Aimee Lim’s The Spindle of Fate (2024) opens with the protagonist’s mother’s death and the 11-going-on-12-year-old main character’s annoyance at the various platitudes. Evie Mei Huang’s mother is thought to have drowned, with her car found in the ocean but her body never found.
The family is a working class one, with the parents running a tailor shop, Reliable Quality Tailoring. Evie has an 8-year-old little sister, Mona Li. In the mourning period, there is to be no hair cutting at risk of cutting short the lives of the living. After the funeral, with an empty casket, they stop by McDonald’s fast-food restaurant to leave the bad vibes there. There are colors they cannot wear in this period, such as joyful or celebratory colors. The family has long had roots in California, and for generations, they have been American born. The father’s Chinese is barely passable, but his English is strong—even as the family may have been seen as perennial outsiders in their own country.
In the midst of the mourning—and the striving to follow the superstitions and cultural practices around grief the Chinese American family struggles to get past the painful moment and into a future which will require them to work together. Grief-stricken and in shock, Evie half-heartedly lashes out at the well-wishers and notes that many accompany their condolences with questions about their own tailoring needs.
When Evie goes into the family’s tailor shop, she encounters a golden monkey, “Uncle Monk,” who mentions that the mother was the leader of the Weavers, a guild that practiced magical powers, including a spindle of string that could be used to find anything. Thida Hnin, her blunt and wise best friend, also sees this golden monkey. The monkey identifies himself as a supernatural being, a yāoguài, a demon. He bears a gift of a hóngbāo (a red envelope, given for good fortune), and he has brought a box, in which there is a sewn message from her mother. As he talks more, he reveals himself as a trickster and perhaps worse.
That visit sets off a series of events that bring Evie to a meeting of the guild members. It is decided that she will go to Dìyù (the netherworld) to bring back her living mother, who has been taken there erroneously. Here is a Buddhist sense of hell (described as a “massive underground torture labyrinth”) and reincarnation. Just past her 12th birthday, Evie is accompanied by a member of the guild, and they are armed with the magic spindle and a staff (an artifact that the guild has collected) that repels ghosts.
Hell is organized as different stacked courts, each with harrowing revelations. Hell is peopled by bureaucrats (with their own Department of Records), and then the ghosts, the penitents, the condemned, the angry and regretful. Here, the dead have corporeality (bodies), and the two living (Evie and the guild member, another child) have various battles with the various entities.
Lim writes from Evie’s perspective:
But then I hear a clink! of metal. I turn my head toward the sound and see an unfortunate dead woman spitting out her rice—or at least, it was rice. When she gags into her bowl, shiny metal pellets tumble out instead.
In another scene, there is an empty restroom with a pamphlet advertising the services of the goddess of mercy, Guanyin. This work draws on Chinese mythology but places the action in the near-present. The writing is colloquial and readable, not reminiscent of the high-minded style of ancient Chinese literature (more remote narrative). The hell reads as an extension of the living world, an unfair world. [Interestingly, racists are in hell alongside murderers and are mentioned several times.]
This is a darkly imagined work for junior readers, and not only in the netherworld. Among the living, there is a broad human capability for evil and deception. Time moves in a single direction. Often, what is lost is irrecoverable.
The Spindle of Fate reads as a mix of genres: a supernatural detective story (and spy fiction) that also evokes coming-of-age. There are a few references to the time period post the COVID-19 pandemic, which gives the work an up-to-date feel. In the story, people are fated, but they can also work the “threads of good fortune, love, magic, and even time.” The junior novel climaxes in a revelatory crescendo, which changes the direction of the denouement.
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The Spindle of Fate is Aimee Lim’s first novel. Lim was a former Jeopardy! Champion. Originally from Arcadia, CA, she is a library associate. She has a BA in English from UC Davis.
Shalin Hai-Jew has worked in higher education for many years. She has edited dozens of nonfiction educational books and authored a dozen with a number of publishers.
