Kirkus
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A college student with a thing for music, movies, and numbers falls in love. Young Wang, the protagonist of Chang’s debut novel, has a thing for numbers. The New York University student keeps an updated list of them, good and bad: 1, for example, is “the first, the best. GOOD,” while 44 is “SO BAD. ALWAYS AVOID.” So when his uncle, Su Su, tells him that “we only get seven great loves in life,” he takes it seriously, especially when he meets Erena, a fellow NYU student, at the used CD and DVD store where he works. (As you may have guessed, this novel is set in the 1990s.) Erena, whose quirk meter is off the charts, introduces herself thusly: “I’m Erena. Erena Ji-Yoon Renee Valentina Yasuda.…It’s a lot, but it accurately conveys the lineage of this petite package of pulchritude—little bit of this, little bit of that. It’s like the whole Axis ran riot over my entire family tree! Hello? Humor? I made a funny?” The novel chronicles the relationship between Young and Erena, interspersed with Young’s remembrances of his previous loves, his relationship with his family and his best friends, and letters from Su Su, a hippie who has embraced a peripatetic lifestyle. Unfortunately, these threads never come together—Young is a depressed cipher, and Erena, who says things like “So, voilà, bingobango,” is such a Manic Pixie Dream Girl archetype that she makes Natalie Portman’s character in Garden State look like Nurse Ratched. (Young, himself a cinephile, would get that reference.) The pace of the novel is slow despite the hyper dialogue and Chang’s extremely liberal use of ALL CAPS and italics, and the ending is unsatisfying. Chang has heart, there’s no doubt about that, but this novel is a misfire. Copyright © Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.