Jade and Emerald by Michelle See-Tho | Review

Fans of Alice Pung, listen UP.

JADE & EMERALD scratched the One Hundred Days-shaped itch in my reading in a way I wasn’t expecting at all. It explores class dynamics, queerness, the model minority myth, and Asian Australian girlhood with so much heart. It’s also delightfully full of 90s nostalgia (was I alive? No. Did it make me very sentimental? Yes.)

This book takes you to that feeling of awakening you have in your late teens when you realise that your parents are actually people not just your parents (and also made me want to call my mum and remind her I love her, because god everyone’s been through it, haven’t they).

Lei Ling is a spectacularly insufferable main character, and I say this with the utmost love for her. She is unhinged and completely delusional, but determined and increasingly desperate as she tries to find her place in the world and a place where she will feel loved. The women around her are all equally flawed and it’s a fascinating exploration of the people and place that form your identity as you come of age.

It’s rare to find literary fiction that has, arguably, not a lot of plot, but is still so propulsive. The characters’ decisions had me binge-reading because it very much felt like a car wreck waiting to happen and I loved every minute of it.

~ fun fact: debut author Michelle See-Tho won the Penguin Australia Literary Prize with this one last year! It’s so exciting to see an Asian Australian author writing an Asian Australian story win a mainstream publishing prize like this 💓