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Monica Tsai has been raised by her grandparents, who are now in their 90s. She keeps to herself, has no real friends, and stays busy at home. She journals and codes for a program-in-development whose goal is to connect people in meaningful ways. A college student, she is taking a semester off to help her grandfather take care of her grandmother, Yun, who has just been diagnosed with dementia.
Monica decides to use her digital skills to track down her grandmother’s long-lost cousin, whom she left behind in China decades earlier. She is able to find Meng through a young woman her age who is in China collecting people’s stories. When Louisa agrees to meet her when she returns to the US, Monica is confused that she just hands her a pencil from Meng to pass along to Yun. A pencil? After 60-plus years of being out of touch?
Readers learn along with Monica that the pencil is not just one of the high-quality products made years ago by the cousins’ family business, the Phoenix Pencil Company, but that the pencils can deliver special messages — in the right hands. Those hands are the women of the family, Yun and Meng and their mothers. They have a magical secret ability: to “Reforge” words that pencils write, spilling anything the pencils drew or wrote onto paper to be read again. But Chinese factions discovered that ability and used it to force the women into a life of espionage, betraying other people’s secrets.
The story of The Phoenix Pencil Company is told primarily from the first-person points of view of Monica and Yun. Readers get to know the hearts and minds of these two women. Yun shares what it was like to grow up in Shanghai and then Taiwan during World War II and postwar, when it was still dangerous because of the factions struggling to run China. It was revealing for me because I knew little about that period of time. I’d read Shanghai Girls, which showed how the city was sophisticated and glamorous just before the war. I enjoyed learning some of what followed in the next decade or two.
The Phoenix Pencil Company focuses on family ties and the power of story. It shows how knowing the stories of one’s ancestors brings families closer together and gives the younger generation a deeper sense of self, of being part of a deeply rooted family tree. That was probably my favorite part about it. Stories are powerful, especially those of our own families.
Rated: High. Profanity includes 6 uses of strong language, a couple of uses of mild language, and 4 instances of the name of Deity in vain. Sexual content includes two scenes that are detailed, “open-door,” “spicy.” One is brief; the other includes self-pleasuring and erotica and phone talk. Violence includes mostly references to people of opposing political groups being taken and/or killed, and references to war.
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*I received an ARC in exchange for my honest review.
