Will Sargent reviewed The Eternal Smile by Gene Yang
Review of 'The Eternal Smile' on 'Storygraph'
4 stars
Three stories, all about leaving one world for another. Sometimes the world is imagined -- sometimes the world is just a game, or a lie. There's no direct connection between the stories, although if you look carefully you can see artifacts from one appear in another.
Yang is very good at contrasting ugly truth with beautiful lie. The artwork in the imagined worlds is gorgeous, full of golds and straight, clear lines. In the real worlds, things are grey, muddy, from the wrong angle.
This isn't on the same level as American Born Chinese or Level Up, but it shows some of the same themes -- the idea of duty tying you down (and how that can be a good thing), and how the imagination can run away in its own directions, away from the person supposedly in control of it.