... even to those not from Los Angeles, Ho’s debut collection feels like a shared experience, carefully read back to you ... While Ho, born in Taiwan and raised in California, circles sexuality, money and religion with grace, the most moving parts of the book are about the two women’s respective family roots ... Certain descriptions feel overdone and stilted ... But regardless, over the course of the book Fiona and Jane become real and electric and precious people. The stories move through intimate, cinematic scenes ... The world Ho creates between the two women feels like one friend reading the other’s story, wishing she were there ... it is through compassion that the characters belong like this to each other, and to the reader, too.
... wonderful ... Interestingly, the book is not designated a short story collection nor a novel and, indeed, it occupies a space that is neither one nor the other, a unique form for which we need a new name ... The way in which Ho crafted this book—the decisions she made about what to put where—adds complexity and depth, which in turn invites the reader to take a closer look, to be more involved in the process of reading. The result is a book that is built on memory, a book that speaks to the importance and difficulties and richness of friendship between women over time, a book that braids its form and content together to create meaning ... a wonderful way to conclude this book, as it sheds new light on everything that has come before.
The friendships that do survive feel precious, unlikely. One such is at the tender, beating heart of Jean Chen Ho's debut work of fiction, Fiona and Jane ... These introductions to the girls' (later women's) families are helpful in setting the scene, showing us what they share in terms of background, language, and family, but it's the third piece, Go Slow, where we really begin to see their friendship shine on the page. Their dynamic rings beautifully true ... Ho renders both women so real that they begin to feel like people you've encountered and hung out with. She also has a knack for rendering their darker, meaner thoughts, those they're sometimes ashamed of, with brutal honesty ... While Fiona and Jane sometimes feels quiet, it is never muted, and its precisely the fact that the women's trials and tribulations feel refreshingly life-sized that makes the book ring so beautifully, sometimes terribly, true.
The collection’s themes are broad yet intricately rendered ... Through Fiona and Jane, Ho honors the hours put into a relationship, while also acknowledging the ways in which our lives are irreversibly changed by short-term engagements. The collection explores the dichotomy between deep and lengthy bonds, like Jane and Fiona’s, and fleeting encounters with lovers, fair-weather friends, colleagues, even parents ... By concluding with Fiona and Jane as works in progress, Ho asserts that resolution is a pointless life goal. Instead, we are left with the beautiful tangle of two lives in the midst of being lived.
Fiona and Jane is structured into a number of chapters that could almost be stand-alone short stories, not always arranged in chronological order. Chen Ho is a masterful storyteller and leaves no lacunae as the story moves backward and forward. In a world that is increasingly defined by social media connections, the waxing and waning of Fiona and Jane’s bond reaffirms that close, in-person friendships still have a chance.
... virtuosic ... a tender portrait of female friendship in all its complexity and depth ... Ho adeptly and insightfully traces the changing contours of their relationship ... many of these stories are propelled by secrets, the measuring sticks of intimacy, capable of both bringing people together and tearing them apart ... new secrets accumulate, creating a rich texture of loyalty and betrayal ... Ho's writing is so vivid, witty and warm that after finishing Fiona and Jane, readers will miss these characters like their own best friends.
Fiona and Jane are finely handled by Ho, who writes with compassion and a punchy gravity. She draws in readers with her insightful exploration of identity and attachment, yet holds them at a compelling distance, allowing her characters to hold on to just a bit of their own interior worlds. This impressive debut is striking in its raw and honest portrayal. It examines themes that are particular to young women and to the Asian experience in America (yet are also universal) with intelligence, energy and confidence.
The decision to differentiate the two Taiwanese American women’s sections in this way becomes increasingly interesting and important as the story progresses. In fact, it becomes evident that this structure is essential to how the story must be told ... Time is a fascinating factor in the novel as well. The narrative unfurls in the present while moving the reader into snippets of backstory, filling in gaps at just the right moments. Ho also moves us through and across physical and cultural landscapes, revealing how a person can feel both resonance with and distance from one’s community and self ... Ho's characters do the most compelling work ... By the book’s end, readers will feel as though they carry some part of these women with them, as if Fiona and Jane are our friends, as if their stories might yet overlap with our own.
Engaging ... The rise-and-fall energy of each story serves the material without forcing a novel’s overarching unity of cause and effect ... Ho’s writing evokes youthful folly, ever glorious and stupid, with a shadow of later awareness in the prose
In this tender and timeless debut, Chen Ho explores the intimate facets of female friendship, Asian American immigrant experiences in Los Angeles and New York, and the debilitating power of family traumas.
The duo’s coming-of-age saga is shot through with moments of clarity and understanding ... (Some realizations are fully articulated, some left for the reader to work out, a stylistic choice that intrudes at times.) Ho’s adept captures of childhood confusion, teenage angst, and adult malaise lend the stories a universality that is not undermined by her equally precise dissections of racial and sexual issues facing Fiona and Jane. The misogynistic dangers facing the girls as they stretch their high school wings in the gorgeous and nerve-wracking story 'Go Slow' echo throughout the work as a whole, with a particularly resounding tone in the devastating precis, 'Korean Boys I’ve Loved' ... Readers will wish for a Fiona or Jane in their own lives.
