An intriguing read.

When Su Lan, a brilliant physicist, dies, her daughter Liya, who grew up mostly in America, takes her mother’s ashes to China. While in China, Liya tries to uncover her mother’s past and to understand her in a way she never could when she was alive. Liya’s perspective and memories of her mother on her journey are joined by those of two others: Zhu Wen, the woman last to know Su Lan before she left China, and Yongzong, the father Liya has never known. Between these three characters, a portrait of Su Lan emerges.

I read this directly after Shuggie Bain, which was an overwhelming read, so this one took a little while to get into. An interesting structure, as the story is never told from Su Lan’s perspective, we never really understand or know the central character in any real depth – she is created and formed by those around her and their fragmented point of views.

At times, I wasn’t sure of where the story was going and struggled to keep up (some sections confused me, in fact) but as it reached the end, I realised I wanted the story to keep going so I could discover more.

An interesting read, that you should definitely seek out.

Little Gods will be published by Pushkin Press on Thursday, 25th February, 2021. My thanks to the publisher and NetGalley for the advance review copy in exchange for an honest review.

Firstly, a huge thank you to Pushkin Press and NetGalley for providing me with a copy of this novel in exchange for an honest review.

Little Gods begins the night of the Tiananmen Square massacre when a woman, who had never intended on becoming a mother, gives birth to a little girl. Su Lan has done everything she could to erase her past, including leaving China altogether for a life in America. However, seventeen years later Su Lan’s daughter begins a journey to learn about her mother’s past and the identity of her absent father.

Jin wonderfully crafts a whole host of deep and complex characters and does so through brief snapshots from the characters' perspectives and through the opinions of other characters. Little Gods masterfully demonstrates the art of showing and not telling. I loved being able to piece aspects of the characters’ histories together and figuring out how the characters’ lives intertwine. Additionally, by telling the story in this way, we get a much deeper and comprehensive understanding of some of the characters, Su Lan in particular.

Whilst there are several narrators of this novel, they each focus on the story of Su Lan. I found all of the characters really interesting and it was fascinating to read about their struggles. I was also fascinated to see the different opinions and perspectives different people can have on the same person. For one man Su Lan was the woman of his dreams and someone he always admired and yet her own daughter demonstrated bitterness rather than compassion towards her. Whilst this novel was a wonderful character study that delved into as many aspects that make up a person, this also explored the realities and expectations that came from growing up in China.

Although the novel begins on 4th June 1989, the day of the Tiananmen Square protests (also referred to as the Tiananmen Square Massacre), Jin weaves politics and society through the lives of each character where, for the most part, it highs in the background rather than becomes the main focus. I thought this was very effective as when attention was drawn to the shots of the protestor or something similar, you really took notice of it, even if not all of the characters do. We also learn a lot about the culture at the time merely through the character's actions the way Su Lan presented herself at work as a physicist, or Yongzong’s relationship with his father.
Each character had a very unique voice and stay, yet they all complemented each other nicely. I especially liked how fluid the changing perspective, and even time was, yet still easy to follow with the signposts that the perspective had changed. Whilst they were all valuable to the story and a delight to read, I particularly enjoyed the parts that were told by Su Lan’s neighbour in Shanghai, Zhu Wen. I feel like it was through her perspective we saw were true aspects of Su Lan. Not only that, but it was refreshing how Zhu Wen would address the reader in the second person as if the reader is Su Lan’s daughter, Liya.

Overall, I adored this novel, everything just fit together perfectly. Whilst Jin is clearly talented when it comes to bringing life to the characters, making them all feel like nine genuine people with real lives, the frequent questioning the concept of time and revisiting memories made the novel have a dream time quality at times which was a delight to read and left me sitting in contemplative silence for a few minutes after I had reached the end.

