press
Publishers Weekly
Hello Kitty Must DieChoi's scorching-hot debut rips into the stereotype of Hello Kitties, young Asian-American women who are upwardly mobile, outwardly modern, but trapped by their families' old-fashioned cultural expectations. A week before turning 28, Fiona “Fi” Yu, a San Francisco corporate lawyer who lives with her parents, uses a silicone device to take her own virginity, an act she soon regrets. When she consults Dr. Sean Killroy about restoring her hymen, the cosmetic surgeon turns out to be Sean Deacon, a former grade school classmate who once lit a girl's hair on fire. Fi renews her friendship with Sean, who draws her into a secret world that's empowering but also highly disturbing. As Sean encourages Fi to fight back when her parents suggest suitors, people who cause problems for Fi wind up dead. A demonic stir-fry of influences, including Amy Tan, Chuck Palahniuk, Clive Barker, and Candace Bushnell, infuses Choi's prose with passionate ferocity. (Apr.)
http://www.publishersweekly.com/article/449902-Fiction_Book_Reviews_2_22_2010.php
Unabashedly Bookish: The BN Community Blog
A Clockwork (Mandarin) Orange: Angela S. Choi’s Audacious Debut Blends Chick Lit With Crime FictionWhen I stumbled across the debut novel from Angela S. Choi Hello Kitty Must Die, I must admit that I was instantly captivated by the title and eye-catching neon pink cover art – which features a twisted version of the Hello Kitty icon made out to look like a skull and crossbones – and I knew immediately that regardless of what this novel was about, I had to read it.
Imagine an intensely intimate, emotionally poignant story that deals with the culture clash that many Asian Americans must deal with – between the hedonism and self-indulgence of America versus the more traditional values and idiosyncrasies of their parents’ or grandparents’ culture; comparable in many ways to Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club. Now blend this storyline with the one from Brett Easton Ellis’ American Psycho, which follows an obsessively style-conscious investment banker whose hobby happens to be serial killing. This gives you a very superficial idea of what Choi’s novel is about – but it’s so much more than that. The narrator, 28-year old San Francisco corporate lawyer Fiona Yu, is sarcastic, intriguingly complex, tragic, cool, and, above all else, deeply disturbing. Almost 30 years old, she still lives at home with her parents, Chinese immigrants who want nothing more than to see her married with kids and living in suburbia. But if she were deflowered, the pressure – and soul-crushing burden – of shouldering her family’s honor would over…
The novel begins in audacious fashion as Fiona makes a life-changing decision: “One week before my twenty-eighth birthday, I decided to take my own virginity with a silicone dildo coated in two-percent Lidocaine gel. Silicone dildos are the best. Firm, smooth, easy to clean, and most importantly, you can boil them in water. We Chinese folks love to boil things. Our chopsticks, our teacups, our pots and pans, and especially our drinking water. Nothing goes inside our bodies without being boiled in water first.”
But when Fiona discovers that she was born without a hymen, she decides to see a doctor who specializes in restoring women’s hymens. She wants a hymen so that she can “pop it” herself: “For nearly three decades, culture, parents, and upbringing all intertwined my self-worth with my hymen. If it was indeed valuable, I should want to rip it out, freeze-store it in a little plastic bottle and leave an instruction in my last will and testament to be buried with it. Either that or stuff it in a glass vial and wear it around my neck like Angelina Jolie did with Billy Bob’s blood.”
When she visits Dr. Sean Killroy, she realizes that he is a long-lost friend from elementary school, a handsome and dangerous boy who had a penchant for violence. Sean is charismatic, unpredictable, sardonic, ill mannered, and white, the exact antithesis of the man her parents want her to marry. But as their friendship is renewed, Fiona finds herself drawn to Sean’s liberating sense of freedom and joie de vivre , although she realizes that when he “works” at night, he is most definitely stalking and killing female targets in San Francisco bars.
Drowning in the absurdity of her existence – her father sets her up with disastrous blind dates on a weekly basis – Fiona finds herself desperately trying to escape the chains of her family, her friends, and her employer, who see her as the literal equivalent of Hello Kitty.
“I hate Hello Kitty. I hate her for not having a mouth or fangs like a proper kitty. She can’t eat, bite off a nipple or finger… tell anyone to go and f@%& his mother or lick herself. She has no eyebrows, so she can’t look angry. She can’t even scratch your eyes out. Just clawless, fangless, voiceless, with that placid blank expression topped by a pink ribbon.”
