HOME REMEDIES is a collection of 12 stories about Chinese millennials, both in the U.S. and China. The most memorable stories for me (months later) are "Mott Street in July," "Days of Being Mild," "For Our Children and Ourselves" and "Algorithmic Problem Solving for Father-Daughter Relationships." I also like short stories with unique structures, so the title story ("Home Remedies for Non-Life-Threatening Ailments") was also a stand-out for me.

A compelling collection of stories about young people in China and the United States by an author with a distinctive voice. I particularly enjoyed the stories set in China, like “Days of Being Mild,” which gave this American reader a glimpse into a world I knew little about. Yet the themes are universal: longing for love, longing to belong. In most of the stories the characters are interesting and memorable, while the narrative avoids cliché. Wang explores interactions across cultures and generations, with acute insight and a keen sense of humor. I look forward to reading more of Wang’s writing.

I'm a lover of short stories and this collection did not disappoint. It was wildly different than any other I have read in terms of subject matter. I don't read much Asian fiction or novels featuring young adults, so this was a departure for me. I highly recommend it.

Home Remedies was a very compelling assemblage of stories about the dilemmas and sense of not belonging as it pertains to transplanting one's roots elsewhere.

One of my favorite stories was The Strawberry Years that dealt with the harsh reality of how people view social media and the heights one will take to please others. A woman develops a compulsive interest in a man's apartment because her followers have fallen in love with the place while she is live streaming. The story gets pretty eerie from there.

Another favorite of mine is one that shows just how screwed up the world is today, fascinated with material possessions. A woman named Echo is obsessed with another woman’s clothes who recently committed suicide. I mean really, why? Call me weird because I wouldn't touch them with a ten-foot pole.

Days Being Mild was about a group of youngsters who people Beijing and get caught up with everyday fancies of life.

The book affords the reader a glimpse into all sectors of society. I'm a short story fan, and this one made the grade for me. #netgalley #homeremedies

Home Remedies is a compelling short story collection by Xuan Juliana Wang. The stories focus on different aspects of Chinese culture, from family responsibility, to marriage, to forbidden love. My favorite stories in the collection were Days of Being Mild, Home Remedies for Non-Life-Threatening Ailments, Vaulting the Sea, and Echo of the Moment. There were a couple stories that didn’t speak to me but the ones that did were told in such heartbreaking realism and well-structured prose that I can’t help but recommend this title.

Home Remedies is a collection of short stories centering around the millennial Chinese experience. This premise was very attractive to me, as I am always looking for new authors of color and stories about people of color. Unfortunately, Home Remedies fell flat with me. Wang's writing style is often unreadable in some of the stories. However, I would not say that this book is entirely bad. Vaulting the Sea is a great story that feels authentic to me. The Strawberry Years feels like a spine-chilling episode of Black Mirror. A few of the other stories have their moments.

There is probably an audience out there for Home Remedies. I do not think that audience includes me. I don't love books that require me to re-read each page multiple time to understand what the author is trying to say. At some points, it almost feels nonsensical to me. I will say that there are some standout bits of writing in this book, which might make reading some of the stories worth it.

Thank you to NetGalley, Xuan Juliana Wang and Crown Publishing for sending me this free e-book in exchange for my honest and unbiased opinion.

Thank you NetGalley and the publisher for an advanced copy of this book in exchange for an honest review. This was a special little gem. It won't be everyone's cup of tea that's for sure. But it is very special.

Home Remedies is a quirky set of short stories that each include characters with Chinese or Asian heritage. From stories set in Beijing or another city in China, to stories of immigrants to the United States, these tales include allusions to the mystical, at varying degrees. An interesting volume that makes one think about the extent to which culture and our heritage inform who we are, regardless of how far-removed from that culture we think we may be.

This collection of short stories blowed me away. One doesn't expect such level of expertise and command of the genre from a first collection, but Wang is definitely a short story writer. She may go on to write novels as well, but this is a genre she owns.

This is one of those cases in which the author's being a "millennial" is incidental. The themes are universal. The writing is fantastic. Amazing.

Home Remedies is infused with humanity and works as proof that the short story medium is alive and well in the hands of new voices.

Xuan Juliana Wang writes with clarity, description, and poise.

I was really excited about this collection and was ready to rave about an Asian-American author and stories about the Asian-American experience, but unfortunately I felt completely disconnected from the characters and writing.

