From what I can tell, 'Siren Queen' has been received with very mixed reviews, with those who dislike it or were underwhelmed by it talking up Taylor Jenkins-Reid's 'The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo' as an example of what did this right. And, quite frankly, that stuns me because this does something very new and very right. Since March, my favourite book of the year has been 'Sister, Maiden, Monster' by Lucy A. Snyder', but that's just been eclipsed by this. Sure, I'm almost the target audience for 'Siren Queen' but it absolutely blew me away. If something's going to take the book of the year from this, it needs to hurry up and get in front of my eyeballs because there are only three months left and this is a peach.

From one angle, this is fantasy, right down to the silver wolves that literally guard Wolfe Studios. Stars in this look at Hollywood are exactly that. They shine on screen and then vanish into the night sky. This quickly smacks of demonic bargaining, with deals and ranks. Our heroine gets her shot by giving away a twenty-year chunk of her life. The rituals and magical contracts in chapter 10 are blistering. Everything is fleeting, but bargains prolong. This is Hollywood as Faerie, with regular Friday night fires serving as courts. Names have power, contracts are binding and everything must be done with care and attention to detail. Don't ever walk into the dark.

But from another, there's serious truth here. Never mind anything I said in my previous paragraph, this is as true a look at Hollywood as it rolls from the silent era into the precodes as I've encountered. Precodes there means the short period of time from 1929 to 1934 when Hollywood studios were free to create films that shock us today, before the Production Code was given its teeth and took away all those films' edges. It's up there with 'Singin' in the Rain' for me and that's been acknowledged as a true classic for seventy years. Sure, the man at the top of the tree is Oberlin Wolfe rather than Louis B. Mayer, but it's clear to anyone with a background in this era of film history who Nghi Vo is talking about. We can't necessarily name all the characters here in our own world, because they're aspects and amalgams as much as analogues, but I generally knew who she was talking about and what she has them do is truth.

This was a world utterly controlled by the studios. You could be the biggest star in the world today but a nobody tomorrow. Just ask Billy Haines, to whom Mayer gave an ultimatum: either you lose your career or your boyfriend, your call. He chose his boyfriend and that was it for him on screen, shifting on a dime from the top draw at the box office to interior decorator to the stars, forgotten by the public. Vo doesn't put Haines in this novel, but she pervades it with the power that Mayer and lesser equivalents wielded and all the ramifications that came along with it.

The lead in this story is Luli Wei, whose name we don't know. She's Luli Wei on screen, once she's found a patron who knows things and bargained well with Wolfe and paid her dues in the dorms. However, it's not her real name because it's really the name of her sister, who relocates up to San Francisco to be an artist. Hollywood takes your essence then moulds it and rebrands it to whatever it feels that the public might want at a particular moment in time. The Chinese American girl from Hungarian Hill who takes a name that isn't hers is merely the latest example, who finds fame as a siren in a set of monster flicks.

We've all read or seen stories of that meteoric rise to fame, the nobody who shows up in Hollywood and suddenly becomes a star. This is another one, but it's rare to see that rise grounded so impeccably, even as it's framed as fantasy. There's a woman behind the screen persona known as Luli Wei, but she thinks that she can play Hollywood at its own game and win, which is insanely ballsy. Everything's against her, from her ethnicity to her sexuality, because the studios have to maintain an image and, while they may be able to find a pivotal role for a Chinese American, they're not going to let the public know that she's also a lesbian. That's just ammunition for the powers that be, who require lavender marriages to keep up appearances, and it's another way to keep her playing ball. There are a lot of those.

I was hypnotised by this novel. I'm a film critic with a particular fondness for silent film and the precode era. My favourite year in film is 1932 so this is my time and I've always been fascinated by the dichotomy between the freedom of what the late twenties and early thirties gave us on screen and the repression that happened off it. Everything here is true even if Vo made it all up and merged it with the perennial dangers of Faerie. The slightest decision anyone can make in this world can and will go horribly wrong if anyone notices. It's all a game and knowing the trajectory of Anna May Wong's career, watching a close analogue survive against the odds and even thrive, at least for a while, is incredibly satisfying.

I have every intention of returning to this book in a year's time to see if its magic still holds. I feel it will because we're talking history here and none of it's going to suddenly change just because we want it to. I believe this can only grow as the ramifications of merging Hollywood history with Fae magic settle. It's a genius decision, even if it went over the head of a host of reviewers. There are all sorts of clichés that critics tend to use, like "I couldn't put it down", that play as meaningless hyperbole. I didn't read this in one sitting but there were chapters where I literally couldn't put this book down because I was captured by their power and I had to let them play out.

Nghi Vo isn't a new author, because she's made her name with a couple of other novels, none of which I've read, but this was the first novel she wrote. I don't know all the reasons why it took so long to reach print, though she talks through some in her acknowledgements. I'm just happy that, like Luli Wei, it made it. It's something special and it's going to shine brightly down on me for a long time yet. ~~ Hal C F Astell

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