The Phoenix Pencil Company is a poignant and impactful dual pov novel from the journal entries of a grandmother and her granddaughter. When Monica gets in touch with a girl named Louise who says she has a pencil from her grandmother's estranged cousin, she has no idea her entire world is about to be upended. Yun's recounting of her childhood in 1940s Shanghai, penned to her estranged cousin, was such a stark contrast to Monica's telling of the current events of their life in 2018. King truly captured Yun's grief and guilt at what transpired in Shanghai with her cousin and what she had to do to not only escape war but the shadows of a life that haunted her still. Monica adores her grandmother, and it's so clear from her perspective how differently she sees what unfolded as she grapples with a new reality, the story of the Phoenix Pencil Company, her grandmother, and Louise. This is a fantastically complex story that is embroiled in grief, love, war, and loss. As someone who has memory loss run in her family, I truly empathized with Monica as she processed her grief for her grandmother and the pre-emptive loss that comes with losing someone far before they leave.

4 stars

This intriguing debut features a fascinating premise regarding the way we build legacy and connect with others. It's a modern take on an age-old query.

Monica is a young woman but she is most deeply impacted by the oldest surviving generation of her family. Her grandmother's unreliable memory highlights Monica's fear that she'll not only experience an inevitable loss but a figural one, too, as her grandmother begins to change and even fade before her eyes. Monica's desire to know her grandmother as well as she can and to piece together a newer, more solid understanding of who she was and is takes an unexpected turn through a creative use of magic. While I sometimes find fantasy and/or magical elements detracting vs. compelling, that was not my sentiment here. King's application of these through lines highlights the ways in which our connections and general life experiences are to some degree magical in themselves.

I've taught college mythology courses for two decades, and the central area of focus is always on this joint notion that mortal beings are both fascinated by their own existences (and impending ends) AND that we use stories to perpetuate ourselves and our loved ones far beyond our short times together. King effectively explores these core concepts through her work and leaves readers looking forward to more.

While I am not a magical realism/fantasy or historical girlie, I’m glad I read this.

The story unfolds (mostly) across two timelines: Monica in the present day, and her grandmother Yun’s past in Shanghai, Taiwan, and eventually America. The story of Yun’s childhood friendship with her cousin Meng, along with the family’s involvement in espionage through their magical abilities were highlights of this story for me.

I did find the “second way” of Reforging through pleasure to be so bizarre and it threw me off whenever it came up!

The idea of this book was a good one but I just could not get into the writing. I can see how others may like the prose of the book and the dual storyline it just was not for me.

Thank you to Netgalley for allowing me to read this advanced copy in exchange for my honest opinion.

This is a book I was really excited for. I thought the entire premise was unlike anything I had ever read. However, this book was just okay for me. I thought the pacing was very slow and it took a while before I felt as if anything was really happening. Also, I didn’t feel that Monica stayed true to her character, especially in the later parts of this book. The book is organized in different POV and it does this well. Also the interactions with Monica and her grandmother are very sweet!

Magical historical fiction family saga. Beautiful writing, engaging plot. The perfect summer historical fiction to read at the beach.

4.5* This is not my usual genre, but I'm so glad I branched out for this one.
"In this dazzling debut novel, a hidden and nearly forgotten magic—of Reforging pencils, bringing the memories they contain back to life—holds the power to transform a young woman’s relationship with her grandmother, and to mend long-lost connections across time and space."
I loved the title and cover but never imagined what the story held. In 1937, a pencil factory in China was a front to make magical pencils that held the power to bleed out the memories of their owner into stories. It was used during the Shanghai war to spy on dissidents through various regimes. It is more about survival and two cousins were separated by war and reunited by one of the granddaughters involved with a research program in America.
The Shanghai culture during the war is heavily compelling. With dual timelines, not only the past but modern time Monica is a college student majoring in computer science. Her grandmother raised her and is now in her nineties diagnosed with Alzheimer's. She finds journals and letters that reveal the emotional turmoil her grandmother and cousin Yun faced. They survived selling pencils and would pass them on with decoded messages.
Fun facts: A Phoenix is a magical creature born from its ashes, weirdly enough then the fantasy part of the magical realism comes to life. If you can step aside from fantasy, it becomes a history lesson, a romance and a story of survival meshed together to find life lessons, espionage and betrayal. Diving into the diaries and journals becomes quite the surprise for Monica.
Who isn't fascinated by the yellow pencil? The cover is eye-catching and delivers well when we all know pencils do contain magic of their own. Well-written for a debut and entertaining!
Thank you NetGalley and William Morrow for this ARC in exchange for my review.

