Editorial Content for Fiona and Jane

Growing up together in southern California, Fiona Lin and Jane Shen share much in common yet are very different women. Following the more than two decades of their friendship, FIONA AND JANE shows them inseparable as girls, growing apart as young adults, and finally settling into a strong and healthy grown-up friendship. Moving between their perspectives, Jean Chen Ho writes these episodes --- which could be read as related short stories or novel chapters --- with frank prose as she traces the ways that Fiona and Jane come of age and into their own strengths.

"This impressive debut is striking in its raw and honest portrayal. It examines themes that are particular to young women and to the Asian experience in America (yet are also universal) with intelligence, energy and confidence."

Jane is introduced first, and we meet her while she is visiting her father in Taiwan. He moved there for what was supposed to be a year of work but had not come home in a few years. On the last day of Jane’s visit, something becomes clear to her: he is never coming back to her and her mother. He introduces Jane to his friend, Lee, and tells her the story of his courtship with her mother as well as his relationship with Lee. Jane responds with an anger that haunts her for many years, especially after he dies by suicide. From a teenage tryst with her piano teacher to the days after her emotionally fraught relationship with a vet named Julian, Jane longs for a stable relationship yet struggles to maintain one.

Unlike Jane, Fiona was born in Taiwan. She moved to the US in elementary school with her single mother and became friends with Jane. Adventurous to Jane’s cautious, Fiona is bold, sexy and beautiful. Her ambition is often lacking focus; over the 20 years that are covered here, she moves from one intense relationship to the next, like her best friend, seeking connection and stability.

Tugged between traditional Chinese culture and the social freedoms of contemporary America, Fiona and Jane aim to create space to be authentically themselves. They also must reckon with the legacy of parents and grandparents back in Taiwan --- Jane’s father’s sexuality and Fiona’s mother’s estrangement from her own father. From hotel hookups in high school to long-term live-in affairs, Fiona and Jane remain, even when apart, both a lodestar for and a reflection of each other. Over the years, they test boundaries and the edges of self and friendships, carving paths for themselves that might bring them contentment and safety.

The book’s secondary characters are also interesting --- from Fiona and Jane’s high school friend, Won, who is faced with similar challenges, to the girls’ parents and grandparents, who straddle cultures and work to build homes for their daughters in America.

Fiona and Jane are finely handled by Ho, who writes with compassion and a punchy gravity. She draws in readers with her insightful exploration of identity and attachment, yet holds them at a compelling distance, allowing her characters to hold on to just a bit of their own interior worlds. This impressive debut is striking in its raw and honest portrayal. It examines themes that are particular to young women and to the Asian experience in America (yet are also universal) with intelligence, energy and confidence.