And when her serial killing friend Sean’s life philosophy suddenly starts making sense to Fiona, she embraces it wholeheartedly and chaos ensues…
With a cool, witty narrative fueled throughout by lyrics from the ‘80s grunge band Nirvana and numerous forceful contrasting images between Chinese and American culture (foot binding versus wearing stiletto heels, for example), this multi-layered novel is a gutsy, empowering, stand-up-and-applaud, storytelling tour de force.
Chick lit meets crime fiction, you will never read a book quite like Hello Kitty Must Die!
paulgoatallen
http://bookclubs.barnesandnoble.com/t5/Unabashedly-Bookish-The-BN/A-Clockwork-Mandarin-Orange-Angela-S-Choi-s-Audacious-Debut/ba-p/514268
Library Journal
Hello Kitty Must DieFiona Yu is a Chinese American attorney who refuses to be any man's "Hello Kitty"—the stereotypically well-groomed, well-behaved Asian wife. When Fiona is reunited with Sean Killroy, a childhood friend with a penchant for punishing the people who wrong him, she finds herself on an adventure with a serial killer who is only too happy to teach her how to get rid of unwanted fiancés and bosses. Choi, herself a former attorney, writes her first novel with a stiletto for a pen. The pace is fast. Sympathy for the victims is absent. And, as the body count rises, Sean's taste for blood grows. VERDICT Fiona's experiences are light-years from the young women in Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Club and only somewhat closer to the twins in Marilyn Chin's Revenge of the Mooncake Vixen. Now that serial killers have become the new 21st-century heroes, fans of Jeff Lindsay's "Dexter" series and Chuck Palahniuk's hard-core novels are the readers most likely to enjoy this book. [Tyrus Books is the new publishing venture of former Bleak House founding editor Benjamin LeRoy.—Ed.]
Los Angeles Times
Hello Kitty Must DieWhere Kellerman's prose style is silken sheen covering deep existential skeletons, Angela S. Choi's sentence structure apes blunt force trauma. "Hello Kitty Must Die" (Tyrus Books: 258 pp., $14.95 paper) is for people who cackle and gasp at the book's opening line -- "It all started with my missing hymen" -- and are compelled to move on. For those who recoil, well, that's your loss, but Fiona Yu doesn't really care what you think or if she's offended anyone.
It's not hard to understand where she's coming from: Fiona is 28, rising up the corporate law chain by working an associate's brutal schedule of billable hours, exceptionally smart and well aware of it, but because she lives at home with her tradition-obsessed parents hellbent on keeping the old Chinese ways intact (leading to many cringe-worthy scenes of Fiona on dates with guys who should never, ever have been let out of their parents' basements, so to speak), her attitudes are more than a little warped. Like going to a specialist in hymen-restoration because she regretted its mechanical removal. Or hanging out with said specialist because it turns out he was her best high school chum. Or keeping her parents in the dark about her increasingly nocturnal activities.
Choi wields her satirical blade at a host of targets, such as the oh-so-American need for material wealth, socially inept losers propped up as great catches because of ethnic concordance and female peers who are considered more beautiful because they bleach their skin, and cut themselves with razors and act like the docile, wide-eyed titular cartoon adorning merchandise around the world.
The real triumph of "Hello Kitty Must Die" is that it refuses to apologize for Fiona's behavior and never offers clear-cut explanations for her pole slide down into amoral adventure. As for where she ends up, let's put it this way: I fully expect Fiona to make partner in a decade or so, and by then there will be new rabbit holes for her to explore and exploit to the fullest.
Crimespree Magazine
HELLO KITTY MUST DIE; the best debut novel I’ve read this year. There is a joy about this manically sublime and entirely over the top book that’s hard to describe. The only way I can explain it is to say I now believe I belong to a secret club. This is the book to present the argument , “Good mysteries can be warped and funny”.As the novel opens Fiona is working on downgrading her “Hello Kitty” status. This requires that she lose her virginity. What follows is perhaps the most commanding first chapter I’ve read in the last decade. Not since Vicki Hendricks found love with a dolphin has anything been as singularly female, shocking and accessible.