Way back in January 2020, before the UK publication date of Meng Jin’s Little Gods got pushed back, it was one of my most-anticipated books for that year. And, it turns out, it does use a narrative device that’s one of my favourites: telling the story of a single character solely through the perspectives of multiple other people, like Anna North does in The Life and Death of Sophie Stark or Kevin Nguyen does in New Waves. As a young woman, Su Lan is a brilliantly talented theoretical physicist. We meet her having just given birth to her daughter Liya in Beijing in the midst of the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989, where an exhausted nurse is struck by her unusual demeanour. The novel then moves between the perspectives of Su Lan’s former neighbour Zu Wen, her former classmate Li Yongzong, and Liya herself to put together the fractured pieces of Su Lan’s history. What emerges is that Su Lan was a master of self-fashioning, but this was driven by a desperate need to hide what she saw as her true self. Arguing with her, Yongzong reflects: ‘through the cracks I saw something terrible, it was dark and powerful and churning, and I recognised with frightening clarity that everything I knew about Su Lan – her excellence, her beauty, her composure – was actually an attempt to control this thing.’ We hear about the poverty of Su Lan’s childhood in rural China, but we never get to the bottom of what she thinks is so wrong with her, and this novel is the stronger for it. Instead, we see how she uses theoretical physics and thermodynamics (in the form of Maxwell’s demon) to chase an impossible dream: can we forget the past and remember the future? There’s something here of Nell Freudenberger’s excellent Lost and Wanted, which also picks up on quantum mechanics to deal with grief and ghosts. For me, Little Gods was stronger in its first half than in its second, when the pieces of the puzzle come together a bit too neatly, but it’s still an impressive debut.

After purchasing a new kindle, I lost lots of ARCs from my library without realising until it was too late to re-download a copy, as this book was already archived. Sorry.

Little Gods by Meng Jin is the story of a woman's attempt to understand her mother and her family history. Liya was born in Beijing on the night of the Tiananmen Square massacre , and later mother and child fled to the United States where Liya grows up knowing nothing about her father or her mother's past. It is only after her mother dies that Liya decides to bring her ashes home and embarks on a personal journey of discovery that will reveal the truth about her parentage.
The book is written in an unusual format, the narrative is complemented by chapters addressed to Liya where those who knew her mother describe various facets of her story and her personality, giving Liya and the reader a better understanding of the past that shaped her mother's life.
I found this choice of writing style distracting, and it took a while to figure out what was going on, which made it difficult to engage with the story or care about the characters. I did persevere and once I adjusted more to the style I started to enjoy the book a little more.
I read and reviewed an ARC courtesy of NetGalley and the publisher, all opinions are my own.

I received a copy of the book from Netgalley to review. Thank you for the opportunity.
A fascinating and complex novel that gives rise to many layers and depths
A good read.

Su Lan, a brilliant physicist and a young mother, is plagued by a question. Coincidentally, it's the same question Hannibal Lecter was troubled by. It's not about eating people, though, it's about putting a broken cup back together, reverting time, breaking the second law of thermodynamics. She just gave birth to a daughter, on the night of the Tiananmen Square Massacre. 

When Su Lan dies seventeen years later, it is her daughter Liya who manages to turn back time. Not literally, of course. When Liya, who grew up in America, takes her mother’s ashes to China, her memories are joined by those of others: people who knew her mother in China. In this way a portrait of Su Lan emerges: an ambitious scientist, an ambivalent mother, and a woman whose relationship to her own past shapes and ultimately unmakes Liya’s own sense of displacement.  

The book is narrated in an odd way, in the form of Liya's narration complemented by reports and stories shared with 'you'--'you' being Liya, not the reader. I had encountered 2nd person narration before, it has another been directed at a named character in the book. It's interesting and less confusing than I make it seem. 

I really wanted to like this book, but for the most part, I found it boring.  I feel like I should say I'm sorry for it. You see, the conflict was kind of there (a woman trying to figure out her mother's past), but I didn't feel it was strong enough to keep me intrigued.  Reading this book only reminded me why I read so many genre books instead of general fiction. Very often general fiction feels like reading an average story. 

I appreciated the format and the themes explored in the book, and I want to be fair to it, so I'm giving it three stars. The author didn't do anything wrong, but there was nothing special about the book either.

I love a book with an interesting structure, and this ticks that box like whoa. This is both the story of a woman, Su Lan, and the story of her daughter travelling back to China with her mother's ashes and coming to terms with her death. Weaving character study, mother-daughter issues, the Tiananmen Square protests and family secrets...I was so here for it.

Su Lan's story is told through the memories and confessions of others who knew her. Physicist, mother, lover, neighbour, peasant, genius, total enigma, Su Lan is a different person to different people and somewhere in these passages is a woman trying to escape her past in a radical way. Woven with these recollections is the story of Liya returning to her mother's homeland, trying to understand not only her mother but the factors that shaped their relationship as Su Lan brought her up alone in the US. Through this exploration, she uncovers two secrets about herself which only further perpetuate her sense of knowing nothing about her mother.