A story filled with magical realism with a unique bent that is not often seen in literature. It takes a while to get in to the story, but once you do it is a delight.

I was totally on board with this generational saga and sapphic romance until the last 10-15% of the novel, which turned this from a 4-star read to a 3-star read.

The dual timeline POVs were really done well. Each chapter's header told you exactly whose POV you're reading and, more importantly (at least for this novel), how it was written.

The historical chapters were atmospheric and you could feel yourself being in Japanese-occupied Shanghai. Those chapters kept me on edge, especially with the scenes that were heavy on the characters' experiences with the Japanese soldiers, the Nationalists, and the Communists. It was brutal and didn't pull any punches. If you like historical fiction, those chapters will be a treat.

I also liked the contemporary POV chapters. Monica's life as a Comp Sci college student, her work with her professor on the EMBRS project, and her budding romance with Louise were easy to relate to and straightforward to read. (I did like the romance up until it turned out that Louise didn't understand boundaries.)

I read a lot of darker novels, so the magic with the Reforged pencils didn't throw me off. It was disgusting, but in a cool, dark magic kind of way.

So why was this a 3-star read for me?

The climax and ending felt so out-of-character for Monica. Throughout the novel, she was adamant on following through with her school and career goals, fully believing in the potential and purpose of the EMBRS project. But then Louise's (potentially bad?) influence came into play and Monica acted in a very impulsive manner.

At first, I didn't want to discredit her activism (because I was a young idealist once, so I totally get it). But after that scene, it felt like the novel tried to say that preserving stories and archivism are dangerous acts because all of that data will be collected and sold to information brokers. So, why bother?

It was such a weird take that it took me out of the story and left a bad taste in my mouth.

I understand data privacy issues and I agree with Monica and Louise's stance, but this quote made things weird. "But if there’s truly no pattern, if our stories will be lost, no matter how hard we try to preserve them, then the only thing that really matters is the people in our lives, and how we treat them in this moment in time."

I don't know. I studied cultural anthropology so I've had firsthand experience with feeling guilty about using people's stories as data. But that quote was strange and didn't really sit well with me. The second half is great and all, but the first half ruined the heart of the story for me because it read like an ultimatum.

Thank you to William Morrow and NetGalley for this arc.

5/5 ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
The Phoenix Pencil Company
Author: Allison King

Thank you so much Netgalley and William Morrow for this ARC! I’m pretty shook from this one. I honestly requested it as another buddy read and damn I had no idea what I was in for. This book is about a magic that involves reforging pencils and using them to store memories, and bring them back to life. This story focuses on Monica who is a computer science student that works in a networking program. She uncovers her grandmother's past with the Phoenix Pencil Company and ends up trying to connect with her long lost cousin. This ends up opening her to this whole secret history of her family’s past. The book is told from Monica and her grandmother's POV. I loved every second of it. The grandparents made the story. There was so much emotion in this book. Like my heart is sore but also somewhat whole? I highly recommend this read. This book releases 6/3/25!

Thank you to NetGalley for letting me read this!

Ooof. Y'all. THIS BOOK. I cannot believe this is her debut novel. I cried. Hard. This book is beautiful and is such a good mix of generational trauma, how to save stories from generations who have suffered, and how far is too far in data mining.

The chapters flip back and forth from Monica, the granddaughter that is struggling with what is going on with her grandmother, and Yun, the grandmother, telling her life story and finally sharing the family secret with Monica.

