The Runaway Restaurant

August 29, 2022
Yang debuts with a promising speculative collection largely focused on the isolation of young and marginalized women. In the title story, a mother picks up a young hitchhiker while searching for the mythic roadside restaurant she believes houses her own runaway daughter. Along the way, she works through her anger and disappointment at her wife, her child, and herself over their ruptured family. “Biohack” follows a high school student as she explores her need for love and her growing resemblance to her mother in a culture obsessed with aesthetic body modification. In “Haunting Grounds,” a recently deceased Japanese American woman drifts through locations important to her past life while looking for a resting place and eventually wrangling with the ghost of a white man over the house her family lived in after surviving an internment camp. Though the stories tend to be a bit formulaic, Yang thoughtfully explores her characters’ needs and emotions, and she effectively conceives surprising and uncomfortable circumstances—up to and including an apocalyptic pandemic in “Your Anger Is a Tiny Bird”—to interrogate the strength of human relationships. Readers will be delighted by Yang’s creative examination of her characters’ psyches.

October 1, 2022
This collection of 14 short stories with a wide range of subjects and rich, descriptive language brings characters and new worlds to life for readers. Commenting on social norms and society, Yang opens with the story of shipwrecked princesses who return to nature and end up embracing the monsters they once needed knights to save them from. The title story, ""The Runaway Restaurant,"" is a sad tale of parental guilt and the tail end of a family falling apart. Yang's stories often break conventional stereotypes, sometimes blatantly, while others are subtly surreal. Other themes throughout the book include technology and fast fashion, the immaturity of infatuation and first love, loss, the awkwardness of adolescence, loneliness, and the complex relationships of family and broken hearts. Overall, a well-written, and diverse collection of stories, all told from the points of view of women, with a common thread of dysfunctional, everyday people throughout. The collection evokes a sense of mystery, almost an unfinished air, as if the stories continue, just not for the readers.

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