A woman wakes up on the side of a highway with no memory of who is and how she got there. The mystery of her identity is solved pretty quickly: with the help of a local RCMP officer, she learns her name is Cleo Li and she has a younger brother named Cass. But then a bigger mystery arises: their parents are missing, last seen close to where Cleo regained consciousness, and their mom’s winning $47M lottery ticket may have something to do with the disappearance. As the investigation progresses, Cleo learns of some recent strains on her relationship with her parents, and she has to figure out, how much does she really want to remember about what actually happened?

In the Dark We Forget is a twisty and fascinating mystery. I loved learning along with Cleo about who she was before the attack, and why someone may have motive for wanting to harm her. Cleo is an unreliable narrator, partly because of the memory loss, but also partly because she hides things from other characters and there are hints that she may also be hiding things from us, the readers. The ending, and particularly the last couple of pages, seem to hint at a final reveal, but then the book ends without actually confirming anything. I admit I’m not a fan of ambiguous endings in general, but this one in particular annoyed me. Given the languid, meticulous pacing and intricate detail of most of the book, something about the narration made the last few chapters feel vague and the reveals challenging to pin down. So when the final two reveals were told with such narrative distance that it’s even harder to grasp what they actually meant, I just found it frustrating.

The book does shine in how it explores the Lis’ family dynamics, and the experiences of being an Asian woman in Canada. I love how the author explores the instinctive trust and recognition of shared experiences between Cleo and Aoki, a Japanese-Canadian RCMP officer assigned to the case. Cleo feels an immediate comfort with Aoki even before she remembers her own heritage (Chinese). There are a few wonderful scenes exploring the racism the two women face, like when Aoki is assigned to be a liaison because of their “shared heritage” and Cass rightly snarks that he and Cleo are Chinese and Aoki is Japanese. Or when another RCMP officer asks Cleo about witnesses saying Cleo often had an angry tone when speaking to her mother, and when Cleo points out none of the witnesses speak Cantonese and may have misinterpreted the tone, the officer retorts, “Isn’t Cantonese a tonal language?” which is a total misunderstanding of what ‘tonal’ means in that context.

Probably my favourite is how the novel calls out the stereotypes faced by Asian women. In an early scene, when speaking of other (likely white and male) RCMP officers taking on the case, Aoki tells Cleo,

Once any of those big strapping lads gets one look at pretty little Chinese you, they’ll be falling all over themselves to help you. I mean, even I feel protective, and I should know better than to jump to conclusions. No, I mean it. They’re conditioned to see us as vulnerable and helpless, right? That’s how Asian women get…fetishized in our society. Demure and meek and all that. [6%]

Later, the dark side of this stereotype plays out in real time, when a suspect in Cleo’s attack accuses her of faking sweetness and innocence and putting on a ‘damsel in distress’ act. First, it’s patently untrue in that scene, where Cleo is in genuine distress at being in the same room with this person. But also, this is incredibly loaded language to describe Asian women, and when it happens, one can almost hear the echo of Aoki’s words from earlier in the novel.

I also love the relationship arc between Cleo and her brother. It’s complex, emotional, and messy… in short, just like a real family relationship, and I love how they pull through for each other even when they fight.

One snag in the character development piece for me is that by Cass’s own admission, Cleo’s personality seemed to have done a complete 180 after the attack. From her conversations with Aoki and Cass, it seems implied that she can choose to keep this new and improved version of herself moving forward. Which, fine, that’ll be nice. But it also felt unrealistic to me. People in her workplace literally feared and hated her before the attack, because she was super shady in her dealings. And while the attack may have rocked her enough to make her a bit more open about her vulnerability, it seems unlikely that whatever caused her behaviour before the attack would have gone away completely. It seems more realistic that we would have seen more glimpses of that side of Cleo throughout the novel. There were hints of more assertiveness in her, to the point that Cass sometimes calls her out on reverting to old Cleo, but nowhere near the level that would inspire such dislike, so even with her slip-ups, she still comes off being like a totally new person.

Still, overall, this was an entertaining novel. I wish the ending had been less ambiguous, and that Cleo’s personality development had felt more realistic, but I loved the family dynamics and explorations of Asian women’s experiences.

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Thank you to Harper Collins Canada for an e-galley of this book in exchange for an honest review.

Metropolis is a compelling page-turner about the lives of six people all connected to the Metropolitan Storage Warehouse in Cambridge, Massachusetts. We see how their lives intersect, and then for the most part, come apart at the seams when someone falls down an elevator shaft.g

The most compelling parts of the story for me had to do with three of the renters: Marta, a grad student and undocumented immigrant on the run from ICE; Liddy, a woman trapped in a marriage to an abusive man who uses her storage unit for escape; and Jason, a corporate lawyer turned immigration lawyer who takes on Marta’s case. I thought all three characters were very richly drawn; I was sucked into their lives and their various troubles. I sympathized heavily with Marta’s dealings with ICE, and I full-on hated Libby’s monster of a husband, Garrett. I just wanted both women to find happiness, and even though Jason’s troubles were fairly mild in comparison, I absolutely love him as a character, and love how much he genuinely cares about helping people in need.

