When Celestial soldiers almost discover her, Xingyin runs away, promising not to reveal her parentage and determined to reverse her mother’s punishment. Alone in the Celestial Kingdom, Xingyin has the remarkable good fortune of becoming Prince Liwei’s companion, attending his lessons and learning not only herbology and magic, but also the fighting arts. Xingyin and Liwei grow close, but as Liwei is the son of those responsible for Chang’e’s imprisonment, Xingyin must continually hide a part of herself. As Xingyin pursues her goals, others plot against the Celestial Kingdom, and the emperor and empress are not without their own machinations. Packed with magic, dragons, and plenty of scheming, this novel features many expected tropes, freshened up by the well-developed setting and strong basis in Chinese mythology. Xingyin is sometimes frustratingly successful and spends much more time with her male love interests than her female friends, but the plot delivers what it promises in a quite satisfying, though predictable manner. The prose is lovely and fluid, lush descriptions of magic and immortal life buoying the narrative. A standard court fantasy, unique in its expansion on the story of the Mid-Autumn Festival.
Chicano community land provide the backdrop to Julieta and Ramón’s pull-and-push relationship. Can they find their way to a happy ending despite all the bad blood? Since this is a romance, we know the answer. The author uses the Shakespearean premise to dramatize the characters’ conflicted loyalties and differing relationships to their Mexican American heritage. Ramón’s worries about his connection to his community have an autobiographical ring, as an author’s note suggests. A heavy-handedness in establishing Ramón’s stratospheric wealth makes him feel like a caricature, while Julieta’s strength as a character is undermined by her choice not just to get involved with a gentrifier she resents, but to join his franchise as an employee. Despite the freshness promised by a modern Chicano rewrite of Shakespeare’s tragedy, the happy ending is unsatisfying.
HOOK, LINE, AND SINKER
Bailey, Tessa Avon/HarperCollins (400 pp.) $14.39 paper | March 1, 2022 978-0-06-304569-9
r om a n c e
A playboy fisherman learns he can be more than just a pretty face. Fox Thornton is a king crab fisherman and the resident Casanova of the small coastal town of Westport, Washington. He’s the life of the party and has convinced everyone—even himself—that he’s not capable of anything more. Imagine his surprise when he strikes up a friendship with Hannah Bellinger. They bonded over a shared love of music when her sister fell in love with his best friend, and Hannah and Fox continue their friendship via text after she returned to Los Angeles, where she works as a production assistant. Hannah doesn’t even think of Fox as a romantic possibility: He’s unbelievably handsome and effortlessly self-confident, while she often feels like a supporting actress in her own life. When the film she’s working on begins shooting on location in Westport, Hannah crashes at Fox’s apartment. It seems harmless enough—she fancies herself in love with a co-worker, and she can’t imagine Fox would ever see her as anything but a friend. Living in close quarters ratchets up the emotional intimacy and sexual tension, leaving Fox and Hannah to each question longheld assumptions about their own worthiness as romantic partners. Fox has never had anyone that values him for who he is rather than how he looks, and the major arc of the novel is his journey to accepting that he has value beyond being handsome and charming. It’s an unflinching look at how toxic masculinity harms men, for Fox must unpack the weight of cultural norms and expectations he’s been internalizing since childhood. The romance between Hannah and Fox unfolds slowly, with side plots that keep the reader entertained while the main characters do the hard work of figuring out how to be together. A slow-burn romance showcases characters trying to become the best versions of themselves.
RAMÓN AND JULIETA
Albertson, Alana Quintana Berkley (304 pp.) $16.00 paper | Feb. 1, 2022 978-0-593-33622-9
Star-crossed lovers struggle to reconcile romance and gentrification in a Hispanic community. Julieta Campos, a trained chef, is managing her family’s small Mexican restaurant in the historic Chicano neighborhood of Barrio Logan in San Diego while supporting her recently widowed Mexican immigrant mom. When she enjoys a flirtation with a costumed man who serenades her with mariachi love songs during a Día de los Muertos celebration, little does she know that he is Ramón Montez, the scion of her family’s sworn enemy and an imminent gentrifier. When she realizes who he is, she runs off. Ramón is puzzled by her sudden flight from his beachside condo, but he focuses on the expansion of his firm’s watered-down Mexican food empire. His plan to buy a block of Barrio Logan proceeds, but once he learns that it includes Julieta’s restaurant, things go south. Worse, he learns of the history of his father and her mother’s failed romance, which was followed by his dad’s stealing her mom’s fish taco recipe and building a franchise out of it. Gentrification, conflicts among family members with different values, and the history of state annexation of 166
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1 december 2021
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fiction
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kirkus.com
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