What I love about diverse stories is how they bring forward unique people/experiences and at the same time show how we're all human, all the same, all in this together. However, I didn't get that intimate feeling from these stories. I felt like I only got a sense of a type of person but not any particular person from these stories, if that makes any sense; the characters felt more like archetypes than real people. Perhaps short stories are not long enough to delve into these characters.

There were some interesting concepts with lots of potential though. I was particularly hopeful about "Home Remedies for Non-Life-Threatening Ailments," "Algorithmic Problem-Solving for Father-Daughter Relationships," and "Echo of the Moment."

"Home Remedies for Non-Life-Threatening Ailments": A silly list of emotional problems and advice on how to deal with them.

"Algorithmic Problem-Solving for Father-Daughter Relationships": A father tries to understand his daughter algorithmically.

"Echo of the Moment": A woman reinvents herself with luxurious outfits swiped from a dead rich lady's wardrobe.

I hadn’t heard too much about this collection of short stories before seeing it on #netgalley and requesting it from the publisher based solely, I’ll admit, on its incredible cover. Thank you to #netgalley and #hogarth for the opportunity to read this collection. The stories within are just as unique and electrifying as the cover. These are the stories of Chinese millennials at home and abroad. Their fears, loves, griefs, and ambitions are laid bare in this collection. I highly recommend everyone check it out. Ms. Wang is a force.

This debut short story collection knocked my socks off! These stories tell tales about Chinese millennials both in China and across the globe. My favorite thing about great short stories is the way they quickly build a scene and spring a great twist on the reader. This collection nails short fiction -- beautifully drawn characters and scenes; an economy of words to bold effect; taking weird ideas and letting them play out; and a well crafted twisty ending. My favorites of the collection were Valuting the Sea, Echo of the Moment and Future Cat. This is a collection not to be missed.

Home Remedies is an excellent short story collection really highlighting the voices of the currently emerging generation of Chinese youth. The stories cover love, family, and time and space. Each story gives something a little unexpected to the reader. It's interesting to see where the characters go and the different choices and people that shaped their lives.

As someone who currently lives in China, this collection of stories has a fresher feel than a lot of Chinese novels that I have read. It could just be the subject matter and the new generation of Chinese youth, but I also think that it is mirroring the underlying changes in Chinese society that aren't always acknowledged by the older generations. It doesn't have the noble peasant or Imperial court nostalgia of a lot of the literature that I have picked up in the past, which makes it stick out to me among the various Chinese works that I have read. It discusses more modern topics like sexuality, the (somewhat antiquated by Western standards) marriage process, and how money is becoming or has become the new ruler of China, whether the government acknowledges it or not.

I would highly recommend this for people looking to get a feel for Chinese youth or to expand upon the Chinese literature that they have already experienced. I will post a full review on my blog sometime next week.

Home Remedies by Xuan Juliana Wang is phenomenal collection of short 12 stories. Through the eyes of Chinese-American millennial's of all status (rich, poor & middle class) we get haunting stories of love, life challenges as immigrants and family. The end of each story is left open ended, (weird) but oddly it works. Although this is a short read, it’s filled with depth and layers, you really invest in the characters in each story. Bravo Xuan!
Thank you, Netgalley & Crown Publishing, for the advanced copy in exchange for an honest review. 3.5 round up to 4 of 5

Let me cut to the chase...I've added Wang to my "auto-buy" authors list. If this is her debut, I can only imagine what else is to come...and I'm excited for it! Her ability to create layers of depth in each short story and characters who are complex, ambitious, and achingly unsure of themselves had me tearing through this entire collection in a single morning.

"Taoyu sent Hai's name echoing in the halls of the dormitory. … he ran … to him at full speed. He needed something that only Hai could give him. He knew it was love. Only Hai could replace his wasted heart with his own." — "Vaulting the Sea," Xuan Juliana Wang

Wang wields the raw, cathartic quality of a storyteller who can render readers to tears with no effort at all. A reader like me, especially, who sobbed in secrecy in the corner of a coffee shop as I pored over these characters and the bottomless depths of emotion and concern with which she writes their lives. This book is a testament for anyone who's ever tried to flee a life — a culture, a country — to which they've been imprisoned.

