Siren Queen

Starred review from January 10, 2022
Vo’s spellbinding latest (after The Chosen and the Beautiful) solidifies her position as a force to be reckoned with in speculative fiction. During the golden age of Hollywood’s studio system, names hold tremendous power. If a studio knows a star’s true name, it can control them, so cast and crew alike hide behind pseudonyms. After toiling on movie lots, a young Chinese American woman gets onto the screen by blackmailing a predatory director, earning a meeting with a bigwig where she takes her sister’s name, Luli Wei, as her own. But even after moving into the dorms on a major studio’s lot, casting doesn’t come quickly. Her first big break comes when she’s cast as a siren, and she goes on to make a career of playing monsters. Through these roles, she learns to stand tall as an outsider amid the bright lights and dark magic of Hollywood, loving and losing various female costars and outsmarting the men who seek to overpower her. Vo’s hypnotic prose blends metaphor with magic so seamlessly that reality itself becomes slippery. Her dazzling voice, evocative scene setting, and ambitious protagonist make this a knockout.

Starred review from April 1, 2022

Movie magic is made manifest, beguiling, and deadly in Vo's (The Chosen and the Beautiful) tale about Luli, a Chinese American girl who is determined to realize her dreams of movie stardom, no matter how much she has to lie, cheat, or steal. Inside the closed world of the film studios, Luli learns that Hollywood magic literally consumes the soul, one picture or autograph at a time. The studios have made bargains with hell, and Luli learns she will be forced to pay in blood if she can't reach the stardom she craves. Luli declines to play the roles expected of her and angers the studios; in particular, she refuses to pretend to be either straight or subservient, making her a monster in the eyes of the powerful movie execs. Luli's stance ultimately makes her a star, and she shines in the firmament for all who come after her. VERDICT Luli is a compelling character both on and off the screen in this story that takes the mythmaking of Hollywood and transforms it and her into something transcendent. Highly recommended.--Marlene Harris

Copyright 2022 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from April 1, 2022
More than anything, the young Chinese American girl from Hungarian Hill wants to be in the movies. But as she begins to break into the business as emerging starlet Luli Wei, she learns that becoming a true, glimmering, immortal star will be a more menacing project than she expected. The studios are full of sharp-toothed, predatory producers, eldritch shadows, sacrificial blood magic, and steep prices paid. If Luli wants to be a starlet, let alone on her own terms, she will have to become a monster herself. In this stellar novel, Vo (The Chosen and the Beautiful, 2021) turns Hollywood into a fairyland--the kind from the old stories, sharp and dangerous--and laces the sparkling silver romance of the movies with a dark, exploitative, hungry greed. It's a world where Luli must hide her sapphic romances as well as her best friendships, because no one at the studios is safe from exposure, betrayal, or simply being emptied out. Pair that vivid world with the stubborn, passionate Luli and a pace that turns from slow and delightfully sexy to vast and terrifying with the turn of a page and you have the brilliantly searing Siren Queen.

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