Yun's story starts in 1937 and spans decades, going over multiple wars and what it meant to be a woman of color during such turbulent times in history. While Monica's story doesn't divulge in the same path, she is also struggling with who she is meant to be, how to live in a world without her grandparents someday, and how to come out and be the person she wants to be.

This story was beautiful. Having a grandmother who was also lost to dementia, I saw so many similarities between Yun and my own grandmother. It brought me back to some of my favorite memories with her, and some of the stories my mother told me long after she was gone.

This book comes out in June, and I urge everyone to read it!

I was not sure about this book at first. A multi-generational story told in alternating timelines and POVs, I was having trouble connecting with the older generation's story in Shanghai and there is an important plot element that made me physically very uncomfortable. I was intrigued enough by the modern-day storyline to stick with it and I'm very glad I did.

Monica is immersed in the technical world, studying data mining and coding techniques that connect people through their immense online presence. Her grandparents, immigrants who have survived many trials both in China and America, are now in their 90s and their health is failing. As Monica attempts to reconnect her grandmother with her cousin Meng, the rift between them dating back to their time together at the Phoenix Pencil Company in China, she is confronted with the difficult questions about who owns their story, who has a right to tell it, and how it will be passed on to the next generation.

This book really picked up in pace as it went along, and I was able to get over my ick and embrace the magical elements of the plot. By the end, the connections between the characters made me emotional! I loved how the story built upon itself and came together with an overarching message. The epistolary aspect was a beautiful way to tell this story and to bring the pieces together. This is a very impressive debut and I'm definitely looking forward to reading more from Allison King!

Thank you Netgalley & William Morrow for an eARC ♥️♥️♥️

Some books are loud; this one hums. *The Phoenix Pencil Company* doesn't just tell a story—it breathes one, in the faint scent of cedar and eraser dust, in the way a well-worn pencil fits perfectly in the crook of your hand.
Allison King has crafted something rare: a novel that feels like uncovering a secret drawer in your grandmother's desk, where every object trembles with unspoken history.
Monica lives in the glow of screens until a single pencil—ordinary in all ways but one—pulls her into her grandmother Yun's silent world. Not with a shout, but with the **soft scratch of lead on paper**, the kind of sound that makes you lean closer. What follows is a dual unraveling: Monica tracing the faint graphite trails of the past, while Yun's wartime Shanghai emerges in fragments—not as dramatic flashbacks, but as half-remembered sentences, the kind that trail off mid-word
The magic here is delicate, almost shy. To Reforge a pencil isn't to perform spells; it's to gently warm forgotten words until they **sweat their memories onto the page**. King understands that real magic lives in the mundane—in the way a grocery list can outlast its writer, in the indentations left on the second page when someone pressed too hard.
What haunts isn't the war (though its shadows linger), but the quiet violence of ordinary loss, a cousin's hand slipping away in a crowd, a love letter never sent, the way Yun's mind now "misplaces whole decades like dropped change." The novel's true alchemy is in how it makes absence **tangible**—not as emptiness, but as something with weight and texture, like the graphite smudges left on your fingers after reading. 💔
This isn't a book you finish so much as one you **carry**, lightly, in your pocket—next to the stub of a pencil you can't quite throw away. Because after reading, you'll wonder: *What stories are hidden in the grooves of my own desk? What might my handwriting say when I'm no longer here to explain it?
For readers who prefer **echoes to explosions**, and who know that the most powerful magic often looks like patience, like waiting for the right hand to pick up what you've left behind.♥️

What a great story. Learning about the family consisting of a grandmother, grandfather and Monica their granddaughter. Such a loving family. The Phoenix Pencil Company what an amazing thing to have during the wars. Reforging messages from people hidden messages, the messages that could get someone killed or secret messages sent to aid the resistance. What a toll that has to take on a body!

This was quite an interesting story and I’m so glad I got the chance to read it!

I want to thank NetGalley and William Morrow for this advanced reader copy. This is my honest review.

“We don’t have much, but we have this power, and we have this story.”

