Publisher's Weekly Review
Twists in language and heady cultural references elevate Chew-Bose's debut above the recent crop of personal essay collections by young writers. Focusing on the complications of growing up and establishing oneself, the essays explore what it means to be a brown girl in a white world and "the beautiful dilemma of being first-generation" Canadian. The collection reads like a writer's notebook, mixing the intimacy of a personal journal with formal experiments. Random memories-a dead squirrel in the yard of her childhood home, a past conversation with a friend-lead way to grander topics, such as marriage, death, or "the dicey irreparableness of being." Chew-Bose maintains an ambitious and inventive style, employing long lists of sensations to describe feelings and using parentheticals to address the reader directly. She is also a veritable dictionary of contemporary culture. Short ruminations on a painting by Swedish painter Karin Mamma Andersson, singer Nina Simone's "Ain't Got No," or journalist John Gregory Dunne's memoir Monster pop up in the author's streams of consciousness. Evocative phrases and bold metaphors such as "memory blistering," "scrapped corner of our imaginations," and "writing is a closed pistachio shell" color this take on the modern experience. (Apr.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Kirkus Review
A debut collection of personal essays from a Montreal-born writer.Chew-Bose is fascinated by life and especially by her response to it. She loves movies, painting, her skin, her name, the sound of her voice, her heart, and just about anything that occurs to her. Her debut is a work of self-examination and memoir, a young writer's songs of herself. She opens the collection with the ambitious, lengthy "Heart Museum," which begins as a rumination on the physical and emotional durability of the heart and quickly sidetracks into a hyper-referential stream-of-consciousness stroll through every subject that strikes her fancy, from cinematography to old boyfriends to random family memories to writing. Possibly taking her cue from Chris Marker's great documentary Sans Soleil, Chew-Bose seems bent on creating an essay that charts a surprising and compelling course despite having no obvious destination. Instead, it becomes an increasingly fetishistic ramble that flies off on various tangents. "Groping through the dark is, in large part, what writing consists of anyway," she offers at one point, perhaps by way of explanation. "Working through and feeling around the shadows of an idea. Getting pricked. Cursing purity. Threshing out. Scuffing up and peeling away. Feral rearranging. Letting form ferment." The trend toward navel-gazing continues in the subsequent essays, but some also profit from a sharper, more direct focus, especially when the author addresses what it meansas a young woman from an Indian family growing up in mostly white Canadato come to terms with cultural identity: "Nothing will make you fit in less than trying, constantly, to fit in: portioning your name, straightening your hair, developing a love-hate fascination to white moms whose pantries were stocked differently than yours, who touched your hair, admiring how thick' it was." Chew-Bose is an intense observer and cataloger of sensations, but this type of literary impressionism, where self-discovery becomes self-absorption, wears thin. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Chew-Bose's writings about her journey on the rocky road of assimilation to a self-assured identity as a Canadian-born daughter of Indian immigrants could easily have meandered off into trite and oft-repeated narratives about being brown in North America. But this sharp and astute debut essay collection reveals a young author who is wise beyond her years and whose keen eye moves beyond tired tropes about identity struggles. In the essay Part of a Greater Pattern, a brilliantly eloquent piece about childhood and coming-of-age, Chew-Bose remembers her father's proclivity for assessing, for being moored to logistics. It's a keen insight because what she does in this collection is not far removed from what her parent once did; she too is an expert assessor of moods, of situations, of her own writing, and her relationships. The book's title is taken from one of Virginia Woolf's diary entries, which ended with too much and not the mood, a suggestion that perhaps her writing was trying a little too hard. If that were Chew-Bose's concern, she need not worry. Her ample talent and keenly observed essays will surely win her followers, especially at a time and place when authenticity is a rare and much-valued currency.--Apte, Poornima Copyright 2017 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
The number of exquisite phrases in this debut collection could populate an entire review. Remembering her grandparents, Chew-Bose writes, "is like watching fireworks backward: tinsel swallowed into the night sky." The sound of a bullet shattering a window is "the loudest, most intense crinkle." Across all 14 essays, nearly each page contains at least one gemlike moment of visual-verbal synesthesia. Among Chew-Bose's central concerns are family, friendship, self and identity. Born in Montreal to parents of Indian heritage, she grew up "brown in mostly white circles," in a suburban home where Edward Said's "Orientalism" was often left lying about. "First-generation kids, I've always thought, are the personification of déjà vu," she writes, and this experience shapes her writerly persona - a discerning outsider suffused with the nostalgia of being one step removed from an irretrievable past. Chew-Bose is never not thoughtful, though the insights on offer are largely of the wayward-whimsical variety - a personal memory that kindles an observation, then meanders along before stumbling, albeit gracefully, onto the next. This is particularly so in "Heart Museum," which relies solely on free association to hold the reader's attention for 90 pages. Presumably, linguistic maximalism is meant to stand in for the momentum of a well-built argument or narrative arc. But unlike her heroes Agnès Varda or Wong Kar-wai, she hasn't yet learned to make the idiosyncratic miasma of memory, feeling and observation sustainably cohere.
