The novel centers around the protagonist, Cecilia, who navigates her life amidst the shadows of her family's past and the cultural dislocation of the Taiwanese diaspora in America. Cecilia's journey is interspersed with the histories of her grandmother, Ama, and her mother, creating a multi-generational narrative that explores the burdens and blessings passed down through the women in her family. The story is not linear; instead, it unfolds in a series of vignettes and fragmented memories that mirror the fractured identities of the characters.

The relationships between Cecilia, her mother, and her grandmother form the novel's emotional core. Chang explores how shared histories and individual experiences shape the bonds between these women. The love, tension, and mutual understanding that define their relationships are portrayed with nuance and depth. The book provides a deeply moving and thought-provoking reading experience through its poetic prose and compelling narrative. Chang's ability to blend magical realism with the stark realities of her characters' lives and a sense of search for identity is highly discussed, which is the central theme of the plot.

Might not be something everyone can deal with but a good sweet read about culture, love, tradition, and self-discovery.

Description:
A woman called Seven encounters her old school friend Cecilia after work one day. To say she was a bit obsessed might be an understatement.

Liked:
Totally, unashamedly gross throughout. Lots of VERY bodily imagery. A feeling of claustrophobia induced by women - familial, friends, schoolgirls, in the media. Some moments of pure horror.

Disliked:
All vibes, no plot. Perhaps? Found it difficult to follow and wasn’t sure, by the end, if anything had really happened ‘in the present day’. Lots of blending between dreams, reality, stories etc. gave a jumbled, messy effect. I’m sure that’s the point, but not sure I could read a lot of this sort of thing.

Read This If:
You’re really into the unhinged female protagonist stuff, and like a bit of poetic language with your body horror/scatological gunk.

Thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for my free digital ARC!

Crows and piss, piss and crows, that plus the most uncomfortable depiction of female obsession I’ve read in a while is what makes up K-Ming Chang’s latest offering. When I read Paradise Rot by Jenny Hval, I thought for sure that was the pissiest book I’d ever read, but somehow Cecilia has topped it with the amount of piss mentioned.

I didn’t love it but I also didn’t hate it. I’m a lover of weird fiction but this one sometimes veered into too nebulous a territory even for me. The magical regenerating liver and the crows had me scratching my head.

However, as mentioned, the depiction of obsessive desire is immaculate. Seven is fully consumed by Cecilia - if you liked Eileen, you might like this one too. There’s a section where Seven rhapsodises about a balloon Cecilia got her for her birthday - because it’s filled with her breath. It goes on for several pages and I’ve never felt so creeped out by a balloon. It’s extraordinary levels of details really.

One for you if you love a gross, weird, queer little read.

This is a dark novella about the narrator’s obsession with a childhood friend who she meets unexpectedly, years after their friendship was abruptly ended. It may be short but it is intense and for that reason I think its length is ideal, as any longer could have been overwhelming.

The writing is lyrical and has a dream like quality which carries you through. The narrator, Seven, has a visceral response to every interaction she encounters; everything is a multi sensory experience. The descriptions of childhood female friendship are acutely observed; the potency, the competitiveness, the longing and the awkwardness.

Language and metaphor are used to maximum effect but are punctuated with moments of poignancy, statements which stand out and hit hard like ‘Once something enters the air, it can hurt you like nothing else.’ The image of men compared to ‘inedible mushrooms..shiny as doorknobs but will actually cause vomiting until death’ is one that I won’t forget.

This was my first experience of K-Ming Chang’s writing and I appreciated the quality and the use of language but it won’t be everyone’s cup of tea - especially if you are squeamish about bodily functions and fluids!

Dark, uncomfortable, and unsettling. This book will thrill lovers of body horror and weird lit fic. For me, however, it was a bit too much. But I know many people who will absolutely eat this up.

this was.. so weird but in all the right ways! i feel like words cannot capture how this made me feel.

the writing was so beautiful and lyrical, i loved every minute of it. i think this is exactly what a novella should be.

thank you so much to netgalley, the publisher and the author for the arc 🫶🏻

Cecilia is a tiny novella about a woman called Seven who re-encounters Cecilia, a woman she’s been obsessed with since their school days. They board the same bus, elusive about their intentions and destinations, in a hazy, transformational blend of past and present, girlhood and sexuality.

