Book 3 for 2025 book bingo: "In the Lives of Puppets” (2024), by TJ Klune.

( My basic thoughts. I wish I liked this book! But alas. )

( Some bitchier thoughts I didn’t include in the post I put on tumblr. )

(My thoughts on this book already showed up on tumblr, but this DW version has more in it, because I feel freer to express myself. See previous post re: my odd relationship to making text posts on tumblr... :D )

My first read for 2025 book bingo! I chose the "literary fiction" square to start, and read "Everything I Never Told You" (2014), Celeste Ng's debut novel. I'd never read anything of hers, so I was curious.

When I first picked it up, I was worried for a minute about whether it would count as "literary fiction", a mode that gets argued about a lot and carries class connotations with it, so I'm not always sure what it's supposed to include. But I went ahead, because I saw the "literary fiction" tag on various reviews and in the public library (along with things like "mystery").

But then I was reassured, and also cracked myself up, when I got into the story. Oh look, a repressed unhappy suburban family who absolutely cannot communicate, with a dad who's a professor who sleeps with one of his own pretty female students, and someone dies, and there is closeted homosexuality. Literary fiction bingo! It's even set in the 1970s--like, welcome back to "The Ice Storm".

Nothing wrong with heaps of common tropes, of course--hell, I love lots of tropes, I write & read fanfic. :D It's just funny how snobby some advocates of Literary Fiction can get, when it can be just as predictable as any other mode (in good ways and bad). And this is an enjoyable book, despite how much I may sprain my eyes at professor-student adultery-to-comfort-his-own-angst blegh (not a moral thing, I'm probably just at Bitch Eating Crackers* level with its use in fiction, so I end up falling out of the story too much).

*(Bitch Eating Crackers: shockingly, the idiom doesn't have a Know Your Meme entry. The short version is that it came from this comedy postcard on the someecards site back in the day with the text "Once you hate someone, everything they do is offensive. 'Look at this bitch eating those crackers like she owns the place.'")

The book was a good read in general, flew by, and juggles POVs and timelines and various pieces of information in interesting ways (who thinks what, who means what, who misinterprets what, who knows or doesn't know what) that kept me involved.

The issue of race, Chinese-American specificity, plus being set in a mixed-race family in a very white milieu, that's all very particular and interesting, as is the intersectional way it includes the issue of being a woman in male-dominated spaces and cultures (and resisting or not resisting certain modes of culturally-defined womanhood within socially feminized spaces too). It grounds those situations so well through character, the details of daily life, all of that. There was a satisfying conversation where the Chinese-American husband is like 'you don't know how it is to be The Other in a sea of the dominant/oppressive culture' (I'm paraphrasing, he doesn't talk like that :D ) and the white American wife tells him details of how it was to soldier through chemistry classes chock-full of men who harassed, belittled, tormented, and overlooked her. Luckily, it doesn't become an Oppression Olympics situation...they come to understand each other and their potential intersectional similarities very late in the book, but better late than never.

And as someone who was a child in the 1970s, the historical 70s-ness usually felt pretty spot-on. Although I have no memory of an unlocked seatbelt triggering a chime at that time--but, we didn't have new cars, so as that function was rolled out I might've just been late to experience it.

I appreciated the tiny future glimpses at the very end, a comforting way to wrap up what had been a pretty sad story. It did make me wonder if that one line about touching the bump on Jack's nose is supposed to indicate eventual requiting! It would need to be unpacked, and actually struck me as a good basis for fanfic--so I went and looked, and of course there are like thirty-something Jack/Nath stories on AO3. :D

Speaking of Nath... my mind initially heard that as Nath with a short-a, rhyming with bath, until we learned it's short for Nathan. But nevertheless, I had to stop and correct myself so often throughout the entire book, forcing myself to think of it with the long a. It's absolutely a verbal nickname for Nathan, no problem, but visually it wasn't intuitive. I think the more typical rules of English spelling/pronunciation kept intruding on me.

Anyway, I'm glad I read it, and appreciate the bingo square giving me the push.