I thought the writing in this book, although not highly emotionally charged, was elegant and crisp. At times there was almost a sort of dream-like quality, not the soft-focus kind but in the fragmented way dreams can be. I really enjoyed the different narrative voices, and how we learned so much about the individuals through their telling of their time with Su Lan. I'll admit, physics is not my jam, so portions of this book went over my head and my basic understanding meant that for a time I thought this book was going in a direction completely different to where it did. But I was glad of that, because I think it would have lost the poignancy had it gone down that other, imagined route.

That this book is a debut elevates it even further in my mind. I'm always excited by a writer who can craft such a fascinating book this early in a career. I'll definitely be keeping Meng Jin on my radar.

The plot of Little Gods is as follows. The book starts with the Tiananmen Square massacre – June 1989. A young woman gives birth alone in a nearby hospital. But where is her husband? At this stage we know nothing of any of the characters, the reader just sees in the mind’s eye the horrific news images item beamed around a horrified globe by technology. (Wiki tells me that “Tiananmen” translates as “Gate of Heavenly Peace”).
Three years later, the young mother – a trained physicist – leaves China to teach at an American university, taking her baby daughter with her. It is left to the daughter to relate the story of Su Lan – the young mother, her mother – seventeen years after her birth, and to try to find what happened to her father. But Su Lan has told her nothing at all of the past and so it is left to the narrator to piece things together for herself.
At its most elemental the plot concerns itself with identity – who are we if we don’t know who we are in terms of our family members and family background? Nothing especially new sounding in that idea but there are as many interpretations of it as there are humans on the planet.
Su Lan has not told her daughter about the past. Why not? The narrator’s voice is deeply critical of her mother, inventing in her mind the ‘proper’ family that she would have liked to have had rather than the life she actually lived, growing up in the US in a single parent family. But the key to the past is, as always, closer to home than we think.
I enjoyed ‘Little Gods’ but felt I knew as little about the narrator at the end of the book, as I did in the beginning.

In "Little Gods", we slowly learn the story of Su Lan through the narrations of people who knew her: her daughter, her neighbour, her husband, and an old friend.

I find it difficult to review this book, as I am not entirely sure of my feelings about it. It is well-written, but some parts (especially the POV of the neighbour) were a bit confusing to me. The author tried to add some history about events that were going on, but it was done in a way (e.g., adding ghosts to the story) that I didn't find compelling. In addition to that, there was no difference in the voices of the characters: they all "sounded" the same, as if they didn't have specific, well-defined personalities.

Although the reader is supposed to learn the story of Su Lan, in reality I finished the book thinking I had learnt more about the other characters than about her. As a woman in science myself, I would have loved to hear more about Su Lan's experiences in academia, especially as a young student. I feel like in a way this was a missed opportunity for female representation in the field.

Other reviewers have mentioned that they finished the book without knowing who Su Lan really was. Even though I don't agree with this, my response to that criticism would be that I believe that is the point: who are we with different people and how do they perceive us?

Many thanks to NetGalley and Pushkin Press for a free ARC in exchange for an honest review.

I honestly don't know what is served in Asian food or drinks but it works out for their creative writers really well and I want some of it.

little gods has one of the best character development I've ever read in a novel. The writing is clean, and simple. Every sentence is thoughtfully written. You can tell that a lot went into sentence structure. But I just want to go back to the character development again.

Employing different narrator's and POVs, this novel embodies, family, love, feminism, self identity, depression, hope, heartbreak, maternal love. There is so much to unpack. I still don't have all the words to describe how this book made me feel. But I would be recommending it to all my friends.

I really enjoyed this book, which tells the story of Su Lan from three different perspectives.

Through threse narrators, we are slowly able to put together a picture of her life.

This was a really interesting narrative decision, but one that worked really well. I wanted to know more about Su Lan and the mysteries of her life, so splitting up the narrative in this way kept me reading with intrigue until the very end.

Highly recommended.

Not an easy read, but one that is worth it.
Now a bit longer text explaining why. First, the book does not make it the reader easy because of it structure. It starts in Beijing told from the perspective of a nurse. Then you get another pespective from Shanghai, told by an old woman several years later. You have no connection at all and think you are in the completely different story. There the reader has to be patient to get the relations between the characters and the time. But when you get it, it takes you all in.
I really liked that the story doesn't explain everything. There are still questions that are not answered, there are not always solutions for the characters. That makes it so real, and if you think of the historical connections even more so. I liked a lot that you don't get the real action concerning the historical events, you just see the results and consequences; it isn't simply a historical novel. But the characters are real people influenced by their decisions and their ideas of life, as well as historical events.
A book that will stay with me.

