The Phoenix Pencil Company by Allison King ****

 The Phoenix Pencil Company by Allison King

A multi-generational story of Taiwan through the last 90 years, the Japanese occupation of Shanghai, the Nationalists' retreat from Communist China, and immigration to the United States. The book also explores who owns your story. Tech and History.

The book revolves around the power of a family of women to “reforge” pencils. They can retrieve what the pencil has written by piercing their wrists and bleeding out what has been written on paper. The form of eavesdropping (spying) is compared to software that scrapes information from social media accounts. Both extract stories from unsuspecting participants.

The book collects the writing of Monica Tsai, a second-generation Chinese-American, and her grandmother, Wong Yun. Monica’s story is collected from her online diary, and the grandmother’s story is reforged from a pencil. Thus, the entire book is stolen from the authors with magic (reforging) or technology (hacking Monica’s online diary with a program called EMBRS - Electronic Memory Bank Enabling Radical Sharing).

While different characters attempt to justify stealing writing without consent, in the end, Monica attempts to sabotage the EMBRS project/company.

The book also includes a lesbian love story.

The book often refers to the latitude and longitude (42.3721865, -71.1117091). This is Harvard Square in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Ignoring these coordinates, Harvard is mentioned four times, and MIT is mentioned nine times.“The joy of understanding her family.” Implicit in much of this book is ancestor worship and the idea that one can’t be happy unless one understands one's ancestors. Many books are built on this strange premise.

Check out https://amazon.com/shop/influencer-20171115075 for Omega Cat Press books and book recommendations.