages are filled with repetitions of homonyms such as dèng and děng). Wang convincingly portrays the bifurcation and complexity of their protagonist’s mind. (Mar.)

Correction: A previous version of this review used the wrong pronoun to refer to the author.