PanThe Washington PostThe Brightest Star reprises plenty of biographical details of Wong’s life, but it stops short of offering any depth ... The first-person voice — a rhetorical device that should have allowed for intimacy and personality — is eerily lifeless ... A great irony haunts the novel: Although it seeks to challenge the films that pandered to a White audience that could not stomach seeing a Chinese actress on screen, the novel itself panders to a White audience that hungers for tales of legible ethnic struggle.
Elaine Castillo
MixedThe Los Angeles Review of BooksCastillo is too shrewd a critic of identity politics to fall prey to such traps of liberal multiculturalism ... Castillo’s essays are whip-smart. They do what good criticism often does: pinpoint something that feels off and explain to us why exactly it so unsettles us. The collection also draws on a remarkable archive ... A masterclass in cultural criticism, How to Read Now feeds my aesthetic proclivity for unusual juxtapositions of the highbrow and the lowbrow. It is profoundly satisfying to watch Castillo dance across these works with such agility (not to mention with such an enviable knowledge of star signs) ... And yet, thumbing through How to Read Now, I could not shake a sneaking sense of déjà vu. To be sure, there were nuggets of insight sprinkled throughout, ones I diligently underlined. But there were also long stretches of well-worn arguments ... Beyond retreaded critiques, versions of the question \'Who is this writing for?\' recur throughout the book. It’s an important question, to be sure, but also one that has been a mainstay of social justice–inflected rhetoric for a while ... not a vulnerable book. As stylistically refreshing as it is in its irreverence, it is a work that eschews risk. The collection’s cautiousness about its politics is evidenced by the repetitions I have outlined: it traffics in arguments that have already circulated on the internet, arguments that are thus \'safe\' insofar as there exists a ready audience for them ... I still found Castillo’s fiction much more compelling than her essays ... what happens when the audience has already been enlightened? Exposure assumes a naïve audience who hasn’t heard the story before; the force of exposure comes from the shock of encountering it. Suppose the reader agrees — then what?