Little Gods was a book I expected to like, but not as much as I did: I devoured this book in a few days, and was completely engrossed by the story from the beginning. Although Su Lan is the main character in the story, we never get her point of view, and her story is told in bits through the eyes of people who knew her. This gave the book such an interesting, haunting effect. I adored Su Lan from the beginning and found her passion for Physics and obstinate insistence on erasing her past fascinating.

Meng Jin's writing is so beautiful, the voice of each character distinct and vibrant and I was so drawn to the story I arrived later at work a few times to read in bed a little longer. I fell in love with the passionate, complicated Su Lan, the beauty on the way she talks about Physics and the ferocity with which she tried to escape her history of poverty and the person she used to be, the unclear image of who she would actually like to be, what to actually aim for. We get incomplete pieces of her and even at the end of the story, I was still completing my image of her with my own imagination. There is something about this book that just worked for me.

What stopped me from giving it 5 stars was probably the ending - I found it confusing and unconvincing, and have been mulling it over for days now but have come to the conclusion that perhaps it's just... not that good an ending. Except for that, this was a fantastic novel. I believe this is her debut novel, and I'm very impressed.

A powerful and memorable read about identity and motherhood. I love books that cover a period of history that I personally know very little about, so this was a great read for me. Thanks to Netgalley and Pushkin Press for this copy.

Meng Jin: Little Gods.
*
“My desire for roots had been more than a desire for belonging. I had seen what people who were from places were like, how they glittered with solidity and substance, and I had wanted to be filled with that substance too.”
*
📚This book has been on my goodreads #tbr for a really long time, so when netgalley approved my request for the ARC I was so excited. And it definitely didn’t disappoint.
📚Little Gods is about identity, and all of the things that contribute to it: country, language, family, beauty, intelligence. It maps the life of Su Lan by following the people who knew her, and at the same time, questioning if they really knew her at all. This books asks so many questions about the human experience and it has so many perfect quotes, that really make you think.
📚I did find it a little confusing at times, but I think a lot of this is because it’s an arc, so the formatting isn’t 100% yet, and because I read it on my kindle, which sometimes interferes with the format anyway. There are quite a lot of characters too- the way the text is woven together is really clever and intricate, but sometimes it took me a little while to see how the new character was connected. This isn’t a criticism though, because in hindsight, I really enjoyed the layout, and found it really effective.
📚I really liked this book. The characters were so different and so interesting; they were all quite heavily flawed, and yet I felt strangely sympathetic towards most of them too. I also really enjoyed this insight to China, and it made me realise that I definitely need to read more books that are set there.
📚Little Gods is already out in hardback, and will be released in paperback on February 25th 2021. I would definitely recommend this book, especially if you’re interested in reading about migration or identity, or even if you just want to read more by Chinese authors- because Meng Jin’s writing is fantastic.

Wow this book blew me away with its complexity. It is ultimately a story about a young woman trying to understand her identity after learning that her mother passed away travelling back to China to find her father. The story of her mother (Su Lan) is told through a variety of characters who knew her at different times in her life. There is a slight mysterious aura which surrounds the narrative in that you never fully understand Su Lan only seeing her through the eyes of others. We jump around through time a little too which at first was a tad confusing but further on in the book becomes clear as links to early threads are explained from a different perspective and I feel add to it’s mystery. I truly enjoyed reading this book and thank Netgalley and Pushkin Press for this copy.

oh wow what a book. this made me think of my own relationship with my mother, and though it wasn't as bad as or even lonely as the main character's daughter, there were times where it felt like both me and my mum were working on two different pages. There are loads of topics in this book, love, hatred, self and of other people, not having an identity or background that is considered "normal". a foreigner in a different country but also a foreigner in your own. I found the relationships, between everyone who knew and was close or came into contact with the main character intriguing and heart rending. There were a few points in the story which didn't make much sense to me and that was near the end, where it just sort of went a bit crazy. I am not sure how to rate this as on the one hand this is an exceptional piece of work but on the other an absolute oddity. I love it but I am not sure why.

This would have been a perfect double bill with my last book, White Ivy. Another debut novel by a Chinese-American writer, with a young female Chinese-American protagonist exploring and understanding her identity through a mother who looms large in her life. And yet they could hardly be more different.

