If You Still Recognise Me

Tumblr fandoms, comic book stores, falling in love with fanfic, awkward crushes, powerful friendships and queer identity. The parts of us that change and the parts of us that don't. This book took me back to coming out and first love and all of the wonderful-terrible emotions associated with that but it's also about loss and family and politics. I laughed, cried and shook my fist at the sky. It really moved me. Chef's kiss. Can't wait to read what Cynthia So writes next.

I was lucky enough to be given early access to Cynthia So’s debut novel ‘If You Still Recognise Me’, an incredible queer coming of age story, that had me so hooked I finished it in a single sitting!Content Warnings — Emotionally abusive relationship, homophobia and racism.Rating — ⭑ ⭑ ⭑ ⭑ ⭑⁣⁣⁣𝙄𝙁 𝙔𝙊𝙐 𝙎𝙏𝙄𝙇𝙇 𝙍𝙀𝘾𝙊𝙂𝙉𝙄𝙎𝙀 𝙈𝙀, follows Elsie, a young bisexual girl as she learns what her sexuality means to her and her life as a whole through the way of her friends, her fandoms and most importantly, her found family.The novel is truly a complex love letter to those who have grown up with fandoms as a central comfort and is a refreshing display of what representation should be. The book itself is so beautifully written and the way in which culture, sexuality and relationships are intertwined throughout the book, is so heart achingly emotional to read. We aren’t only just given over five main queer and poc teenagers, we also get to read about the reconnecting of deep relationships that will almost most definitely make you want to pull the tissues out! This is definitely a novel that makes people who feel unseen and unheard, feel seen and heard without even asking.A truly beautifully crafted coming of age debut novel by Cynthia So and I cannot wait to see what they write next. I extremely recommend giving this book a read when it comes out the 9th of June, this year.

This book was absolutely delightful, and my highest rate of the year so far. I initially was going to give four stars, but that's just over some niggles that detracted a little bit from my reading experience and will probably not even be noticeable to others.Honestly, I just found this so wholly relatable. I'm not a teen, nor am I Chinese, but the author does an amazing job describing the more wholesome sides of fandom culture, which provide such great joy to their main character Elsie. All of the side characters had a lot of depth to them and the way their journeys were interwoven into the story was very natural and never seemed like a tick-box exercise. The way Elsie and Ritika worked through their issues (both on a personal level and how they communicated with each other) was so mature!To impress her crush, Elsie sets out on a quest to track down the crush's grandmother's long-lost lesbian love (what a mouthful of a sentence). This is exactly as over the top as it sounds, and the other characters do remind Elsie time and time again that, quite literally, no one's asked her to do this and it's not entirely clear to them why this is so important to her (although we, as readers, do know what this symbolises for Elsie).I love when I actually learn something new from books, too. The description of the different terms and categories that would be used in Hong Kong to describe queer people and stories was so educational. I also loved all of the adult queer characters. It was so unapologetic and it allowed us to explore such a broad range of different experiences.

This is easily one of the best YA books I have read in a long time and one of my favourite reads of the year so far! It is a beautiful exploration of queerness that is simultaneously realistic and optimistic. I wish I could have read it when I was younger as the representation of fandom culture and relationships and how queerness interacts with that was something I would have love to have seen explored so honestly.

Cynthia So’s debut novel, If You Still Recognise Me, is a heartfelt exploration of identity, love and growth. This coming-of-age story follows young Elsie as she navigates between school and university, British culture and Chinese heritage, and life both on and offline.Summer starts in an emotional knot of guilt and absent grief. Elsie’s Hong Kongese Grandfather has died, putting an end to the eight year estrangement between her expat family and her Grandparents. So once her mother leaves for Hong Kong to bring back her Grandmother to Oxford, Elsie has little else than fandom to distract her from her secretive family’s business. Can she piece together her parent’s throw-away bits of information to really understand why they’d all stopped speaking to their Hong Kong relatives for eight years?It’s easy to see why Elsie falls hard for Ada. The two met from fandom and there is a really meaningful sense of belonging which Elsie gets from her online communities. Ada panders to Elsie’s interests by writing fan-fiction on the comic ‘Eden Recoiling’ (the story of which seems to run sub-plot to the events in Elsie’s life). I thought that this was a really poignant way for Cynthia So to empower their characters, as Ada and Elsie were able to direct their own queer narratives through writing and sharing their own fanfic.I loved If You Still Recognise Me as a powerful story which defends the rights of young people to not know about their identity in a world which demands so much certainty from them. Cynthia So definitely has the voice of a generation, a voice which will prove to be increasingly essential in the growing realm of YA Queer narratives.