BLOB

Vi Liu, the daughter of a Taiwanese father and white mother, navigates relationships, identity, and her early 20s in this touching, absurd debut novel.

Reeling from the breakup of a two-year relationship with Luke Meyer, who gave her a “taste of what it felt like to be normal,” Vi is spiraling. She’s dropped out of college, missed the Peace Corps application deadline, and works at the front desk of a Holiday Inn–esque hotel. Her oft-flooding basement apartment, where she spends most of her time off, is grimy, strewn with dirty laundry and rotting leftovers. On a night out with her co-worker and her co-worker’s estranged high school friend, Vi discovers a blob next to the trash cans in the alley behind the bar. Drunk and panicking, both terrified and curious, Vi takes the blob home. Soon, to her confusion, she discovers that the blob is sentient; it breathes and eats. Increasingly, Vi realizes she can mold and shape the blob: She tells it to grow a hand, then a neck, and it does, growing into a body that looks like a handsome, generic-looking movie star. At first, Blob follows Vi’s commands, but as he becomes increasingly human, his desires shift accordingly; he feels trapped, and Vi’s plan to create her perfect boyfriend inevitably backfires. Interspersed with this comic story are vignettes of Vi’s troubled childhood—she was awkward, perpetually friendless, unlikable. These characteristics are supposed to explain why she is the way she is today: friendless, temperamental, quick to anger, a heavy drinker, sadistically self-deprecating. At times, these traits are humanizing and relatable, though they often feel too heavy-handed: “All the mistakes I made because I wanted to prove to myself what I never fully believed: that I belonged, that I was worthy.”

A funny, tender, unexpected—though somewhat flimsy—bildungsroman.