Daughter of Calamity

Cabaret dancers square off against gangsters, foreign businessmen, Mongolian shamans, and angry gods for control of Jazz Age Shanghai, “the Sin City of the East,” in Lin’s atmospheric if overwritten debut. Yue Jingwen’s grandmother, Yue Liqing, makes her living attaching magical silver arms to members of the Society of the Blue Dawn gang, but Jingwen refuses to become her apprentice. A chorus girl in the East Sea Follies, her greatest ambition is to win a backroom contest among her coworkers to “bring the richest date to the annual Firefighters’ Yuletide Ball.” American doctor Bailey Thompson seems like her ticket to victory when he buys the East Sea Follies and promotes her to leading lady, but soon Jingwen is drawn into Bailey’s schemes to export a rare drug that, when smoked, makes the inhaler feel like an ancient Chinese god. Jingwen and her fellow dancers come under attack by a mysterious magical force that steals their lips and eyes—and Jingwen’s grandmother may know more about what’s happening than she lets on. Unfortunately, the story often gets buried under purple prose (“But in the shadows of taxicabs and leafless plane trees, I sense a hum of nervousness, like violin strings pulled taut under my skin”), breaking the spell and making it difficult to follow what’s happening. Readers will need a high tolerance for labored metaphor to get through this. Agent: Kurestin Armada, Root Literary. (June)