I also found Rose, the building’s office manager, an interesting figure that straddles the lines between heroine, anti-heroine, and outright villain. She takes kickbacks to allow renters to live in their storage units (Libby, Marta, a photographer named Serge) or use them as office spaces (Jason), and she lets Serge go into other people’s units to take photos without their permission, which is all pretty shady, but she’s also genuinely interested in the renters and their lives. Later on, she makes a decision that’s just morally wrong on so many levels and has a truly terrible impact on another character’s life, but her reason for doing so is relatable.

Zach, the building’s owner, is also an interesting figure. We meet him at a low point in his life; the contents of the storage units are being auctioned off. Zach’s dealing with the huge financial losses and legal ramifications of the person’s fall in his building, and trying desperately to turn his life back around. He mostly acts for purely selfish reasons, for example, wanting to sell the photographs in Serge’s unit just to set himself up in a new career as an arts taste maker, never mind if he can’t find Serge to share in the profits. But there’s something scrappy about him that also makes him easy to like. He’s an anti-hero brought low, and it’s hard not to root for him to climb his way back to the top.

Ironically, even though so much of the story hinges on Serge’s photographs, both plot-wise and in terms of giving the book its literary feel and at-times poetic tone, Serge himself turns out to be a fairly minor figure. We get a few chapters from his perspective, and there’s hints of a more complex tragic backstory, but he mostly just fades into the background of the story. Which isn’t necessarily a bad thing; I actually found the subplot about his photographs to be the least interesting amongst the various characters, but given the vulnerable and transient nature of the character himself, it’s perhaps sadly fitting that his story too ends up fading into the background.

In terms of the big turning point in the story — someone falls down the elevator shaft — I found the scene itself and the resulting fallout to be very well done. That moment really ramps up the pace of the story, and creates some truly villainous moments for some of the characters. And even when I thought I knew where the story was heading, there were enough surprises along the way to keep me hooked.

Overall, I found Metropolis to be compelling, moving, and exciting. I devoured it in a weekend; I ended up caring a lot for some of the characters; and for the most part, I’m deeply satisfied with how some characters’ stories turn out.

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Thank you to Thomas Allen Ltd for a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

Gouda Friends is a sweet and sexy friends to lovers romance. Tam and Josh have always been each other’s BFF/emergency contact. They drifted apart when Tam moved from California to New York for a boyfriend and a dead end job at an ad agency. But when Tam catches her boyfriend with another woman (and worse: having eaten her precious fancy cheese with said woman), she immediately gives Josh a call. Josh owes his current success running a ghost kitchen business to Tam; she helped him figure his life out when he hit a personal low point a few years ago, and he’s glad for the opportunity to return the favour.

I love Tam and Josh’s relationship. Yardley does a great job of building up the sexual tension between them — their sex scenes are both scorching hot and adorably tentative, and I love how much their years-long friendship helped them understand what the other needed in bed. I also love how deeply they care for each other beyond the romance, and support each other through key life moments. Even with just slight, subtle references to the past, it’s clear to us just how much Tam helped Josh out of his low point years ago, and how much she contributes helpful ideas to the next stage of his career; and in turn, we get to see unfold in the present how Josh uses similar techniques to help Tam through her own career slump.

Josh is a super sweet friend; I like how he offers Tam a place to stay for an indeterminate amount of time, and more importantly, I love how Tam is equally determined to get on her own two feet in reasonable time. She values her independence without being too defensive about it, and as much as Josh wants to help her out for as long as it takes for her to figure out what she really wants to do with her life, he also respects her desire to stick to a reasonable timeline. There’s a deep thread of mutual respect between both of them, and I love that.

I also like the supporting characters; the nerd herd is a fun group. I like the various friends, and how they all jump in to support Tam through this major transitional moment in her life. I’m already looking forward to what I presume will be future romances in the series featuring Vinh and Emily, and Juanita and Darius. They’re all badass in their own ways, and it’s fun to see them working together to help each other out.

I admit the cheese puns did get a bit much after a while; I thought I loved cheese, but I didn’t realize until Tam how much more a person actually could be obsessed with cheese. But Tam is so genuinely enthusiastic about cheese (particularly Cloud City Creamery cheese!), and Josh so earnestly supportive of her love for it (he keeps feeding her stuff she loves to eat, which is so super sweet!), that I actually ended up liking the overall cheesiness of this part of the story. Mostly, I was happy that they were happy, and honestly: find yourself a man who’d fill his fridge with cheese just to keep you happy.

And finally, I love how both Tam and Josh’s stories vis-a-vis their careers turn out. The job Tam eventually takes is perfect in so many ways, and the way Josh’s pitch to his investors turns out, despite not being quite how he planned, makes so much sense. I love how these subplots about Tam and Josh figuring their professional lives out was so intricately interwoven with the romance, and how their partnership was developed on so many different levels.

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Thank you to Thomas Allen Ltd for a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.