I found some of the fourteen essays in this collection more compelling than others, but, overall, I like Chew-Bose’s voice and the way she writes about memory/family/personal history and larger issues like race and the experience of being a first-generation North American. I liked “Summer Pictures,” about going to the movies in the summertime, a whole bunch – how Chew-Bose writes about the “sense of ceremony” that an excursion to the theater brings, and how sitting in the cool dark in the summer heat feels like “playing hooky,” “pretending that adulthood is no match for summer’s precedent” of freedom (189, 191). I liked “Tan Lines,” about summer heat and family stories and Chew-Bose’s childhood summer awareness of her body, her brown-skinned body in a largely-white place, and also the way Chew-Bose writes in this piece about summers now, about moments sitting on rooftops in New York City, trying to read, feeling “indebted to the car passing below blasting that song” (183). I liked “Since Living Alone,” in which Chew-Bose writes about figuring out who she is in her own space, by herself, not defined in relation to others: this, from that piece, is great:
I count living alone as, in a manner of speaking, finding interest in my own story, of prospering, of creating a space where I repeat the same actions every day, whetting them, rearranging them, starting from scratch but with variables I can control, or, conversely, eagerly appeal to their chaos. (173)
I also really liked “D as In,” about having a non-Anglo name in a mostly-Anglo place, and about considerations of privilege related to race and to names, and “Moby-Dick,” about reading in the library and the way moments from books can line up, pleasingly, with the outer world. And I liked the meandering/digressive structure of the long first piece, “Heart Museum,” which is about the heart and life and wonder and everyday ordinariness and families and how art affects us and friendship and heartbreak and sense memories and more.
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