Through 12 stories, Home Remedies offers an eyewitness view at a number of Chinese individuals whose lives become upended by abandonment, death, sexual and spiritual awakenings. "Home Remedies for Non-Life-Threatening Ailments" gives a litany of hard pills to swallow for afflictions of grief, self-pity, and consolation; "For Our Children and For Ourselves" steers an arranged marriage in the path of emotional departure in lieu of financial happy endings; "Vaulting the Sea" (my absolute favorite among them all) finds two Chinese boys — one gay, the other straight — who mature into synchronized diving celebrities at the summit of a sexual coming-of-age. The latter of these stories, in a way, could arguably level with the devastating homoerotica of Annie Proulx's Brokeback Mountain.

Written with intricate beauty and rage, these glamourous stories could easily rival any American millennial drama. Wherever your myths and prejudices lie on Chinese narratives, let them vanish in the advent of Wang's remarkable voice.

Thank you again, Hogarth, for allowing me to read Home Remedies in advance — it was a wonderful experience.

Home Remedies is a beautiful collection of short stories capturing the millennial Chinese experience both in China and in the US. I loved every story in this book. One of my favorites was Future Cat, in which a woman in San Francisco, lonely while her husband works all the time and reliving memories of a lost love from her past, experiments with the abilities of her new “Wine Ager” to affect more than wine. In another favorite, The Strawberry Years, Yang does a favor for a young actress visiting from China only to find it is not so easy to get her to leave his Brooklyn warehouse loft. The best story of the book may be Echo of the Moment, the story of a young Chinese-American woman living in Paris whose life is transformed when a benevolent acquaintance calls her with an offer of some new clothes. I predict Home Remedies will be another short story collection (along with Mouthful of Birds) that we’ll see on all of the best of 2019 lists. It deserves it.

Thank you to Crown/Hogarth and Netgalley for the ARC in exchange for this honest review.

Review posted to Goodreads 4/30, posted to Instagram 5/2.

One of my favorite sensations as a reader is stumbling across something perfect and unexpected, something you weren't looking for and never knew you needed, and you come away feeling richer for the experience. <em>Home Remedies</em> does that, repeatedly, with each strange little slice of life feeling like a concentrated burst of observation, a window into a truly strange stranger's head, rendering a consistently alien experience somehow relatable, while your brain marinates in a stew of subtle details that feel <em>right</em> even when you're not entirely sure what they all mean.

What we have here, in simple terms, is a collection of short stories written by a Chinese-American author. We consistently see tales of emigration--families, children, students, hustlers, and others leaving China to restart their lives in the United States--and what that feels like for all involved. We also see China from a perspective few Americans could conjure on their own, the kind of perspective born from some kind of lived experience--whether first-hand or absorbed from family and friends, I'm not entirely sure, but it certainly feels real as you read. As I dug deeper into the book, I felt the weight of Chinese culture looming in the background, in ways I hadn't expected and ways I can't really articulate in a short review.

I realize as I read all that back it sounds like I'm describing a travelogue, but <em>Home Remedies</em> isn't that at all. It's a swirl of characters built out of bundled observations, little bursts of thought and feeling, all perfectly rendered, somehow cohering into a series of tiny stories, but stories built on the backs of human-sized lives, if that makes sense. Xuan Juliana Wang experiments with form several times throughout the book, sometimes employing impressionistic lists but just as often keeping things straightforward on the structural front only to swerve into magical realism to keep us on our toes. It's a cop-out to point to Raymond Carver when describing good short fiction, but I think there's a reasonable parallel here to the extent Wang is able to do so much with so little, to leave only a few threads on the page but lace those threads with mystique, heart, detachment, longing, unease, humor, millennial ennui, i.e., the stuff of life. Her characters are traced in electric prose but carved in relief, silhouettes painted on the page with just enough detail, just enough narrative to make them indelible and intoxicating, relatable but ultimately unknowable. It's a hell of a trick, and no accident. Wang is confident, subtle, and remarkably consistent, toying with expectations, cleanly sidestepping cliches, all that good stuff.

If I have a criticism, it's that I wish this book were longer. I couldn't put it down, and I probably read it faster than I should have. Before I knew it the end was upon me, and I was bummed, left yearning and bereft. <em>Home Remedies</em> gets my highest recommendation for short fiction; run don't walk, do the right thing, yadda yadda.

Absolutely gorgeous writing. The stories are very engaging. One of my favorite reads of 2019 so far.