COYOTELAND

Beneath the idyllic surface of an upscale San Francisco Bay Area suburb, threats burgeon and tensions rise.

As Hua’s simmering novel opens, a Chinese American family is moving to a fixer-upper home in the tony community of El Nido. The father, Jin Chang, plans to remodel and flip the property, working with funds from a rich friend in China. Unbeknownst to his wife and daughters, he has been out of work for months. The Changs’ initiation into the culture of this almost completely white enclave will be a bit rocky after life in majority-Asian Fremont. “Wealthy elsewhere was middle class in El Nido, and middle class might as well have been poor.” Also less than hospitable is the environment itself: Wildfires, smoke, and growing populations of deer and coyote all pose threats, and while quarantine has ended, Covid-19 has not. Many of the tensions are concentrated in the relationship between the Changs and their new next-door neighbors, the Belles, a white family of five with a Latine nanny and her daughter living in an apartment above their garage and a flock of chickens in their backyard. Both the family cat and the hens are about to become dinner for “Wily,” a young coyote whose backstory and perspective are threaded in with those of the other characters. The Changs’ resourceful 15-year-old daughter, Jane, will make a friend when she rescues Tasha Washington, the rare Black girl in town, from a coyote attack. Hua’s third novel has a jampacked cast and too many subplots to list here. Almost all involve the players in subterfuge, competition, and nefarious high-tech schemes and campaigns, as even the humans in this “coyoteland” are hungry predators seeking dominance. It’s riveting and impressive to watch the author bring the whole steaming mess together in a disastrous, dramatic climax, and then tease out satisfying and even inspiring resolutions for all the individuals involved. At the heart of her achievement is the portrait of El Nido itself—its sociology, its topography, its history, its native plants and animals, and its moral swamp.

A standout in the wave of “dark suburbia” novels coming out of the dystopian realities of the embattled West Coast.