Thank you to the publisher for the gifted copy of ponti. I had to wait for the audiobook for this one to become available in order to finish this one. This takes a deep dive into three women's thoughts, their choices, their memories and the combination of the three that haunts them. It was an okay read but it did not keep my attention.

Relationships are hard especially when it comes to female relationships. Ponti by Sharlene Teo explores the different relationships women have with one another. The story is told at three different times (eras) using different characters viewpoints. Amisa is the mother of Szu and the star of a b flick called Ponti. We follow Amisa throughout her life. Szu is Amisa’s daughter. Szu part of the story takes place in 2003 and Circe, who is Szu’s high school friend, is looking back at the action in 2020. Ponti is dark.... it’s filled with unlikeable characters. This is my favorite kind of book because it’s honest.

Ponti is the title of a series of cult horror movies from the late 1970s about a ghost, portrayed by the preternaturally beautiful Amisa. In 2003, Amisa is 45, ill and living with her 16 year old daughter Szu and the medium Yunxi. Amisa aged out of the movie business in her late 20s, but she is still beautiful, regal and intimidating, especially to her daughter, with whom she has a fraught relationship. Szu and her only friend Circe attend a convent school. Circe is fascinated by Amisa. "[Amisa] had a brand of bruised yet appealing insouciance that I wanted to grow into one day myself." She "broke her daughter's heart every day as much as she continued to fascinate us both."

This book is set in Singapore and stretches from the 1970s to 2020. It's told from the alternating points of view of Szu, Amisa and Circe. It is a character driven book and not terribly eventful. There is no melodrama or big twist. People just live their lives. Relationships fray or blossom, people age, some die or recover, careers evolve. But I liked the quality of the writing, the dialogue (even though Szu and Circe often sound like annoying valley girls), the incisive descriptions and the interaction of the characters. Sometimes Chinese terms were used in the book without clarification, which was unfortunate. Overall, however, I enjoyed this book and I would like to read more by this author.

I received a free copy of this book from the publisher.

Brillant debut novel by Sharlene Teo! Ponti is a darkly comic coming of age novel set in Singapore. The location takes on the role of a character through the lush descriptions in the book. It's a unique and fresh perspective, and I'd recommend it.

This book blew me away. It started out a bit slow at first, but once I got into it, I couldn't put it down. Revolving around Szu, a high schooler in Singapore in 2003, the story weaves back to her mother's past, and a friendship in the future, and goes in directions I couldn't believe. Both funny and heartbreaking, this was one of my favorite books of the year by far.

On a personal note, it was also wonderful to read a book set in high school in Southeast Asia in the early 2000s, as that was my HS experience! The little details and name drops were delightful for me, and brought me right back to that time. I cannot wait to see what else Sharlene Teo has for us in the future.

'The distance between where she was and the glossy point where she wanted to be stretched and stretched.'

In Ponti, Szu lives in the shadow of her mother Amisa ‘s otherworldly beauty and small diminished fame. ” I marvel for a split second at the unfairness of genetics, mysterious spirlas of DNA coiling and cohering into life sentences: You will be plain. You will be beautiful. You will repulse mosquitoes. You will have an iron gut. You will be sickened by crabmeat.” Amisa’s career never took off with the promise her beauty once held. Having left her small village for bigger things, she works hard and falls in love with Wei Loong, they marry and she works full-time at the Paradise Theater until she is discovered by filmaker “visionary” Iskander Wiryanto. She has the perfect beauty, like a mask, exactly who he desires to play the Pontianak (folklore, a ghost of a woman who dies in childbirth and preys on men, in the form of pale beauty, long dark hair) in his films. We follow Amisa through the making of the film, witness to the ‘bloom of her ego’ even in the face of grief for her losses back home. Playing the Ponti takes it’s toll on her, the filmaker difficult, pushing her harder than she can stomach, not as enraptured by her sexually as all men are. Three films in, and her shining star dims, the movie becomes a cult classic, but of the times no one is interested in superstitions nor films about ghosts. The parts dry up, Wiryanto no longer needs his beautiful ghost and life with Wei Loong leads to just another part, of poor housewife. It isn’t long before she is pregnant with Szu, and feeling dreadfully close to her own mother and the life she trudged through. Amisa is more like a ponti now than a starlet. Wei Loong leaves before Szu turns 8, and then it is three, Szu, Amisa and Auntie Yunxi.

