What We Are Reading in April

Ellie’s universe is falling apart. Her mother is in a coma; her sister accuses her of being insufficiently Chinese; and a shadowy cabal of engineers is trying to hijack the skunkworks, the machinery that keeps the physics of each universe working the way it’s supposed to. Daniel, Ellie’s cousin, has found an illicit device in the skunkworks — one that keeps Ellie’s mother alive while also creating destabilizing bugs in the physics of this universe. It’s not a good day.

If she can confront her mother’s legacy and overcome her family’s generational trauma, she just might find a way to preserve the skunkworks and reconcile with her sister. However, digging into her family’s past is thornier than it seems, and the secrets she uncovers will force Ellie to choose between her family and the universe itself.

The characters in “My Dear You” find themselves facing situations that range from the everyday to the absurd: The U.S. government injects citizens with a drug that makes them see everyone else as members of their own race and gender. A woman adopts a cat who conjures the ghosts of her ex-loves. A factory worker decides to befriend a sex doll she is tasked with selling.

Playful, profane, and yet enveloped with profound compassion for life, these stories address dating, marriage, and the pressures of having or not having children; intimacy, memory, race, and capitalism; living, dying, and being dead. They touch on the particular awkwardness of dating in your 30s, asking: What does it mean to be an Asian woman in America? Or an American? Or a human? Along the way, the characters stop to consider interventions from the supernatural, the earthly, the robotic, and the immortal.

Kang Siying, a priestess paid to guide the deceased home, travels to a hostile state to retrieve the corpse of a missing prince. Instead of making the corpse obedient to Siying’s commands, her talisman brings the prince back to life, but he won’t stay alive for long — not unless he absorbs enough qi, or life force. Siying begrudgingly agrees to aid the frustratingly handsome prince in finding and purifying evil spirits for their qi. But as they journey across the countryside, they uncover dark secrets about the prince’s death — secrets that could endanger both Siying’s father and their entire kingdom.

“Deathly Fates” has all the elements that make a new fantasy exciting: lush worldbuilding, life-or-death stakes, a strong heroine, and a magnetic, slow-burn romance.

Maggie Wang, a broke young Asian American writer, needs a lifeline. Ingrid Parker, a veteran white Hollywood producer with her career on the edge, offers an irresistible deal: $3 million for 10 experimental medical sessions to reverse her aging, using Maggie as a transfusion partner, and mentorship.

What starts as a professional transaction exchanging blood quickly becomes a complex psychological dance. As Maggie gains unprecedented access to Ingrid’s hard-earned wisdom, Ingrid sees in Maggie a weapon against an industry that’s been trying to sideline her. As their relationship intensifies, the rules around aging begin to shift. So does the balance of power between the two women, leaving both questioning who holds the upper hand and what they’re willing to sacrifice to succeed.

At 25, Kea Petrova is the youngest of five Hawaiian clan leaders living on the Homestead in outer Los Angeles. Nearly 200 years ago, when a catastrophic flood submerged the Hawaiian islands and unleashed magic into the world, these clans forged a treaty with the city, establishing a new Hawaiian homeland. Kea struggles to keep her small clan afloat, scraping together rent through odd jobs and selling Hawaiian spells crafted with her language magic. Then, the murder of Angelo Reyes — LA’s most prominent Filipino activist — by a death spell turns her world upside-down.

With independent spellsmithing being technically illegal, Kea quickly becomes the prime suspect, known for her spellwork on the Homestead. To clear her name, she must unravel the mystery behind Angelo’s murder and confront LA’s most powerful (and dangerous) players, each wielding their own type of magic.

Stretching from the present to the future, from China to America and beyond, M Lin’s debut collection depicts characters finding beauty amidst the disorientation of migration, the contradictions of living between cultures, the perverse realities of race and class, and the delicate dance between survival and resistance.

In “Scenes from Childhood,” an elderly woman in a dystopian reality is visited by forgotten memories of her grandfather’s village. In “Magic, or Something Less Assuring,” a fraying couple goes on a divorce honeymoon in Morocco to surprising results. “You Won’t Read This in the News” imagines four migrant workers and petty thieves who forge an unshakable connection across one desperate night. And in a newly instated Memory Museum, two sensory architects weave a moving tapestry of love and radical hope.

In February 1942, Franklin D. Roosevelt authorized the internment of 120,000 Japanese Americans into inland concentration camps. To be considered for release, they had to answer the so-called loyalty questionnaire. Question 27 asked the inmates whether they were willing to serve in the U.S. military. Question 28 asked them — many of whom had never visited Japan — to renounce allegiance to the Japanese emperor. Answering these questions caused volatile divisions within the camps, tore families and friends apart, and had lasting repercussions in the decades postwar.

This book reaches backward and forward from the time of the questionnaire, chronicling people who arrived in the U.S. from Japan at the turn of the century, their children who came of age during war and incarceration, and their descendants. Yamashita mixes fact with fiction and gives voice to laborers, artists, scholars, informants, and activists who, over three generations, defined an immigrant community.

Eight unsuspecting people receive an invitation to participate in a new reality show called Break Room. But what starts as an opportunity for fame is quickly revealed to be something far more unsettling when they learn how they were chosen — voted in by their respective co-workers as “the office villain.”

Among them is an imposter — a mole planted by the show’s producers. The only way to win the prize money is to uncover the saboteur before time runs out. As alliances shift and paranoia festers, the contestants begin to realize that the true challenge isn’t surviving the show. It’s facing their own selves.

Step into the world of the reality show, Break Room, where every smile hides suspicion, and every word could be a clue.