March 2024

**5+/5 Stars**

Ling Ling Huang‘s Natural Beauty is bound to become a script at some point. It would be a shame if someone didn’t pick up this original story! It is a remarkable read with so many layers.

The first layer involves family relationships. The main character is a young woman whose parents left China to build a life for themselves and their gifted daughter in the United States. Pianists forbidden to play piano and compose amid the Cultural Revolution in China, they now teach piano lessons in the US to survive. Their aspirations become their daughter’s aspirations, which weigh heavily on her. A gifted pianist beyond her years, the daughter gets accepted to a prestigious music academy. Once there, she is teased and bullied by wealthy, jealous musicians. Then, her world is turned upside down by a tragedy.

The second layer of this book focuses on the desire to remain young at all costs. The daughter finds work in a wellness store, which at first seems like a financial blessing. However, the store and owners’ secrets slowly come to the surface. They reveal a grotesque underbelly of the beauty industry, one not too far off from the current time in which we live.

The last layer is about making friends and finding love in a world that can feel and be so shallow. How does one make it in a world that is, at times, racist, sexist, and elitist? The worlds of beauty and music are infiltrated by these -isms, and the author does a good job of exploring how the character navigates a world pitted against her.

As a parent of a child (now teen) musician, I could relate to a good chunk of this part of the story. The author’s personal experience as a gifted musician was evident in this book, and I enjoyed every single part of the story that involved music. The music world is intensely competitive, frequented by numerous wealthy families who have privilege and use it to buy their way into academies. The story of the sacrifices parents make for their children – children who often do not understand them at the time – was particularly powerful. I loved how music brought together the daughter and her parents, in life and in death.

A marvelous first book by Huang. Highly recommend!

**5+/5 Stars**

Where to even start with this magnificent book? Sequoia Nagamatsu‘s How High We Go in the Dark is a series of deeply interconnected stories told across thousands of years (maybe a couple million years?!) of time and over numerous generations of families. I will warn you that this is a difficult book to read if you are down or depressed. If you have experienced child loss or any sort of really terrible thing as of late, Chapter 2 is probably not for you. Some of the content may feel all too familiar after surviving a plague of our time.

If you can handle the overwhelming wave of emotions that comes when reading about life and death amid a devastating global plague, then please, please read this book. I was initially drawn in by the character of an archaeologist, who loses his daughter to an odd prehistoric virus found in the remains of an ancient child’s skeletal remains. Each story that follows after this is sort of like Russian nesting dolls; they have overlapping patterns, themes, and people who are all struggling to find meaning in the world. This book isn’t just about darkness and death; it is also about hope, grit, resilience, and longing. It covers the entire range of human emotions.

As someone who loves futuristic dystopian novels, I was immediately sold on this book, as weird and unique as some of its stories are. There is an entire chapter about a genetically modified pig who learns to speak, and you will find yourself never wanting to eat bacon after it. Some chapters make you question the ethics of how we might recall and recreate our loved ones in the not-too-distant technological future. Many chapters make you question what makes us human and what emotions may be unique to our species.

Overall, this was an incredibly powerful book and I cannot wait to see what this author writes in the future.