Christine Liu's Reviews > Fiona and Jane

I always say that the reason I read fiction is to have the chance to live lives I could never live otherwise, and there are passages so evocative in this beautiful debut novel by Jean Chen Ho that they made me feel like I had actually lived those moments myself, If all the 2022 releases I read end up being this good, I will have the best reading year of my life.

Fiona and Jane tells the story of two friends, both Taiwanese American but so different in who they are. In alternating chapters, we see their lives weave in and out of each other’s as they experience disappointment, heartbreak, and all the things that come along with adulthood.

There’s a slightly disjointed feeling to the book as a whole. The stories aren’t always told on a linear timeline, which makes the passage of time a little confusing. A lot of these chapters could’ve been standalone short stories, capturing vignettes in the lives of these two women. By the end of the book, I felt like I had more a sense of who Jane was than I did Fiona, an that may be intentional as the Jane chapters are told in first-person while the Fiona chapters are from a third-person perspective.

I absolutely loved the rich and multilayered exploration of female friendship that we get in this book, and the prose is smooth as silk. Jean Chen Ho is a new writer to watch for sure.