Wednesday's Child

April 1, 2023

MacArthur Fellow Li follows up the multi-best-booked The Book of Goose with a collection that swings between desolate loss and unnerving closeness as a grieving woman touts up those departed, a professor gets creepily close to her hairdresser, and a woman receives twice-yearly emails from a mysterious man several states away. In these stories, small moments have big meanings, and big meaning break through the everyday. With a 20,000-copy first printing. Prepub Alert.

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Copyright 2023 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from July 3, 2023
The protagonists of Li’s splendid and elegantly observed collection (after the novel The Book of Goose) desire to lead purposeful lives. “A Sheltered Woman” centers on Chinese immigrant and postpartum nanny Auntie Mei, who lives with her clients for the first month after childbirth. After her current client Chanel claims to have postpartum depression, she briefly imagines running away with the baby, but knows she’ll soon move onto the next family. In “Hello, Goodbye,” friends Katie and Nina remain in California after graduating from UC Berkeley in the 1990s to avoid returning to their respective homes in the Midwest. Years later, during the Covid-19 pandemic, Katie considers divorcing her older boorish husband and moves in with Nina’s Chinese American family in Kansas. “On the Street Where You Live” follows a woman named Becky who processes her conflicted feelings about motherhood, imagines having an affair with someone she meets at a diner, and recognizes the rift between her “commonplace” mind and that of her six-year-old son, who is autistic. Distinguished by their fully realized characters, nuanced narration, and striking portraits of everyday struggles, these stories find Li at the top of her game. Agent: Sarah Chalfant, Wylie Agency.

Starred review from July 1, 2023
"Air oxidizes, water rusts. Time, like air and water, erodes." Li expands on this premise in a collection of 11 short stories. Revisiting the territories of grief and loss she's explored in earlier works, Li places her protagonists in situations of reflection upon the circumstances of their bereaved lives. Mothers contemplate the deaths of children, wives recall long-estranged husbands, and women are haunted by missing friends. An infinite variety of ways to survive--or, at least, march through--devastating loss are cataloged in Li's cool and measured litany of pain. In "When We Were Happy We Had Other Names," the mother of a teen who has ended his own life opens a spreadsheet of all those she knows who have died in a literal calculation of grief. (The same mother muses upon whether life is just the antechamber for death.) The dead and missing in Li's stories are not without voice: A woman who is the lone long-term survivor of a teenage suicide pact in which several of her friends died--detailed in "Alone"--realizes the other girls have made themselves more present in her later life through their absence. The bereaved often carry the weight of either casual or calculated misogyny along with their life burdens, and echoes of #MeToo claims underlie other injuries. The relative values of memory and forgetting are examined, too, as one woman does not "indulge" in focusing on the past (in "Hello, Goodbye") and another muses that memory is actually nonlinear and more of a jumbled haystack of incomplete stories which can only attempt to distract from an absence ("When We Were Happy We Had Other Names"). The cumulative mass of the stories is sobering, a gorgeous almanac of the world of pain. Quiet, beautiful accounts of journeys through hell.

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Starred review from August 1, 2023
Breaks may be required between these 11 stellar stories, both to absorb the brilliance of Li's prose and to honor the breathtaking heartbreak trapped within. Li's acknowledgements are an aching confession. During the 14 years she crafted this exquisite collection, Li lost four beloved people, including her teenage son, who died by suicide. With keening empathy, mothers who lost children to suicide open and close these pages. "Wednesday's Child" follows a mother whose solo travels resurrect past conversations with her dead daughter; "All Will Be Well" foreshadows a mother's loss-to-come. In the most haunting tale, "When We Were Happy We Had Other Names," a grieving mother creates an antidotal spreadsheet; "If she could remember a story or two about each of the dead, they would not be reduced to the many generally and generically dead." Other unforgettable characters exhibit a spectrum of mothering responses. Auntie Mei in "A Sheltered Woman" is a temporary, paid mother for a newborn's first month; a daughter recalls that her adopted mother discarded an earlier daughter for being deaf in "A Small Flame;" in "A Flawless Silence," a bullied wife anticipates with "vindictive joy" that her daughter will "sabotage her father's authority;" in "Let Mothers Doubt," a sister raised her younger brother, who died by overdose. Storytellers become lifesavers--ironically, tragically--even of the dead.

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December 22, 2023

MacArthur Fellow Li's (The Book of Goose) latest is an evocative and melancholy collection of short stories. These deeply introspective stories explore life and parenting amid loss and mourning; often, the focus is on parents who have lost a child. Grief deeply permeates the collection, but Li seems uninterested in seeking answers to relieve that suffering. Instead, the stories delve into the pain the characters experience and how it affects their everyday lives: a traveling woman (whose teenage daughter died by suicide) still hears her daughter's voice refuting her thoughts; a grieving mother catalogs every death she has personally experienced; a mourning professor becomes deeply involved in her hairdresser's tragic teenage love story. Even the stories not centered around death--such as a live-in nanny who refuses to get attached to anyone, even the children she cares for, or a mother trying to guide her children in the modern world--explore feelings of isolation and the difficult undertaking to connect with others. VERDICT Insightful yet matter of fact, Li's beautiful and heartbreaking collection about lost lives, connections, and opportunities resonates. A striking addition to any short story collection.--Jennifer Renken

Copyright 2023 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.