Seek Immediate Shelter by Vincent Yu ( Flatiron 2026) was a bit of a disappointment. The novel is a series of interconnected short stories about residents of a small Asian-American community in Massachusetts following a false ballistic missile alert. There is one section that takes place months after the alert and piggy-backs on an earlier section. Had these two stories served as the beginning and the end of the novel, it might have worked better because that particular family unit is central. As organized, the story that takes place months after the alert seems out of place.
I’ve already dropped the book back at the library and can’t remember the different characters, but my favorite section dealt with the woman whose husband had a heart attack after receiving the alert. Her sister comes to live with her. A woman shows up and says that her husband had fathered a child with her and had been paying her child support for years and she’d like the support to continue. The use of her sister’s new hobby of birdwatching and the ending was just perfect.
Overall, I thought there were some interesting aspects here. I really enjoy interconnected short stories that form a larger work, so I appreciated that; however, I didn’t really click with a lot of the stories. I liked the opening story a bit and I also like what was being done with the mom/daughter relationship in the second (or third?). I do like the idea of a deep dive into multiple residents’ lives following the false alert (including the employee responsible for the false alert.) I just don’t know, some of them just seemed filler and bits cobbled from others. (Which could have been intentional to showcase similarities within the Asian-American families – I don’t know; it was just meh for me. BUT the stories that I liked were really good.
A Girl Named Tommi 