Things to Make and Break

July 15, 2018
Everyone in Tan's world is broken and searching for connection, though in the 11 haunting stories collected here, the results are rarely what they bargained for.With the eerie precision of oversaturated snapshots, each of Tan's stories captures a different moment of desperation--some otherworldly, others deceptively mundane. In "Legendary," which opens the collection, a woman studies her boyfriend's ex-girlfriends, searching for herself in their strange, unspoken sisterhood. In "Date Night," a little girl in Hong Kong spends the night with her Indonesian nanny--new to the country, thousands of miles from her own children--while her mother is out with a date. In "New Jersey," a teenage girl feels betrayed when her best friend loses her virginity to a boy. Other stories are stranger and more violent: "Laurens" follows a boy-Lauren and a girl-Lauren living brutally parallel lives: "They know how to skin things. Their fathers are hunters. The summer their mothers suicided, the Laurens went to SeaWorld San Diego, where they occupied the same quadrant of the bleachers during the Shamu show." Both their stories end with blood. In the viciously sad "DD-MM-YY," twin brothers have been competing for the same girl for years, though her own memories of this are shaky: She's brain-injured from a car accident. Formatted like a movie script and taking up nearly 50 pages, "Candy Glass" is perhaps the most quietly affecting story in the collection, and the loneliest, about a Hollywood actress who falls for her stunt double. "Maybe funhouse mirrors would be scarier if, instead of making you look bad, they made you look better," the actress observes, watching her doppelgänger. There is a gentle hesitancy to their relationship; in the end, the stunt double--a trans woman--will leave her, choosing to start fresh. "I'll stick a flag in my lawn and go to church every Sunday, and marry a man. I'll be part of the superstructure," she says. "I don't know how useful love is, in the long run."Visceral and demanding; an unsettling collection that knocks you off balance.

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August 27, 2018
With this provocative debut, Tan proves herself a sharp chronicler of contemporary romance. Her stories feature setups including a love triangle consisting of twin brothers and a woman with brain damage (“DD-MM-YY”) and a movie star’s tryst with her transgender stunt double (“Candy Glass”). In the brief, impressionistic “Ghosts,” an unfaithful husband suppresses his kinks to save his marriage. “Would Like to Meet” finds Amber, a museum curator with bone cancer, attempting to find a woman for her husband to remarry after she dies. The narrator, having answered the couple’s ad, is immediately receptive (“They were trying to pull the future into the present, to make a place for Amber in it. I thought it was a beautiful idea”) even as the husband has second thoughts. These stories are attention-grabbing, though sometimes hamstrung by Tan’s inclination to default to stock imagery to evoke her characters’ passion for each other (“I drifted in your wake, feeling the tug of your slipstream. I watched your cigarette hand in the wind, smoke threading your fingers”). The collection’s best moments are its small ones, when Tan focuses on the maintenance of a relationship rather than its alluring arrival. Tan has a powerful ability to push the characters’ relationships to their emotional limits, and she is never better than when those limits break.

October 1, 2018

Debut A Berlin-based author with a background in fine arts, Tan looks at relationships with a satisfying honesty, neither too sentimental nor too darkly cynical; characters move their way through life and make their peace with it. The writing is mostly bright, loose-limbed, and engaging even though the subjects aren't always sparkly. A mother's date night out brings forth a daughter's wistfulness, a boy whose mother committed suicide believes he hears her voice when he and his father have a car accident, two sisters each get pregnant, but only one has the baby. In the emblematic opening story, a young woman becomes obsessed with her caddish boyfriend's former girlfriend, Holly--the only one in a long string of flings whose name he mentions--and secretly seeks her out. When she moves out after their breakup, she realizes, "I'm one of them now, a blade in the guts of some future girl." There's something vulnerable yet finally tough about this character, as there is about the protagonist of "Candy Glass," who's starring in a romcom-thriller that "arrive[s] in Miami a month behind schedule and four million over budget" and becomes fascinated by her stunt double. VERDICT Entertaining reading from a writer worth watching.

Copyright 2018 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

September 15, 2018
Tan unveils worlds within worlds in this collection of 10 stories, depicting love relationships and their inevitable complications. Adam has an opportunity to hook up with his twin brother's ex-girlfriend, Coney, after an incident that made her lose her memories. Julia tells a potential lover her incredibly bizarre story of being temporarily crucified by a cult. A couple seeks counseling to repair their marriage and manage one party's masochistic sexual desires. One woman becomes fixated on finding her boyfriend's sensual ex-girlfriend and imitating the woman's attributes; another sleeps with her sister's husband's brother, even though she can't fathom being in a committed relationship with him. Vivien meets a couple interested in dating her for reasons deeper than they initially indicate. Tan, author of the chapbook Girly (2014), shows how love stories rarely involve just two people, as her characters all search for connection and explore possibilities despite the consequences. She writes these compelling narratives with a cinematic quality that will keep readers engaged.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2018, American Library Association.)