Steph Cha

This novel begins with the shooting of a black teenage girl in Los Angeles, an event which takes place shortly after the Rodney King beating and which sets off a series of riots. Ava is sent to the corner store to pick up milk one morning. The pregnant Korean shopkeeper accuses her of shoplifting and the argument which follows ends with Ava shot in the back.

Decades later, Ava's brother Shawn has built a life for himself, a steady job, a family and a determination to keep things calm. And show more Grace is a pharmacist, living with her parents and working in their small pharmacy. Her older sister is estranged from their mother, and no one in the family will tell her why.

Cha has written a novel that directly confronts how racism affects us today, and how wounds that are not treated will fester. It's a novel that embraces nuance and uncomfortable areas alike, diving into Korean American culture, and how disenfranchisement and racism fuels violence. There were several moments that made me uncomfortable and Cha didn't flinch from making her characters deeply flawed. This novel gave me a lot to think about. show less

As I read this novel, I found myself wishing that Cha would stop trying to be so literary and just tell the damn story. I like Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlowe, but I was kind of sick of him by the end of the novel with all the times the sleuth, Juniper Song, invoked him. Sometimes my suspension of disbelief was strained to the breaking point. I understand that mysteries, especially with amateur sleuths, often don't want to bring the cops on board, but I had a hard time buying Song's show more tenacious drive to solve everything herself even after she found a dead body in the trunk of her car. She just went around putting herself in dangerous situations and asking questions, and everyone always told her exactly what she wanted to know.

But my real issue was the prose style. Cha really overdid it with the metaphors. I mean, metaphors are supposed to help you envision the story, give depth and color and illuminate the prose. But time after time I would find a metaphor that made me pause to work out what exactly Cha was trying to express. I would have appreciated a leaner, simpler prose style.

"My dreams were miasmic tarantulous things full of sticky voices and glinting teeth, but they dissolved in the sun without aftertaste." This one actually made me chuckle, it was so Lovecraftian. Swampy, vaporous, spidery nightmares, okay, but what does a sticky voice sound like? I imagined a sort of operatic vibrato, but I'm not sure that was Cha's intent. And there were LOTS of sentences like this, which I sometimes found beautiful, and sometimes just ponderous or confusing. But time after time, they threw me out of the story as I focused on the words and grammar and not the narrative.

Despite the above quibbles, I did enjoy the novel, and read it to the end. Your House Will Pay is in my TBR pile, so it will be interesting to see if the author's style has evolved. show less

The Best American Mystery and Suspense 2023, edited by Lisa Unger and series editor Steph Cha, is an excellent collection of the past year's short stories.

Every story is strong, though like any anthology some will appeal to you more than others. Some readers who think of more involved or complex stories as simply being a particularly difficult crime to solve may be less engaged, these stories for the most part have their complexity in the display of human nature and what drives some of us. show more In other words, these tend toward deeper rather than simple characters solving complex mysteries. Though there are still some wonderful mysteries along those lines, you just have to deal with a more rounded character.

Because I don't read a lot of contemporary short stories unless they're in a book, whether a single author or multiple, I particularly enjoy this series. I also approach them from two compatible but slightly different perspectives. First, like any reader, I am reading for enjoyment of the story itself. I think this is what most readers mean when they say a story is strong or weak, they mean it did or did not appeal to them. My second perspective is one that, unfortunately, is less common (though not uncommon) which is enjoyment of the form, of the elements that make a short story a short story. This allows me to find enjoyment in stories where the plot might appeal to me less even though the story is well written.

If you like mysteries and suspense stories that rely as much, or more, on looking within a character, you will find a lot here to appreciate. If you like good stories and aren't put off by too much character development (I can't understand why, but some people genuinely fall into this group: "just give me the story, don't make me work to also understand the character") you will also find a lot to like here. If you want the facts, just the facts, well, you might be a little disappointed.

Reviewed from a copy made available by the publisher via NetGalley. show less

A fictionalized retelling of the very real 1991 shooting of Latasha Harlins. It is a topical read that looks at racism in this country and the difficult relations between Asian and Black Americans. This book was powerfully written and subverts the stereotypical characters by giving them in-depth characterizations that force the reader to look past the schemas they might have been taught to believe, to see the messy humans underneath.

It is commendable how the author performs the balancing act show more of explaining Yvonne's actions without justifying them, sympathizing without affirming, and also critiques without vilifying.

Not for people who want pithy, feel-good reads to make them feel better about racial tensions. This book is a sucker-punch sort of novel that leaves you thinking about the questions its raises long after you turn the final page. show less