Aunt Yunxi and Amisa earn their living as fakes, mediums who ‘trade in hope’, milking the desperation of their clients. It’s necessary to con people for their survival, what with her tragic mother more a ghost of a woman, sleeping away her life. Szu is a misfit and completely friendless, until she befriends Circe. The two of them ‘citizens of nowhere’, feel unique, bonding over their discontent with the world. For Circe, the allure is Szu’s mother and mysterious aunt, even in their ugly home, there is a pull. Jump ahead to 2020, Circe’s team is going to be working on promotions for the new re-make of Ponti, hence “it feels like a can of Amisa-shaped worms has been opened.” The reader is dragged through time, guest to each character’s perspective. Szu, once seeming so bitter, strong, solid begins to fade, retreat into herself. Something many female relationships wrestle with is the discomfort of familiarity, seeing too much of yourself in another. Sharlene Teo exposes this uncomfortable bond perfectly, there is a pull and push between Circe and Szu, a sort of marriage. They feel warm and cold toward each other, until Circe can’t stomach Szu, when Szu needs to be anchored most to the here and now! “She started wearing her hair in a bubble ponytail just like mine and mooched about my house all day drinking gallons of diet coke and draping her sadness over my things.” It’s too much heavy sadness, Szu is dwindling, and she isn’t going down with her! Circe wants to be young, fun, free and this friendship is suffocating, she needs to shake her off, shake off this stale depressive air. Circe of the present day isn’t sure she wants that Szu back in her life, and is surprised to hear of a Szu who turned out differently then she imagined.

Szu doesn’t really hate her mom, she hates that she wants her love and never gets it. That her mother was more a phantom through her entire childhood, never happy to play her part in her real life role. What is more melodramatic than a fallen star? Despising all the ordinary living that remains. How did Amisa, so beautiful, so alluring allow her promise to fizzle out? How could this woman, who as a young girl showed so much grit and courage by venturing into the city, the unknown to become something more, simply surrender? Auntie Yunxi is the bones of the household, maintaining the only structure in Szu’s life. But she is a mysteriously strange woman herself, and where is Szu’s father? Is she right in blaming her mother, for chasing him away being like a Ponti, a threat to his happiness? When he makes an appearance again, after life turns tragic, he has some truths to unveil.

This novel is disquieting, because the real ghost here is grief, blindness, and starry eyes. It’s about the whims of fate, beauty isn’t always a promise of anything solid either, you can’t bank solely on dreams nor a face. It’s giving up and closing your eyes to what you have, haunting your own future and destroying those nearest you in the process. It’s a child trapped by her mother’s shadow, who sees nothing but disappointment reflected back at her, a girl who hungers for the love she will be denied even from the grave. It’s clinging to another person for dear life, because they are a sort of stand in for the mother/daughter bond. Circe and Szu represent that awkward hunger girls have for connection, and how easily it can turn monstrous and all you want is your freedom. The Ponti in this story isn’t so much about the folkloric ghost, the more terrifying creature is Amisa, and what she allows her disappointments to do to her future. She was so sure her beauty signled her out for more, made her special and she simply retreated from life when it knocked her back to earth. Szu follows in her footsteps for a breath of time, devoured by her own form of grief, like a disease. I found this to be terribly sad, heavy to carry.

I admit I was disappointed by the ending. I felt the story was a gathering storm, waiting for a climactic moment (big things do happen throughout, in their own unassuming way, with death) but I was waiting to be a part of Circe and Szu’s reunion, which was more hinted at. It never culminates. The writing is gorgeous, it’s an emotional upheaval which is strange considering there is a great distance between all the characters. There is an air of detached coldness, but it seems more a defense, Szu isn’t as strong as she seems. Her anger is a wall. Maybe it’s true that grief ‘makes ghosts of us’ and that is part of why Amisa is more a suggestion of a mother, having lost someone dear to her early on. I am mixed on the novel, this is a talented writer but again I kept waiting for the big ending. Despite the aforementioned issues, the novel itself is beautifully written. Circe is haunted by the past friendship, and years later carries the burden of her reaction to Szu as she began falling apart. It’s a complicated look at friendship, unwanted motherhood, dead dreams and the terrible ways we allow certain moments to define our lives, for better or worse.

Sharlene Teo is one to watch. I am wildly curious what her next novel will be about.

Released Today! September 4, 2018

Simon & Schuster

Szu is a pretty typical teen who feels she has never fit in, living in the shadow of her former actress mom and grieving the sudden loss of her dad who walked out when she was only eight.  
She finds a kindred spirit in her wealthy and sometimes cruel school mate Circe and they develop a friendship in 2003 when Szu's mom becomes ill and passes away.

In 2020, Circe is a social media consultant recovering from a divorce.  She's shocked to see that her consulting team will be handling the promotion of a Ponti movie re-make.  Her thoughts turn to Szu, who she hasn't seen in years, and her mysterious mother Amisa.

