she clearly wasn’t his, as he showed when he took her virginity and then left her for beautiful Taylor Spells. Now karma has turned on Zack and Taylor, whose 6-year-old daughter, Skye, has disappeared. After leaving Everglades City for Miami specifically to get away from Zack, Noa is in no mood to go back. But her parents, who run the Bramble Rose B&B, wear her down, and soon she’s left South Beach for her hometown to help with the search for Skye. Zack’s so distracted that it’s hard to get close to him, and Taylor is still Taylor. That leaves Jamie Camden, Zack’s best friend in high school and more recently Skye’s godfather, and Noa finds herself warming to him once again. One big obstacle stands in the way of their renewed friendship, though: Noa’s announcement that she’s been cured of congenital insensitivity to pain with anhidrosis even though no one ever is cured of CIPA. If it doesn’t sound so bad to be unable to weep or sweat or feel pain, rest assured that Finlay has pointed out dozens of ways Noa’s disorder will have consequences that range from inconvenient to life-threatening. Be warned: Some of her adventures may be even more trying to her readers, like the second time she gets knocked out and locked up. A so-so mystery upstaged by the determined heroine it’s clearly designed to showcase.
THE MANY DAUGHTERS OF AFONG MOY
Ford, Jamie Atria (384 pp.) $28.00 | Aug. 2, 2022 978-1-9821-5821-7
Covering 250 years, Ford’s new novel traces the way states of consciousness involving extreme moments of pain or joy interconnect seven generations of Chinese women. Embedded images—airplanes, ships, waves—and the occasional ghostly vision highlight how these women’s lives reverberate as the focus moves back and forth in time. In 1942 China, Faye Moy, a nurse in her 50s who’s working with American forces, feels an eerie connection to a dying young pilot in whose pocket she finds a newspaper photograph of herself as a teenager and a note in her own handwriting that says, “FIND ME.” Finding oneself and/or one’s soul mate becomes the throughline of the book. Faye’s great-grandmother Afong Moy, the first Chinese woman in America, dies in childbirth after a short career being exhibited as a curiosity in the 1830s. Faye’s mother, Lai King (Afong’s granddaughter), sails to Canton after her parents’ deaths in San Francisco’s Chinatown fire of 1892. Onboard ship she bonds with a young White boy, also an orphan, and nurses him when contagion strikes. When Faye is 14, she has an illegitimate daughter who is adopted and raised in England. Presumably that girl is Zoe Moy, who, in 1927, attends the famously progressive Summerhill School, where a disastrous social experiment in fascism destroys her relationship with a beloved poetry teacher. In 2014, Zoe’s emotionally fragile granddaughter, Greta, loses both her skyrocketing tech career and the love of her life at the hands of an evil capitalist. While several earlier Moys receive aid and guidance from Buddhist monks, Greta’s troubled poet daughter, Dorothy, turns to both Buddhism and radical scientific treatment to uncover and understand how past crises, emotional, physical, and spiritual, are destabilizing her current life in 2045. Expect long treatises on anamnesis, quantum biology, and reincarnation before traveling with Dorothy’s adult daughter in 2086. Ford raises fascinating questions, but a rushed ending too neatly ties up the answers in an unconvincing, sentimental bow.
I REMEMBER YOU
Freeman, Brian Thomas & Mercer (348 pp.) $24.95 | Aug. 9, 2022 978-1-5420-3508-8 Fasten your seatbelts. Fiendish Freeman has engineered another peerlessly bumpy ride. It’s not until after the worst Fourth of July imaginable—her boss fires her, her 12
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1 june 2022
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fiction
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kirkus.com
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