The plot develops no further than the summary above, instead devoting 126 pages to the most visceral, minutely detailed descriptions of bodies I’ve ever read. Never have I felt so aware of myself - of my fingernails, hair follicles, the oil on my face. Every centimetre of the body is examined, the metaphors she uses so steeped in magic and sharpness that the result is close to body horror.

If the book had been any longer, then the gorgeous writing could have delved into being overly tiring, but at 200ish pages, it stops in just the right time. It should have been a book I loved; a queer, surreal whirlwind of a novella. And it was all those things.
But that wasn’t my core take away from Cecilia. Instead, my main thought was…
Why is the author so obsessed with wee?

At first, I thought I was being prudish. Of course a book like this will mention p!ss and faeces and snot and grime and all the other delights that come with being a body! Get over it Jess! Then I noticed the word p1ss appeared an 𝘢𝘸𝘧𝘶𝘭 lot.
I began counting.
Every other page, a sprinkling (excuse the word choice) of wee.
The despair began. I ploughed on.
Then the body functions 𝘰𝘯 each other began, and the remaining pages became a desperate nope-nope-nope race to finish before I had to hear any more about the main character’s weird p1ss kink.

I wanted to love this so badly, but the reality is, my reading experience was marred by the simple fact that I prefer my books without endless references to urine.
Somehow at the same time, there’s so much to discuss in Cecilia that I do want everyone to read this strange and bewitching little book! So much of it was ravishing! Just make sure you go in prepared for a bit of grime.

This novella is an odd duck or, perhaps more appropriately, an odd crow. I have read quite a lot of literary fiction with similar themes of obsessive love/friendship/lust/rivalry between two women so in some ways Cecilia is retreading old ground. However, as other reviewers have commented, this book’s sheer weirdness sets it apart! I don’t consider bodily functions to be transgressive in 2024 but this book is strange in so many ways, from its structure to the magical realist aspects etc that there’s definitely enough here to recommend.

This was a weirdly written novella but in a good way! I didn’t really understand the story but I did know that it has to be read in big chunks to appreciate the style of writing The imagination was tremendous; Melody who died and came back with a double lined plastic stomach, the inherited liver in a jar,… just those pieces alone entertained me enormously.

While I enjoyed it, I was also a bit confused - was this just the protagonist’s wild imagination or was it actually the story.

This sounded interesting and I was looking forward to reading it. However, the focus on style and weirdness didn’t hold my attention and in the end it ruined my reading experience.
K-Ming Chang is a smart, intense, imaginative writer, but I’m afraid this wasn’t for me.
Thank you Vintage UK and Netgalley for the ARC.

A young woman who works for a chiropractor, and from the off is a little too interested in her colleagues' trips to the loo, bumps into the schoolfriend on whom she used to crush back before she even quite knew how bodies worked, sending her into nostalgic reveries and old fantasies: Remembrance Of Times Piss, if you will. And sure, individual thresholds will vary, and most of it would be ill-advised as small-talk with a new colleague, but come on, it's 2024! Even if we leave to one side what anyone might have encountered in the darker corners of the internet, I live in a country where a recent official portrait reminded me that it's a matter of record how the monarch envied his consort's tampon; to register as transgressive, fiction would need to go harder than this fairly gentle magic realist ick. But I kept going, because it was harmless enough, and short enough that abandonment would have felt mean, and I was rewarded with a certain ambient tenderness, building to stabs of genuine poignancy towards the end, when we learn how the girls were parted, and question whether two people who were so close, and then severed, can ever ultimately reforge that connection, or any connection that heals more than hurts.

(Netgalley ARC)

Deliciously dark and strange, this powerful and intense novella is all about the writing for me as Chang inscribes queerness through her extended dislocations: of storyline, of lexical form, of syntax, of bodies.