Little Gods was released in January this year and is due out in paperback in February. It opens in Beijing on 4 June 1989 – not in Tiananmen Square, but in a maternity ward standing amongst the chaos as bodies line up in the halls and delivery rooms are taken over by urgent care. It’s an extraordinary scene, with echoes of Ma Jian’s Beijing Coma in taking a slanted, medical view on those events. For me it was doubly affecting – I spent the height of the Covid crisis this spring making daily trips to neonatal intensive care, and it was never clearer to me that while the rest of a hospital can (more or less) shut down in an emergency, maternity – motherhood - is a constant. In this Beijing maternity ward is a new mother, Su Lan, and her baby, one of the ‘little gods’ of the title. Her husband has gone missing and she has hardly slept or eaten. She asks the nurses cryptic questions about time.
After this start, the time shifts to 2007, shortly after Su Lan’s death, and the voice shifts to three different characters: Zhu Wen, Su Lan’s elderly neighbour in Shanghai; Li Yongzong, a physician and childhood friend of Su Lan’s who becomes her husband; and her US-raised daughter Liya, the baby born in Beijing. Liya, however, thinks she was born in Shanghai in 1988, and travels to China to find out more about her mother and her heritage; Zhu narrates in the second person to Liya. Through these three different voices Meng Jin unfolds the story of Su Lan, a brilliant scientist with two ardent admirers.
This is a very frustrating book – and I think that’s deliberate. The narrative voices are distancing and we are always kept at arm’s length from Su Lan. Often the narrative voices are retelling what other people have told them, so we are a further step removed again. A multi-perspective technique works best in novels with a huge canvas; or in a Rashomon-style narrative where the different experiences conflict with each other. Here they are being used to unfold and explore a single character, through which we are led to ponder space, time, identity and personal history. But it’s not just that we are kept at a distance from Su Lan by the storytelling; Su Lan is a character who keeps her distance from people.
Throughout the book I struggled to get hold of Su Lan, and I wondered why we are chasing after a callous character who clearly doesn’t want to be caught. It’s not even clear why her two ardent admirers are so besotted with her. Su Lan says things like ‘Do you know who I am, Li Yongzong? Do you know me at all?’ and leaves us (and poor Yongzong) hanging. Both she and Liya ‘sink’ into extensive, convoluted lies. She’s almost nihilistic, not believing in the ‘idea of China’, agreeing to marry but wanting not wedding or children, consumed with ‘lofty concerns’ but uninterested in the political events of 1989.

When Yongzong tells us that ‘immediately I could tell that she was a passionate and brilliant scientist’ it seems very flat. There is a lot of telling and not a lot of showing: we are told she is beautiful and brilliant, but have to take it at face value. Because Su Lan, it seems, uses theoretical physics in the place of character. She makes a Hallowe’en costume for her daughter and, instead of bonding, gives her a lecture about how ‘gathering information was a kind of irreversibility’. A letter to one of her devoted men, which affects Liya with its ‘beauty and authenticity’, includes lines like ‘Einstein was referring to… Minkowski space and the picture of physical reality as a four-dimensional existence, rather than the more intuitive model of three-dimensional space moving through time’. Romantic she is not.
Space and time, future and past, and their inter-relationships, feature strongly and regularly throughout the novel as Meng Jin explores humanity. But these passages which deal with science and the relationship between space and time sit very heavily within the narrative. I couldn’t help but think they are probably very meaningful to the author but would be better excised – kill your darlings, after all. Not only do they slow the storytelling but they take you out of the voices. Even Zhu Wen, the elderly neighbour concerned with ghosts and gods, starts narrating about entropy, being ‘limited to a linear experience of time’, and the ‘reconceptions’ of the ‘restriction of our temporal experience’. I don’t know many people who speak like that, even if they live next door to brilliant scientists.
Meng Jin is clearly aiming for profundity, and perhaps Su Lan is intended as a great metaphor – if so, it’s not clear what for. She is a deliberately offputting character to put as the sun around which the narrative turns.
Some of the other descriptions and allusions don’t land either (‘her beauty like sunlight one could swim in’, people who ‘glittered with solidity and substance’). We are told that Liya has left fellow students ‘groping one another at parties, falling asleep in the library’ but I didn’t get a sense of her character outside the narrative either.
That said there is plenty to enjoy. The excellent opening scenes, for one, but also the initial mystery as Liya pieces together the truth of her birth and parentage is gripping; her meditations on her identity, otherness, and motherhood is thoughtful; and the evocation of Beijing is recognisable and unusually strong. But overall I found Little Gods book very flat and cold. A bit like a Beijing winter.