[In the following review, Gambone calls Monkey King "a considerable achievement," despite finding the novel's ending "reductive."]

At 28, Sally Wang would seem to have many advantages, including a fine education and a promising career as an art director in New York. But "all this American stuff" cannot dispel the ghost that haunts her—that of her father, now dead, who sexually molested her as a child. After an attempted suicide, Sally embarks on the painful process of exorcising this demon and coming to terms with the lies and blind spots in herself and her family—a family in which filial respect, perfectionism and the public pretense that, as she puts it, "everything's hunky-dory" obscure hard realities. This is a familiar theme in contemporary Chinese-American literature, but Patricia Chao, who makes her debut with this novel, explores it with freshness and aplomb. In short, delicately sketched scenes, she convincingly portrays Sally's awakening to the fact that her life has been an attempt "to numb the monster inside me." The second half of the novel turns to Sally's struggle to understand her parents, giving them a surprisingly empathetic hearing. The Wangs' sense of displacement, the "continuing seasickness of immigrants." is a major theme. Although in this section the exposition occasionally drags, and the conclusion feels reductive, Monkey King is still a considerable achievement, the work of a writer worthy of serious attention.