Mona in the Promised Land (1996) by Gish Jen

 1,001 Novels: A Library of America
Mona in the Promised Land (1996)

by Gish Jen

Scarsdale, New York

New York: 24/105

Upstate New York: 21/23

    Not a huge Gish Jen fan.  I listened to the Audiobook of her 2020 Dystopia-lite book, The Resisters.  I reread the review I wrote back then- reads very much like I was trying to be polite.  It's currently over on Amazon with just under 500 reviews, which is not great.  None of her other books have more than 150 reviews, which is bad.  That shows you that people aren't reading her books.  Mona in the Promised Land is certain to be on my cut list for the revision.   It's another example of the "teenage girl trapped in her bedroom" genre- like The Resisters, Mona in the Promised Land has strong elements of YA fiction trapped inside what appears to be an attempt at a work of adult literary fiction.  I found that same approach grating in The Resisters, equally so here. I ended up having to grit my teeth to make it through the Kindle version I checked out from the library.

   The narrator/protagonist is the daughter of a pair of hardworking Chinese immigrants who decides to convert to Judaism.   The way this whole arc of the plot is written was cringe inducing for me, as was the other main plot line, where the narrator's white friend invites a fired black cook at the narrator's family restaurant to live with them after his wife kicks him out of his apartment.   So cringe.   I guess... I admire the attempt to write about these subjects but I didn't find any of the characters particularly interesting or convincing. 

   But challenging myself to read books I would never ordinarily tackle is the precise idea of undertaking the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America.  The whole project has been a real carnival of teenage girls in small towns in the Northeast, thus far.