The writing is immediately striking for the way it is wrenched out of usual meanings and contexts: verbs, nouns and adjectives take on novel forms just as sentences buckle, bodies metamorphose and the boundaries of normative order dissolve. On a superficial level this recounts a story of obsession: Seven enacts a meeting with her childhood friend, Cecilia, and drifts into recalling their haunting, eroticised relationship, abruptly terminated. But that bare description of story doesn't come even close to encapsulating what makes this narrative rare and extraordinarily fertile as a piece of writing.

I'd say this will appeal to readers who love metaphor and mythology, who enjoy being tantalised with intertexts and want a narrative to liberate the imagination rather than close it down into a set track. There are elements here which repeat and reverberate both externally and through self-referentiality: the dissolution of bodily integrities, women and crows, the erotic and the cruel. This is the sort of book one could write a thesis on - always a positive in my eyes! And it sent me straight out to snap up Chang's back catalogue.
<I><blockquote>When I reached up to touch my face, I felt no protrusions, no new bones inflecting my surface, and yet, when Cecilia and I looked at each other, we saw them: beaks mountaining out of our mouths, rooted to the shadows of our jawbones. Beaks shining like the perfect darkness preserved inside a belly.</I></blockquote>

This was incredibly lyrical and beautiful to read, I loved the prose and the way it was written. I also found the female friendship and Cecilia’s mysterious yet powerful character very interesting to read about. However, I unfortunately struggled with the time jumps! I never really knew if I was reading past or present and that made it all a little confusing. Still, gorgeous writing.

Where do I begin? I am probably forever going to be very stuck on this. Whilst the main message of this book/plot was delicious, I don't think it's possible to avoid the fact that most of this book was just in depth shit and piss. I had a conversation with a friend about K Ming Chang, as this was my first read and my friend had read several others. Whilst the gross aspect of Changs writing seems consistent, as does covering taboo topics, I don't see how in this particular book (for the most part) it added to the story. Here and there, sure. But 75% of it? I was concerned, yet it was so deeply and beautifully written that I equally couldn't put it down. You can see my dilemma - but its not a bad dilemma to have

Cecilia by K-Ming Chang is written in a very lyrical and poetic way which adds to the strangeness and intensity of it. The use of language conjures up the protagonist's obsessive friendship as she grows up.

Cecilia is a novel about the intensities of love and friendship, as a woman reencounters her childhood best friend who she has been obsessed with for a long time. Seven is a cleaner at a chiropractor's office, and when a client turns out to be Cecilia, her childhood best friend, she is plunged into the past, remembering the messy, obsessive connection they had.

This is a book so intensely about character that it is hard to describe the narrative at all: in the present, they meet again, and get a bus, and then everything is snippets from the past told by Seven as the narrative, exploring Cecilia and their childhood together and also Seven's own family. Particularly notable is the intensity and weirdness of Seven and Cecilia's friendship, not just the boundaries between desire and love and friendship, but the boundaries even between their respective bodies and bodily fluids. At times it is disgusting, at times poignant, and sometimes strangely surreal in ways that might make you lost. The book (at least in the UK edition) has an incredible cover that reflects the weird darkness of the book, so taking the vibes from that rather than the actual blurb might be the best way to approach the book.

Cecilia is a dark, intense novella about Seven and her reuniting with her childhood friend. It's undoubtedly well written but, in terms of style, it's just a little too dark for me.

While I do prefer a book that delves deep into characterisation, I also need a more coherent plot structure and Cecilia lacks this. I can appreciate the skill of the Chang's writing but I struggled to engage and, by the end, found it quite a slog. I can imagine that fans of darker, queer, body horror genres would love the book, it just wasn't for me.

I found this exploration of a young woman, Seven, and her reconnection with her childhood best friend in adulthood to be thoroughly engaging. Their intense and occasionally erotic friendship from their girlhood is examined, providing a captivating narrative. The writing is strikingly intense, teetering on the edge of being off-putting but always pulling back just in time to keep readers invested. It leaves you eager to uncover what comes next and how far Chang will push the boundaries.

Interesting at times but I found some of it made me cringe a little. I suspect feeling uncomfortable is the point but it just wasn’t 100% for me.