Cheated out of the rite of passage to “lose her virginity” , our heroine decides to reclaim the momentous moment with plastic surgery. She meets up with her childhood friend, Sean Killroy and an entirely different world opens up for her… this world is dark. Ken Bruen dark. How far does one go to decide who they will become in the U.S.A.? What price do you pay to become the real you? And if the answer to whom the real you is rather shocking do you embrace your individuality or once more conform to society’s ideal of whom you should be….. BONUS to the above questions, how high can you make the body count?
In Choi’s first novel, I relived the experience of Tart Noir, remembered Richard Stark, found myself wanting to be in the room when Choi met Bill Fitzhugh and Val McDermid. And here’s the most important thing about HELLO KITTY MUST DIE. I found myself promising never to miss a book or a moment with this author, because the pages flow one into the other with a 1990s’ deconstruction and the Romanticism of the Golden Age. No one else could have written this book and no one else should try to copy it. That’s some major talent for a new writer.
One of the most refreshing aspects of HKMD is the fact that it is a female world but Choi invites any reader who’s experienced Swierczynski or Huston to the party. So read the book. I’ll give you the password to our club. It’s Angela Choi. Remember the name.
Ruth Jordan
The F-Word
Hello Kitty Must DieThe protagonist of Angela S. Choi's comic debut novel channels the anger of every woman who has been belittled or demeaned, says Kaite Welsh
"I hate Hello Kitty.
"I hate her for not having a mouth or fangs like a proper kitty. She can't eat, bite off a nipple or finger, give head... She can't even scratch your eyes out. Just clawless, fangless, voiceless, with that placid blank expression topped by a pink ribbon."
The cutesy, mute Asian cartoon character Hello Kitty, beloved so many, is the surprising villain at the heart of Angela S. Choi's darkly comic debut novel. She tells the tale of Fiona Yu, a Chinese-American lawyer whose parents are desperate to see her married - or at least wearing lipstick - and Sean, her childhood-best-friend-turned-plastic-surgeon with a grisly hobby.
Whilst all Fiona's parents want is for their daughter to get married, all Fiona wants is to be left alone. Oh, and her hymen back. The novel begins when Choi's heroine, determined to lose what she terms as her "family's honour", takes her own virginity only to discover that, by a biological quirk, she never had a cherry to lose in the first place.
Disgusted that she has been "protecting, preserving and defending an honour that had never even existed", Fiona books herself in for a hymenoplasty in order that she can have something to destroy, "some family honour that I could shred into bloody pieces and wear around my neck."
"Choi excels at charting Fiona's progress from a disillusioned young woman frustrated with the assumptions society makes about her - namely that she is the human embodiment of a certain speechless feline - into a woman set on claiming her own anger and taking her revenge on the world"
This lands her in the office of Sean Killroy, whom she last encountered being hauled off to juvie after setting a fellow student's hair on fire. From then on, it's Thelma and Louise meets Natural Born Killers. Whilst both trying to avoid the men her father tries to set her up with and navigate the murky waters of San Francisco's legal world, Fiona joins Sean for a series of platonic dates that always seem to take place the night before a murder victim is discovered.
When the overbearing offspring of a wealthy chef decides that, despite Fiona's obvious contempt for him, she would make the perfect wife, we see how little control this independent woman who prides herself on being "able to pay for my Jimmy Choos myself...[and] tell anyone who tried to put a damn bow behind my ear to go to hell" really has over her own fate - "the six-figure salary, the JD, the Eileen-Fisher-Armani-Calvin Klein wardrobe didn't liberate me from the confines of tradition, culture and family." And that's when things really beging to spiral out of control.
Herself a frustrated ex-lawyer from San Francisco (although presumably minus the body count), Choi excels at charting Fiona's progress from a disillusioned young woman frustrated with the assumptions society makes about her - namely that she is the human embodiment of a certain speechless feline - into a woman set on claiming her own anger and taking her revenge on the world.
Her prose quivers with anger, and the entire novel is a manifesto for every woman who has been belittled or demeaned. It may not be an advisable template for a rebellion, but it is a fast-paced, wisecracking gem of a book that leaves the reader ready to take on the world, and eager for a talented young writer's second novel.
Kaite Welsh
http://www.thefword.org.uk/reviews/2010/02/hello_kitty_mus