A review by bailym
Uncanny Magazine Issue 19: November/December 2017 by Tim Pratt, Rachel Swirsky, Karin Tidbeck, Dimas Ilaw, Troy L. Wiggins, Betsy Aoki, Dominik Parisien, Sharon Hsu, Natalie Luhrs, Sara Cleto, Lara Elena Donnelly, Valerie Valdes, Nin Harris, Cassandra Khaw, Julia Rios, Brittany Warman, Tansy Rayner Roberts, Zen Cho, Sam J. Miller, Michael Damian Thomas, Tina Connolly, Sarah Monette, Shana DuBois, Millie Ho, Lynne M. Thomas, Mari Ness, Mallory Yu

5.0

“No, we are having a very simple funeral,” said Vivian. “Nai Nai didn’t believe in religion so much.”
“But what about the dog cat all that?” said Auntie Wendy. “Did it work? Did your sister manage to keep her in the coffin?”
Vivian’s mind whirred to a stop. Then it started up again, buzzing louder than ever.

a malaysian expat returns to her family home for a funeral, and comes to terms with her heritage, in this truly funny supernatural family drama.

deciphering the plot along the way relies on some prior knowledge of taoism and malaysian folklore, so if you have unlike me not read two (sadly bad) ya novels hinging on taoism in the past four months you may want to do some research, because this throws you in the deep end with unfamiliar words and concepts in the grand tradition of sff but... for malaysian culture.

also features a really immersive and cool rendition of dialogue between hokkien L1/english L2 speakers! i love reading dialogue like this but it’s hard to have insight into the kinds of syntactic errors second-language english speakers tend to make unless you also speak both languages. it’s expertly done here.