Fiona and Jane by Jean Chen Ho is a must-read for readers who crave a nuanced exploration of female friendship, identity, and coming-of-age struggles, particularly those who appreciate stories that delve into the complexities of LGBTQ+ experiences, loss, and self-discovery in a contemporary American context.

I'm a huge fan of Jean Ho, her writing, her person, I'm also very invested in narratives about female friendships. I look forward to reading more of Jean's work in the future.

Thank you to Netgalley and the publisher for giving me a free advanced copy of this book to read and review.

For this being a book about friendship, the main characters' friendship wasn't on the page that much. I found both of their individual stories interesting, but wasn't really sure how they fit together since they were so rarely *together.* If you read this as multiple interwoven short stories, it works better.

I received an ARC of this book from Netgalley in exchange for my honest review.

A little misleading. Felt more like a collection of short stories rather than a narrative. Would like to have seen more interaction between the two main characters, as the title/synopsis lead me to believe I would.

I loved this book! Everything about it -- the format of vignettes rather than a chronological narrative, the distinct voices of Fiona and Jane, their relationship and its ups-and-downs. This look into a complicated friendship felt authentic and heartfelt at every step.

My public has been responding well to this, definitely wasn't a first purchase but is a good option for a debut voice.

This novel reads like a collection of short stories. The narrative alternates between the perspectives of Fiona and Jane and covers their lives and friendship from childhood until they're almost forty. Jean Chen Ho paints detailed pictures of their friendships, families, formative experiences and relationships through the time period. The novel is character driven and well written but because I enjoy novels with an over-arching plot, this fell short for me, personally. I still appreciated the novel and would recommend it to those who love character-driven narratives.

I'm honestly not sure how I feel about this book. The whole format was odd to me in that it didn't really feel like "essays," and there were definitely plot lines that occurred throughout the entirety. I was invested and interested in the characters and their stories, but it was also jolting and a bit odd reading through this one. Not a must-read or one I'll highly recommend to all, but definitely worth the read.

Fiona and Jane is a gorgeous and pensive linked story collection about two friends who drift into and out of one another's lives growing up, like wavering parallel lines. Each story in the collection hones in on a particular relationship with a lover or parent. it feels like southern california the moment before the sun touches down from the sky, the way everything is hot and red and holds everything. it's such a west coast book, and it's filled with so much tenderness, care, and love, even in the face of trauma and grief. A lovely debut.

I was invested in the characters quickly but ultimately didn't feel like the book delivered. I was left feeling like I just read a bunch of character development but not much of a story.

This book was a surprise to me. What I thought would be a story of female friendship based on the title reads more like a snapshot of the girls.

For me personally, the short stories distanced me from Fiona and Jane. I did enjoy their friendship even though they rarely appear together or interact in this book. Fiona and Jane captures the feeling of loving someone dearly but having not spoken to them in ages and wondering if your friendship exists.

This is a book that makes you think, even days after. Chens writing style, being non-linear timewise and told in snapshots, requires the reader to think. The characters are compelling.and the female friendships are multi-layered..

Many thanks to Netgallery, Jane Green and Penguin Group for sharing genuine interconnected stories about friendship, love, family, relationships, and being caught between two cultures.

I was hoping for a slightly different resolution at the end, which almost cost it that fourth star, but the sum of this novel's parts made up for my slight disappointment in a lack of queer happily-ever-afters.

This novel follows the evolution of a lifelong friendship between the titular characters - a pair of Taiwanese American girls growing up in proximity to one another in LA, then growing apart, and finding their way back together as adults. It is a poignant and sometimes unflattering look at the emotional intricacies of adult relationships, especially the friendships that follow us from childhood and adolescence through the tumultuous events of young adulthood. Fiona and Jane drift into and out of one another's orbits throughout their lives, remaining constant but not unchanging.

The only reason it took me so long to finish this is that I was trying to juggle too many books at once. It's actually a pretty quick read. I wouldn't necessarily call it "light," because it deals with some of the heaviness of being human, but it's paced well.

This was a solid collection of short stories about our main characters Fiona and Jane (shocking). Some of the stories I really connected with and found them incredibly moving but others made me wonder why it was even included. I'm very interested to see what Jean Chen Ho puts out next! I think she has the potential to do some really great work.

An interesting collection of short stories that really focus on character development and finding out who you are.

An intriguing novel -- the relationship between the two women is fascinating and the comparisons as well as
the integrations of their worlds makes for a really good read.
The author's use of language also makes the work come alive in a way that many similar novels fail to do.
Definately do not miss this book.

This debut short story collection about twoTaiwanese-American women from their high school years through their thirties reads more like a novel than you'd expect. It was marketed as a collection about Fiona and Jane's friendship, but it's both more and less than that. I was pleasantly surprised by the depth and breadth of issues going on in this book (family issues, career issues, romantic relationships, mental health)...it's got much more going on than just friendship. And, it's less about the actual friendship than I expected. It's more a juxtaposition of two very different lives and paths for these Taiwanese American women, with their friendship threaded throughout. It's extremely character-driven and a bit melancholy, but with hope and connection.