This book is for you if you…

* have ever considered the possibility of ordinary objects holding on to thoughts, emotions, or memories in some way
* enjoyed reading The Memory Collectors and The Ten Thousand Doors of January
* would choose Arby’s over Subway every time
* dream of uncovering your family history or connecting with a long-lost relative through an online ancestry archive
* appreciate stories written in unconventional formats


This lightly-magical debut novel was thought-provoking and captivating. I enjoyed the multigenerational feel and the questions the book raised about what it means to hold onto & tell your own story. There is a bit of a love story woven in that I don’t think the book needed; I think it would have stood on its own feet just fine without it, but overall, I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend this one to fans of historical fantasy or magical realism.

——

A huge thank you to Allison King, William Morrow, and NetGalley for an ARC in exchange for an honest review!

It's possible that if I'd read this at a different time, I would have loved it a whole lot. But at this moment, I'm struggling to connect to both timelines. An awful lot doesn't make sense to me. It's not that it's poorly written, just that it'd the wrong book for me right now.

This dual timeline novel had a really intriguing premise and is really hard to summarize briefly. In modern times, Monica is a computer science college student returning home to her beloved grandparents for the summer. In her efforts to come up with a really special gift for her grandmother’s 90th birthday, Monica makes contact with her grandmother’s cousin, who she hasn’t seen since leaving Shanghai shortly after World War 2. Because of this connection, Monica gradually learns about a family secret. The women in her family are able to reforge pencils - they can take a pencil and recreate all the words that were written with it. This ability can be a thing of beauty or can be used for more sinister purposes. We as readers learn things more quickly than Monica from the second timeline, where Monica’s grandmother recounts her life story in the form of a letter to her cousin. This plot was uneven in a lot of places and often overly complicated, but the character development was very strong. I really cared about Monica and her grandmother and I enjoyed learning more about China during the Japanese occupation and World War 2. While I gave up on following every plot detail (better to let it wash over you) I did find the pencil plot engaging and wanted to see how it was going to wrap up. This book is also saying a lot of things (not always clearly) about storytelling and how we share information. Definitely a good book for discussion!

I generally love a magical realism book, but something about this one felt off to me, and I can't put my finger on what it was. I was definitely interested in the story and thought the magic system and historical elements were really cool, but it felt like I was learning about the story from arms length and not actually inside it if that makes sense? The story was told in first person from two different POVs, so I definitely wanted to feel a bit more invested in the characters, but I just couldn't connect.

What this book does well? The history was so meticulously researched and felt very high stakes. I felt like I was learning new information about a war I already thought I knew so much about. The magic also felt really perfectly crafted for this world - the dark and brutal nature of the way they bled the words out onto the pages fit the vibe of the war-torn city like a glove. I loved these aspects and because of that would be willing to give this author another shot.

I think the issues of this book were because it was a debut. I truly believe this author is just going to get better and better and I can't wait to see what she does next!

This was such a great debut book! It is whimsical and thoughtful. I really loved the aspect of generations of women with a unique power and what they did to survive and protect their families. The format of the women’s story unfolding in a past / present format was really effective. This was not a book I binged; instead I took my time with it. Thank you so much to NetGalley and William Morrow for the ARC.

Thanks to NetGalley and William Morrow for the eARC!

This book was dazzling. For some reason before I started reading it, I didn't connect that Phoenix meant the animal - I kept imagining Phoenix, Arizona. This was quickly cleared up when I started reading.
This was a beautiful exploration of a time in history we don't hear much about, and from a perspective I hadn't been taught about. The structure of the book was really interesting too - dual timelines was really fun.
I liked both storylines, but I think the one in the past was slightly better. The idea of a pencil giving up its secrets with a magical power was SO interesting. I loved the exploration of communication, what we decide to share, what is shared without our consent, and what it means to post online.
One thing that was a little disappointing, and I'm assuming this was related to it being an ARC, not the final version, most of the emojis that are included in the text came through as squares, so I had to just guess what was being said by the context. This was not a huge part of the text, so don't let that put you off, but it was something I noted.