Allison King makes her dazzling, spellbinding debut with THE PHOENIX PENCIL COMPANY. This heartfelt, powerful blend of magical realism, historical fiction and generational epics chronicles the story of the Phoenix Pencil Company --- and, more importantly, the women who started, ran and weaponized it to change history forever.

It is the late 1930s in the International Settlement in Shanghai, China, and Yun has not yet known a moment’s peace from civil unrest. Already her father has left for war, her mother has turned cold and distant, and her grandmother has taken to her room, where the sweet scent of opium keeps her numb to her son’s absence.

So it is understandable that when her elegant cousin, Meng, and aunt move in with them --- fleeing the warzones --- and begin working in Yun’s mother’s pencil factory, she is more than a little dazzled by these glamorous guests. Rather than bonding over their situation, however, Yun and Meng quickly turn contentious --- one jealous of the other’s sophistication, the other of her cousin’s stability. This rivalry does have a positive, though: it distracts them from the real war happening around them. The girls also love to help out at the Phoenix Pencil Company. But it always seems that Meng knows just a bit more about their mothers and their special pencil projects, which Yun has been shielded from but is desperate to learn.

"Sure to be an instant book club hit, this timely, spellbinding novel is a resonant and tender story of the power of perseverance and the ability of the written word to fuel that power."

Some 70 years later, in 2018, Yun is a grandmother to college student Monica, a gifted but reclusive software coder. She has not spoken to Meng in all that time, but Monica is aware of her grandmother’s cousin and the pencil company they so proudly ran together. Yun has dedicated her life to Monica’s care. So with her 90th birthday approaching, Monica decides that she will gift Yun a reunion with Meng. It should be easy given her role at Electronic Memory Bank Enabling Radical Sharing. EMBRS is a souped-up search engine that prioritizes not logistical information, but rather the data written by an individual about his or her own life: social media posts, newsletters, blogs, and so on.

Monica strikes gold when she finds a picture of a woman her grandmother’s age posing next to a cute college girl, Louise Sun. It’s not hard to find Louise’s contact information, confirm that the woman in the photo is indeed Meng, and learn that Louise has taken on the task of archiving the stories of senior citizens from China in an attempt to record the truth about Japanese invasion, civil war and decades of unrest. Even better, Louise tells Monica that Meng is sending something to Yun via the girls. Their meeting is easy, even for reclusive Monica, and she starts to feel that great hope of “connection.” But her hopes are nearly deflated when she receives Meng’s “message” for Yun: a measly pencil.

But Yun is not surprised by the pencil. Although she does nothing with it, she begins to take on the arduous task of recording her life’s history, writing to her cousin and childhood best friend. But the meaning of the pencil is not the only thing Yun is hiding; she has been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s and is facing the loss of her memory, her ability to pass down her history --- and that of her magical pencil company --- to the granddaughter she adores.

In alternating chapters, King invites readers into the diaries of Monica Tsai as she navigates her grandmother’s fading memory and the unspooling of her family history; and the letters of Wong Yun, confessing to decades of choices to the cousin she left behind in Shanghai. What unfolds is a magical tale of women with the innate power to “read” whatever has been written with a single pencil, jamming the point of each one into their veins and bleeding out, in black ink, the stories of each person who wielded it. There is no doubt that the power is important, crucial even, especially in war-torn Shanghai, where the women become involved in an underground spy movement. But, as teenagers Yun and Meng observe, it is also dangerous.

Using their power --- Reforging --- doesn’t just record the stories of each pencil’s previous user, it also embeds the memories in the sorceress’s brain, broadcasting across their brains horrific wartime tales of fear and uncertainty, violence and rape. And, as the war continues and supplies become scarce, the women are forced to Reforge impure pencils not manufactured by the Phoenix Pencil Company, marked by their distinctive phoenix carving, absorbing the poisons and toxins. Though the women all agree that their work is powerful, Yun and Meng start to disagree about its use. Yun believes that stories are no match for bayonets and bombs, while Meng is convinced that there is no greater power than them, than the proof that they existed and lived it all.

It becomes increasingly obvious to the reader that the girls are heading toward an inevitable betrayal. But what becomes equally clear is that the clock is ticking on Yun’s ability to remember and record her magical knowledge, and that losing her precious, brilliant memories will be losing an entire history of the world.

King employs a magnificent, striking blend of intergenerational trauma, themes of privacy and ownership, and a resounding message about the power of storytelling in her debut. Written in a warm, welcoming tone, THE PHOENIX PENCIL COMPANY invites you right into Monica Tsai’s family, smoothly preparing you for the epic that is about to unfold --- and it is an epic. Balancing Japanese occupation, spy-fueled intrigue, and the deeply personal grief of losing touch with one’s history, King pens a tender chronicle of a changing world, all the while championing the importance and power of recording not just the broad strokes --- the date of invasion, the death of a soldier --- but also the subtle, more difficult to trace changes that come with war and loss of identity.

Though young adult Monica is the driving force of the novel, drawing out her grandmother’s story as she embarks on her own journey of romance, it is Yun and Meng who form the beating heart of the novel: two girls born of wildly different circumstances, to fathers fighting the same war but with different beliefs, and possessing two equally right (but not wholly realized) ways of using their unique power. King is adept at forming parallels between the girls, their past and future, and how their power has shaped them. This allows readers to glide along effortlessly, fully immersing themselves in the generational saga unfolding before them, and the ways that the magical Phoenix Pencil Company’s women have changed history.

Sure to be an instant book club hit, this timely, spellbinding novel is a resonant and tender story of the power of perseverance and the ability of the written word to fuel that power.