Book Review: "My Dear You: Stories" by Rachel Khong

I was so excited to read Rachel Khong’s brand-new story collection. I really enjoyed her previous books, Goodbye, Vitamin and Real Americans, and couldn’t wait to see how her voice would work in a variety of stories.

This was a really intriguing collection. Many of the stories dealt with unique, almost futuristic topics, but also many dealt with relationships, love, marriage, dating, and family.

Of the 10 stories in the book, here are a few of my favorites. In the title story, a young woman dies on her honeymoon and goes to heaven, only to find her memories of her life start to disappear. “The Freshening” envisions a world where the U.S. government creates an injection which turns everyone a person sees into the same race, sex, and ethnicity.

“The Family O” is about a group of Asian women who have all dated the same man they met on a dating app, and he apparently fetishizes them. In “Tapetum Lucidum,” a woman and her husband adopt a cat who somehow conjures up the ghosts of their exes. And in “Serene,” a woman befriends a sex doll she hopes to sell in order to get breast implants.

Khong is such a talented writer. These stories evoked a range of emotions and were very thought-provoking. Some definitely packed a punch, and I’ll be thinking about them for a long while.