Ask a Bookseller: ‘Coyoteland’ by Vanessa Hua

Are you looking for a novel to generate a good discussion for your book club? Pamela Klinger-Horn of Valley Bookseller in Stillwater recommends “Coyoteland” by Vanessa Hua. With the novel’s multiple viewpoints and complex issues, “Coyoteland” will appeal to fans of Celeste Ng’s “Little Fires Everywhere.”

After years of scraping, Jin Chang has finally managed to move his family into a prestigious suburb east of Berkeley, Calif.

Secretly, Jin has high hopes of making a big real estate deal that will cement his family’s future. Next door, Blaire Belle, who is white, makes a show of welcoming her new Chinese American neighbors. That is, until Jin’s hopes threaten her own plans to develop a high-end neighborhood.

“This taught me a new [phrase] called ‘performative progressivism,’” laughs Klinger-Horn.

“This is a very insightful look at suburbia, where privilege, racism, and class consciousness are set to a low boil and will be soon threatening to boil over because all these people also have teenagers, and you know how teenagers like to push the envelope. They are not happy with the hypocrisy that they see in the town, and they plan to expose this. And the fallout will intensify everything and have a cataclysmic end that will change the course of everyone's life.”

The name “Coyoteland” references the fact that humans are not the only ones who view the land as their own. The suburb is in coyote territory.

And while the human residents view the coyote who enters the scene as a threatening, dangerous predator, Klinger-Horn says, “he is the least of their worries when they have neighbors like this.”