literary – six of queens reads

REVIEW: The Ministry of Time

Kaliane Bradley
Published: 7th May 2024
Genre: literary, romance, sci-fi
Spoilers?: no

A BOY MEETS A GIRL.
THE PAST MEETS THE FUTURE.
A FINGER MEETS A TRIGGER.
THE BEGINNING MEETS THE END.
ENGLAND IS FOREVER.
ENGLAND MUST FALL.

There are several ways to tell a story.

A civil servant starts working as a ‘bridge’ – a liaison, helpmeet and housemate – in an experimental project that brings expatriates from the past into the twenty-first century. This is a science-fiction story.
In a London safehouse in the 2020s, a disorientated Victorian polar explorer chain smokes while listening to Spotify and learning about political correctness. This is a comedy.

During a long, sultry summer – as the shadows around them grow long and dangerous – two people fall in love, against all odds. This is a romance.

The Ministry of Time is a novel about Commander Graham Gore (R.N. c.1809-c.1847) and a woman known only as the bridge. As their relationship turns from the strictly professional into something more and uneasy truths begin to emerge, they are forced to face the reality of the project that brought them together.

Can love triumph over the structures and histories that shape them?

REVIEW: Real Americans

Rachel Khong
Published: 30th April 2024
Genre: historical, literary
Spoilers?: no

Storygraph | Goodreads

From the award-winning author of Goodbye, Vitamin: How far would you go to shape your own destiny? An exhilarating novel of American identity that spans three generations in one family and asks: What makes us who we are? And how inevitable are our futures?

Real Americans begins on the precipice of Y2K in New York City, when twenty-two-year-old Lily Chen, an unpaid intern at a slick media company, meets Matthew. Matthew is everything Lily is not: easygoing and effortlessly attractive, a native East Coaster, and, most notably, heir to a vast pharmaceutical empire. Lily couldn’t be more different: flat-broke, raised in Tampa, the only child of scientists who fled Mao’s Cultural Revolution. Despite all this, Lily and Matthew fall in love.

In 2021, fifteen-year-old Nick Chen has never felt like he belonged on the isolated Washington island where he lives with his single mother, Lily. He can’t shake the sense she’s hiding something. When Nick sets out to find his biological father, the journey threatens to raise more questions than it provides answers.

In immersive, moving prose, Rachel Khong weaves a profound tale of class and striving, race and visibility, and family and inheritance—a story of trust, forgiveness, and finally coming home.

Exuberant and explosive, Real Americans is a social novel par excellence that asks: Are we destined, or made? And if we are made, who gets to do the making? Can our genetic past be overcome?

REVIEW: A Great Country

Shilpi Somaya Gowda
Published: 26th March 2024
Genre: contemporary, literary
Spoilers?: no

Storygraph | Goodreads

Pacific Hills, California: Gated communities, ocean views, well-tended lawns, serene pools, and now the new home of the Shah family. For the Shah parents, who came to America twenty years earlier with little more than an education and their new marriage, this move represents the culmination of years of hard work and dreaming. For their children, born and raised in America, success is not so simple.

For the most part, these differences among the five members of the Shah family are minor irritants, arguments between parents and children, older and younger siblings. But one Saturday night, the twelve-year-old son is arrested. The fallout from that event will shake each family member’s perception of themselves as individuals, as community members, as Americans, and will lead each to consider: how do we define success? At what cost comes ambition? And what is our role and responsibility in the cultural mosaic of modern America?

For readers of The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett and Such a Fun Age by Kiley Reid, A Great Country explores themes of immigration, generational conflict, social class and privilege as it reconsiders the myth of the model minority and questions the price of the American dream.

REVIEW: Memory Piece

Lisa Ko
Published: 19th March 2024
Genre: literary fiction
Spoilers?: kind of

Storygraph | Goodreads

The award-winning author of The Leavers offers a visionary novel of friendship, art, and ambition that asks: What is the value of a meaningful life?

In the early 1980s, Giselle Chin, Jackie Ong, and Ellen Ng are three teenagers drawn together by their shared sense of alienation and desire for something different. “Allied in the weirdest parts of themselves,” they envision each other as artistic collaborators and embark on a future defined by freedom and creativity.

By the time they are adults, their dreams are murkier. As a performance artist, Giselle must navigate an elite social world she never conceived of. As a coder thrilled by the internet’s early egalitarian promise, Jackie must contend with its more sinister shift toward monetization and surveillance. And as a community activist, Ellen confronts the increasing gentrification and policing overwhelming her New York City neighborhood. Over time their friendship matures and changes, their definitions of success become complicated, and their sense of what matters evolves.

Moving from the predigital 1980s to the art and tech subcultures of the 1990s to a strikingly imagined portrait of the 2040s, Memory Piece is an innovative and audacious story of three lifelong friends as they strive to build satisfying lives in a world that turns out to be radically different from the one they were promised.

REVIEW: Ellipses

Vanessa Lawrence
Published: 5th March 2024
Genre: literary fiction, lgbt+
Spoilers?: some

Storygraph

Set in the glossy world of New York City media, this sharp and witty debut novel follows a young woman caught in a toxic mentorship with an older, powerful executive as she grapples with career, belonging, and the complexity of modern relationships in the digital age.

When cosmetics mogul Billie rolls down her town car window and offers Lily a ride home from a glitzy Manhattan gala, Lily figures there could be a useful professional connection to broker. She’s heard the legends of Billie’s rise as a business titan, the product of white New England privilege and one of the few queer women in a corner suite. Lily feels stalled in a magazine industry threatened by social media, and in her relationship with her girlfriend, Alison. Mixed-race and bisexual, Lily’s spent her life negotiating other people’s sliding perceptions of her identity at the expense of her individual selfhood.

Billie is charming and hyperconfident, and she seems invested in mentoring Lily out of her slump—from the screen of her phone. But their text exchanges—and Billie’s relentless worldview—quickly begin to consume Lily’s life. Eager to impress her powerful guide, Lily is perpetually suspended in an ellipsis, waiting for those three gray dots to bloom into a new message from Billie.

As she navigates influencer interviews, cocktail lounge rendezvous, and staff meetings rife with microaggressions, all with one eye on her phone, Lily must ultimately work out not only what it is she really wants—but also how to make it a reality.