This is a truly unexpected and deeply felt story of legacy - not at all what I expected to see for 2025 but I can't want to evangelize for this book.

A bit of mixed feelings with this book. The narrative is told from two perspectives: Monica, a freshman in college writing journals of her present, and her grandmother Yun, writing a letter to her long lost cousin about her past. Monica’s POV didn’t move me. I found the prose too stream-of-consciousness. Yun, on the other hand, I was enthralled by. Her voice was authentic and her story captivating. I think this book could have benefitted from drawing a stronger parallel between the two POVs. Perhaps if Monica had also been writing to someone, had as strong a focus and need to share her story and perspective, I would have been more engaged.

The prose was beautiful in this book and I loved the way the story wove together the concepts of storytelling, memory, family history, spying and immigrant stories with social media data, technology and broader privacy and ethical issues. But it's only not getting 4 stars because I struggled with the love story.

This book tells the story of Monica Tsai, a shy, reclusive computer programmer who's more at home with lines of code than the ways of the heart. She is close to her loving grandparents, who raised her. Her family has a secret that she unearths with the help of a new social media app that scrapes journal entries to make connections between users.

She connects her grandmother with a long-lost family friend and finds out about the family secret: They used to own a pencil factory in China. But the pencils were a front for a magical power the women in the family possessed to Reforge pencils and bleed out the memories of their owners into stories. This power was used during wartime in Shanghai to spy on dissidents through various regimes. I was confused about the mechanics of how this power worked and could never really picture it.

The narrative is woven together through multiple points of view in the form of journal entries and personal letters, which I found creatively executed and easy to follow.

On this journey of discovery, Monica meets Louise, the family friend's daughter, whom she develops a crush on. The two dance around a tentative situationship while Louise is using her for her real project, her future career as an archivist. She wants to get close to Monica's grandmother to record her story. Stories, for her, are a way of connecting to a family that she's never felt she belonged to.

There was a nasty third-act betrayal in the love story though, not cheating but I found myself disliking Louise and not trusting her intentions, and I did not forgive her as quickly as Monica did. I would have been happier with a sad ending for them than the flimsy HEA presented. Betrayals are my least favorite third act breakup and they require a strong redemption arc and a deep-dive into character motivations for me to appreciate them. That didn't happen here; their reunion felt rushed and tentative.

In short... the story was beautiful but the romance really did not work for me at all.

Thank you to Netgalley and the publisher for the advance review copy. I am leaving this review voluntarily.

I really enjoyed reading this, it had that scifi element that I was looking for and enjoyed the bond between the characters. It was a strong debut and worked with the story being told. Allison King was able to weave a strong tale and keep the reader engaged with what was happening. I enjoyed the cross-generational element and enjoyed the family element that went with it.