Staff Picks: Carolina Meurkens’ Favorites

As a native New Yorker, I fell in love with how Lisa Ko brought three different time periods of the city to life through the eyes of three young Asian American women — Ellen, Giselle, and Jackie. The novel starts in the early ’80s when the girls first meet and connect over their shared identity. The novel moves through time to the rise of the internet and Y2K, and then to a dystopian future that felt a little too close to the city’s current reality of rising gentrification and displacement of ethnic communities. Despite its heavier themes, the writing swept me away. I felt drawn to the interconnected lives of the characters, and I couldn’t put this book down.

All This Could Be Different beautifully encapsulates what it looks like to form your chosen family and come of age as a queer, brown woman in the U.S. Sneha immigrated to the midwest from India in high school, and the novel begins shortly after she graduates college and lands her first job. With her family back in India, Sneha is hoping she can “sow her wild oats” and explore her queerness before settling down into what she believes to be a respectable adult. Things don’t quite go as planned … her job isn’t what she envisioned and family secrets begin to reveal themselves. As a queer biracial woman born to immigrant parents, I felt so seen by how this novel tackles the divide between building the life you want for yourself vs. the life you’ve been taught to want.