Little Gods

Starred review from November 4, 2019
Jin’s stunning debut follows 17-year-old Liya on her journey to China with the ashes of her recently deceased mother, a mysterious and mercurial woman whom Liya both loved and resented. Su Lan, her mother, was a former physicist from China who died in America, where she had lived and worked for nearly two decades. Intertwined with Liya’s grief-stricken quest is the voice of Zhu Wen, Su Lan’s former neighbor in Shanghai, whose memory of Su Lan as a beautiful, charismatic, and fiercely brilliant physics student in a happy marriage to a handsome doctor does not square with the woman Liya knows. The third narrative strand belongs to Yongzong, Su Lan’s husband and Liya’s father, who has long lost touch with Su Lan and has never known Liya. Liya arrives in China with only her mother’s last known address, in Shanghai, where Su Lan had once lived with Yongzong. On first meeting Zhu Wen there, Liya realizes just how little she knew about her mother. Liya then visits the small mountain village where her mother was raised, and goes to Beijing, where she finds out what happened during the night of the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre, when she was born and Su Lan began to transform from a promising young student to a living ghost. Artfully composed and emotionally searing, Jin’s debut about lost girls, bottomless ambition, and the myriad ways family members can hurt and betray one another is gripping from beginning to end. This is a beautiful, intensely moving debut. Agent: Jin Auh, the Wylie Agency.

November 15, 2019
Love and ambition clash in a novel depicting China's turbulent 1980s. Jin's debut is at heart a mystery, as a young Chinese American woman returns to China to try to understand her recently deceased mother's decisions and to find her biological father. Liya grew up with a single mother, the brilliant but troubled physicist Su Lan, who refused to talk about Liya's missing father. Mother and daughter grew increasingly estranged as Su Lan obsessed over her theoretical research. Complicating Liya's search for truth is the fact she was born in Beijing on June 4, 1989, the very night of the government crackdown on the protesters at Tiananmen Square. Su Lan changed Liya's birth year on her papers to obscure this fact in America. The reader is meant to wonder if Liya's father perhaps died during the crackdown. However, this is not a novel about the idealism of the student reform movement or even the decisions behind the government's use of lethal force. Instead Jin focuses on the personalities of three students: the young Su Lan as well as Zhang Bo and Li Yongzong, two of her high school classmates who were rivals for her affection. The novel shifts point of view and jumps back and forth in time, obscuring vital pieces of information from the reader in order to prolong the mystery. Not all the plot contrivances make sense, but Su Lan is a fascinating character of a type rarely seen in fiction, an ambitious woman whose intellect and drive allow her to envision changing the very nature of time. The title refers to the thoughts of a nurse, musing about the similarities that she sees between the Tiananmen student demonstrators and the Red Guards of the Cultural Revolution: "A hunger for revolution, any Great Revolution, whatever it stands for, so long as where you stand is behind its angry fist. Little gods, she thinks." While the love triangle is interesting, perhaps most compelling is the story of one woman's single-minded pursuit of her ambition.

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A trio of gifted narrators performs this debut novel told from alternating points of view. After her mother, Su Lan, dies, Liya returns to China, the homeland she left as a toddler, and uncovers truths about her parents and her own past. Karen Huie, Francois Chau, and Emily Woo Zeller voice the elderly Zhu Wen, Su Lan's former neighbor in China; Yongzong, Liya's father, who went missing during her birth; and the thoroughly American Liya. All the narrators imbue the characters with personality and bring them to life. Their performances play well together, each engaging the listener. Huie's quiet, expressive style, Chau's mild manner, and Zeller's versatility ensure that each of their protagonists comes to the forefront of her chapters. A beautiful production. A.L.S.M. � AudioFile 2020, Portland, Maine

Starred review from December 1, 2019
The story starts at the end? Today Su Lan begins to die ?and finishes at the beginning? her new American life. In between, multiple fragments pieced together from various points of view present an immigrant teenager's quest to understand who she is, how she came to be, and how she'll move forward alone. Liya's birth during the 1989 Tiananmen Square Massacre marks the cleaving of her parents' marriage, her father's disappearance, and the reversal of her mother Su Lan's promising trajectory as a gifted physicist. Seventeen years later? enough [time] to turn an infant into a woman, a Chinese into an American ?Su Lan is suddenly dead. In searching through the few fragments Su Lan left behind, Liya finds evidence of a past her mother intended to erase, prompting Liya to return to her birth country, which she barely remembers. What she finds upon arrival sets in motion the search for a father she's never met. With precocious dexterity, Jin?Chinese-born, Harvard-educated, Brooklyn-based?adroitly privileges her readers with a haunting omniscience she denies her characters, giving voice to Liya's first caregiver and the runaway stranger whose genes are Liya's dubious legacy. Skillfully revealed, exquisitely rendered, Jin's first novel undoubtedly presages future success.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2019, American Library Association.)