★★★★
SYNOPSIS:
“No maids, no funny talking, no fainting flowers.” Luli Wei is beautiful, talented, and desperate to be a star. Coming of age in pre-Code Hollywood, she knows how dangerous the movie business is and how limited the roles are for a Chinese American girl from Hungarian Hill—but she doesn’t care. She’d rather play a monster than a maid.
But in Luli’s world, the worst monsters in Hollywood are not the ones on screen. The studios want to own everything from her face to her name to the women she loves, and they run on a system of bargains made in blood and ancient magic, powered by the endless sacrifice of unlucky starlets like her. For those who do survive to earn their fame, success comes with a steep price. Luli is willing to do whatever it takes—even if that means becoming the monster herself.
Siren Queen offers up an enthralling exploration of an outsider achieving stardom on her own terms, in a fantastical Hollywood where the monsters are real and the magic of the silver screen illuminates every page.
Nghi Vo's Siren Queen was everything I expected, and like nothing I could have imagined.
Vo has taken the dark, gritty underbelly of 1930s Hollywood, infused it with magic of the most twisted kind, and presented it on a platter for us to devour in Siren Queen. I ate it up.
This is vivid, enticing, entrancing storytelling at its peak. Nghi is a master storyteller, weaving the mundane with the mystical, giving us strong characters with stronger motives that leap off the page. She has this ability to hold the fine threads of tension so tightly when she writes – I found myself unsettled for most of this book; dread trickling down my spine when she writes of the Hunt; the tight-jawed horror of missing boys and girls; the silent scream at the admission of a name. All of it brilliantly, subtly done. I didn’t even realise my body was coiled like a spring until I finished reading and came up for air.
The different love stories Vo has stitched into Siren Queen captivated me, too. Friends, family, lovers – love stories, all of them, and all of them played out to perfection. Luli understanding her own queerness and the queerness of those around her is so matter-of-fact, so solid, and I appreciated that Vo included elements of historical reality while also honouring these characters’ experiences.
From start to finish, Siren Queen blew me away. If you love the glitz and glamour of 1930s Hollywood, but are in the mood for some fantasy infused into it, and a rich, diverse cast, this is the book for you.
Thank you to NetGalley and to Macmillan – Tor/Forge for providing me with this ARC.