Jean Chen Ho’s debut collection, Fiona and Jane, portrays two Taiwanese American women who learn to accept themselves and each other even as they also discover the sense of belonging that comes with being seen. The 10 linked stories here are set in Los Angeles and New York, where the two share the formative milestones of girlhood before drifting apart and then back together again.

Ho introduces 18-year-old Jane first, in a moment of queer awakening. “We sat on the piano bench like that, just exploring each other with our lips,” the character enthuses. “Was that allowed? I didn’t care. I was kissing Ping, and she was kissing me back.” The thrill, however, is complicated when Jane’s father, who has left the family, reveals the reason: a similar awakening of his own. “My daughter. My dear daughter,” he laments. “I didn’t know this would happen.… I care for him. Very much.… And he cares for me.”

In Fiona and Jane, lovers and absent fathers abound; this is a book about coming-of-age, after all. At the same time, such figures never occupy the center of the narrative. If Ho’s secondary characters—the con artist who drains Fiona’s bank account, the lover Jane nicknames Ed because of his erectile dysfunction—do leave marks, the two women remain at the heart of things, their drunken nights together punctuated with laughter and green bottles of soju.

This review also appeared in the Monday Book Review Newsletter, sent to your inbox every week.
SIGN UP

The collection shifts between them in a sequence of fragmented timelines, capturing the tender heart of their relationship. “If not for Jane,” Ho writes of Fiona’s early acclimatization to Los Angeles, “her loneliness might have been unbearable. Her parents were from Taiwan, too, but Jane was born here, in California. She spoke crooked Mandarin, learned from weekend Chinese school. Jane’s tonal accents were often mixed up and off-key, a funny song that made Fiona giggle.”

By choosing to move forward and back in time, Ho creates a coming-of-age experience that feels searingly true to life. The stories are each distinct, finding purchase in individual moments. Yet they also work together, building an emotional arc that allows Ho to address a much deeper question: How do you return to the people who love you when you know you will disappoint them?

The story “Korean Boys I’ve Loved” catalogs the essential encounters many young women accumulate as they assimilate their desires. “If you really want to know the truth,” Jane confides, “Won Kim was the only Korean boy I’d ever really loved, just don’t tell him I said so. Back in high school, we were both closeted as hell, but maybe some part inside each of us sensed it in the other and that was why we clung together.… He came out first, then me, a few years later.”

It’s a dynamic Ho complicates marvelously in the following story, “Doppelgängers,” which deals with the racial microaggressions inextricably woven into the women’s dating experiences. There, a man asks Fiona where she’s from. “LA,” she answers, to which he counters, “But where are you from, from? Originally, I mean.” When she finally says that she is Taiwanese, he tells her about his favorite Thai restaurant. “I love their pad see ew and tom yum soup,” he says. “I can eat it all at level-five spicy.”

Here we get Ho’s keen social eye and dry wit. “Cool,” Fiona says. “Good for you.”

Perhaps Ho’s greatest accomplishment (among the many joyous subversions of Fiona and Jane) is her rejection of stereotype. In a recent essay in Harper’s Bazaar, she argues for “Asian American mediocrity,” citing the reality show Bling Empire as a rare display of ordinariness.

“Because there are fewer stories about Asian-Americans in mainstream media than the vast array of white stories,” she writes there, “the works that do emerge inevitably endure harsher pressures of judgment from the communities they seek to represent.” The problem, Ho continues, is that this doesn’t allow space for “the messy stuff of being human, a privilege the white majority has always enjoyed playing out on screen without fear of casting embarrassment onto the entire race.”

In Fiona and Jane, Ho corrects for that. Jane opts not to attend college and manages apartment complexes for a living. Fiona graduates from UC Berkeley but drops out of law school. The friends’ major breakthroughs revolve around secrets and vulnerabilities.

“I was trying to protect you—” Jane tells Fiona at one point.

“Protect me?” Fiona responds. “I don’t need you to protect me, Jane. I need you to tell me the truth.”

Throughout Fiona and Jane, Ho gives her characters the grace to fail and the space to start again. Freedom from shame is the gift they offer each other. As Jane observes, “it takes practice to look like a real person.”

Words to live by, in a friendship that feels like home.

Let me say first of all that I love stories from the Asian perspective, and I am a huge fan of the K-drama. In fact, I'm looking for a book that gives me those sorts of feels. I wanted to love this book, and I started it enjoying the story and the back and forth between the protagonists. However, eventually, I felt like it went all over the place, and it gave me the feeling that the author hurried through the story to get to the end of it. It just felt rushed by the last chapter.

I did enjoy the difficult topics she introduced, and it's definitely something to spur discussion in a book club. I hope to see more books like that that end well but still with the characters being real. I would like to see more from this author as the book was well-written. It just needed tightening up.

Ho’s debut novel covers a cultural identity, family, love, and friendship through the journey of two Asian young women, Fiona Lin and Jane Shen’s youth and young adult ages. As the second generation of Taiwanese American immigrants, their struggles and choices have been tangled with their parents' past and culture even when they have not realized the connection consciously. If you are a reader, who is interested in seeing a bare face of a young generation of immigrants in America with genuine concern, this book is a good choice to see why they stay in the circle of minor society and are afraid of accepting their true identity. This book is also good for a reader who seeks a way to how vulnerable girls become strong women through their struggles.