A cosy and quirky mystery set in the near future in a Taiwanese town about lost memories, the bonding experience of delicious food, omnipotent technology and the human connections we all crave to be happy.
Rating: 🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟
Genre: Fiction, Cosy Mystery, Science fiction, Queer fiction.
Publisher: Pew Books
Review in one word: Soulful
On the fictional island of Meiyu in Taiwan at an undisclosed time in the future, people “clip” their heaviest and hardest emotions and store them in memory drives that are spirited away and then “cleaned” by an ominous and all-knowing company called Halcyon. This cleaning of the memory drives makes people’s everyday life easier to bear.
Lena our protagonist is employed in an Uber-like employment situation, she couriers the memory drives from people’s homes to be reformatted by the company she works for. A menacingly omnipotent corporation called Halcyon that owns many buildings in the town and advertises their services from every illuminated billboard.
Even with its unusual premise, this book captured my attention because of its setting. I’ve spent some time in Taiwan teaching English to kids in Taichung. I really liked the nature, the food (a delicious blend between Chinese and Japanese influences) and the people who were warm, open and super kind. The idea of clipping emotions is also a fascinating one, and so I overcame my general aversion to reading science fiction to give this one a go. I am so glad I did because I was richly rewarded!
The author Lee does a great job of capturing the dynamic, sensory-overload and ferocious weather conditions of Taiwan and the sensual and homely experience of eating Taiwanese food, which is so much about comfort food. Her descriptions of cuisine in this book had my mouth watering and were true highlights of the book.
Rain falls in an unbroken run, too mild to empty the streets but persistent enough to soak anything that stays. It beads along canopies and windows, blurring the glow of bright neon signs over the market. Umbrellas bloom and fold with the occasional gust, and dark shapes weave intermittently between closed arcades and stands hawking food, clothing, or trinkets. The smell of wet fabric and stewed vegetables, skewers, and noodles on steel trays floats through Lena’s senses.
Under a sagging Halcyon sign reminding the city of monthly credits, she parks her bicycle and yanks her poncho hood closer around her face. She slips under the first row of tarps, shoes skimming over trickles on the pavement. The precipitation has elevated its tempo, an insistent drumming she feels in the hinge of her jaw. Lena scans the strip.
An excerpt from All That Holds Between by S.J. Lee
The cosy mystery at the heart of this book created ample plot progression and really accelerated me through this short but delightful novella. The mystery (and I won’t reveal what happens) is to do with a defective memory drive. Lena is too late to return it to the company and so she takes it home. Ignoring protocol she experiences what is on the drive through a machine. She realises that the memory in the drive feels uncannily familiar.
And so the book charts Lena’s mission to reveal who is in the memory, which is intimately tied up in the taste of eating scrumptious food at the night markets. The key to a person’s heart is through their stomach so the saying goes.
Before she can check, sound bleeds. A distant thrum that isn’t the chamber’s, something like a muffled crowd, somewhere open but not. Then somehow, the scent of oil, crisp dough, and the smoke of a griddle. Impossible, but distinct. Taste follows, salt at the edge of her tongue. It’s a strange feeling—hearing, smelling, tasting all this knowing it’s not happening. She’s sitting in her quarters where she can still smell the air that’s sat a bit too long, a mix of soap within it. These other sensations aren’t real. And most of all, this is wrong. Her apparatus only reads tagged affect signatures, not this. Not sensory detail.
The images disappear like wisps of smoke, and Lena’s spine snaps straight. She sits several seconds, staring blankly. She knows what this is. A clip. But not inert. Drives bound for disposal are neutralized before transit. This one shouldn’t contain anything. She should shut it down. Eject it, seal it, and report the fault.
An excerpt from All That Holds Between by S.J. Lee
I was honestly in love with the book and the character of Lena right from the very first page. Gratefully, it also took me back to the rain-washed streets of Taichung and other small towns around there, which has a magical and mystical quality at night. Additionally it brought to mind all of the cosy and comforting food I ate late at night in Taiwan.
Lena digs in. She takes a bite, a good mix of rice and meat carrying salt and sweetness in equal measure. The soy sauce lays down a foundation mellowed by sugar that never quite announces itself. The spices, star anise and shallot, bloom. Fat, sauce, and meat seep into the rice, grain by grain, each mouthful unified, inseparable as if the dish has erased the idea of components altogether.
The richness catches her off guard, but something eases. It orients her toward the bowl, toward the old woman, away from the fixation of the drive, of everything else waiting upstairs.
Mrs. Kuan pours tea, humming tunelessly, her own rice and pork still untouched. “People think memories are tidy things,” she starts, “but the things we care about shift. They wander. Change shape. Sometimes we recall the food and forget the place. Sometimes the place outgrows the people. We don’t always know why we hold on to one piece or why we let go of another.”
An excerpt from All That Holds Between by S.J. Lee
I was pleasantly surprised by this short book and I am really pining for more cosy mysteries from this author. I can see that previously she has written fiction about other topics to do with intelligence and the military. These are not really my cup of tea but given how much I loved this one, I may just give them a go. Author S.J. Lee has an interesting life story and she was previously a security specialist in the foreign service. She is originally from Taiwan/Singapore and has lived the United States, Iraq, Mexico, Chile, India, Brazil, and Guyana. No doubt she would be a fascinating person to have a conversation with!
This is a soulful, evocative and healing book all about the connections we build with people we love, bonds that transcend pain and memory to make us who we are. I would thoroughly recommend this book if you love cosy and quirky mysteries with heart.
Content Catnip 