In the 1970's, Amisa is a poor teen in a large family.  She leaves them and their village behind for Singapore, where she works at a movie theater.  She eventually marries and is "discovered" at the theater by a director who immediately offers her the starring role in his film Ponti and its two sequels.  By the 2000's, she is divorced and living in an old house with Szu, performing seances with a sister who claims to be a medium.  She drinks and smokes too much and soon finds herself in the hospital with a gray spot in her lungs.

The story is told in alternating chapters from the perspectives of Szu in 2003, during the year she meets Circe and loses her mother; Circe in 2020, looking back on her childhood and the year spent with Szu and Amisa; and Amisa from the 1970's - 2003, explaining her relationship with her family, her movie role, and life after filming.

While Ponti is beautifully written and covers topics like loneliness and adolescence in smart and honest ways, I felt lost by the end.  I feel we barely graze the surface of the stories of Szu, Circe, and Amisa.  I appreciated this book for its story of friendship and loss but I wanted more:  more of their stories, more of a resolution for each character.

Thanks to Simon & Schuster and NetGalley for providing an ARC in exchange for my honest review.

Ponti is divided into three perspectives. Most of the sections follow Szu in the year 2003 when she’s in secondary school. The years 1968 through 2003 concern Szu’s mother, nee Xiaofang and self-named Amisa. The sections that take place in the “present-day” of the novel are from the perspective of Circe in 2020. Circe and Szu speak in the first-person. Amisa in third.

Szu’s sections, especially in the earlier parts, seem like an ethnography of prep school in Singapore. The girls are very bubble gummy and superficial with the evil edge that popular girls of this age probably all possess. Of course, all such ethnographies can only come from the perspective of an outcast—which Szu is. She’s also an active delinquent rather than a passive observer. Szu’s relation to her mother Amisa is something of a mystery at first. She does a class presentation on Ponti, a cult film that her mother starred in back in the 1970s. Szu seems proud of her mother, a point that is amplified by the fact the movie was apparently a total flop. The irony of the film is that Amisa really is a bit like a Pontianak, i.e. a cannibalistic monster who feeds on men to maintain her beautiful looks. A central turn in the story is when Amisa dies. I found Szu’s storyline to get much staler after this turn. As a mourning, self-destructive daughter, Szu becomes familiarly needy and sad in a not entirely interesting way (it feels unkind to write this). Even the gradual unraveling of her friendship with Circe seems predictable and plodding.

Amisa is the most fascinating character, possibly because it’s difficult to truly view the world through her eyes—her sections are the only ones that proceed in third person. Everyone, especially Szu, holds Amisa in a kind of elevated regard combined with spite and fear, so perhaps it is fitting that the novel formally enacts this distance.

Circe doesn't have the same quirky personality as Szu or Amanda, but her sections cut to the heart of the novel. This is because Circe seems devastatingly "normal": we encounter her in a midlife crisis following a divorce, but this crisis is an extension of rather than a break from her past life, in which she partook in standard couple activities with her husband Jarrold. A strong shot of ennui pervades Circe’s point of view.

What is crucial to Circe, and indeed to the novel, is the problem of childhood and nostalgia. In Szu's section, high school-age Circe is distinguished as someone given to strange corporate lingo such as “I’ll action that” and “going from good to just great.” But the carryover of these catchphrases from childhood into adulthood makes the once precocious Circe seem stuck in a childish loop. Whereas Szu describes with ethnographic verve the girl culture of prep school from which she is excluded, Circe also ends up scrutinizing interns and school girls, but with a yearning for her lost youth. If there's a connection between the past and a trope of "haunting," then Circe's seemingly lackluster sections are where we find this the most.

The fourth unacknowledged "character" in this novel is perhaps Singapore itself. To my mind, Teo's novel is much more effective than, say, Kevin Kwan's Crazy Rich Asian series in presenting a Singapore that is layered, complicated, and fascinating but without an exoticizing polish. The point also isn't that the characters or the city seem "real"—rather, there's something about finding the surreal in the real, the supernatural in the natural, that makes the novel very subtly and pleasurably genre-bending.

So this got a terrible review by the Guardian, who slammed it for being "too MFA" but didn't offer much of a comprehensive review. I found the language to be poetically beautiful and fresh, and the story touching. Most people who read are women, and most of those probably knew what it was like to feel awkward as a teenager. So, a universal story without dirty parts or cliches. It's also a love letter to Singapore: a timely read as the movie Crazy Rich Asians comes out and breezily brings attention to the glitzier aspects of life there. Worth a read and a few re-reads for the sensual language.

I devoured this book on a flight the other day, and the pages raced by. What a human portrait of both love and loss, and grief with exoticism thrown in. It's a tremendous novel, from a gifted new voice, and I'm telling everyone. What a great Fall read!!