Unidentified Suburban Object by Mike Jung (review)

In her lily-white town, seventh-grader Chloe Cho attracts a lot of attention for her Korean heritage. She frequently encounters thoughtless comments and insensitive stereotyping, making it ironic that she knows nothing about her family’s history, as her parents sidestep all her questions and discourage her curiosity. Only when her new social studies teacher assigns a project on lineage do Chloe’s parents tell her the truth: they are actually aliens from another solar system who escaped the destruction of their home planet and came to Earth because of their near identical genetic match to humans and their close physical resemblance to Koreans. It’s a wallop of a plot twist, so fun in its implausibility that it helps compensate for the novel’s flaws. While Chloe’s anger—about the subtle but constant racism, her parents’ vagueness, and the revelation that she isn’t even human—is believable, Chloe vents her feelings in ways erratic, unproductive, and alienating (no pun intended) that make it difficult to bond with her as a character. Chloe’s experience of and reaction to Jung’s smartly observed microaggressions are more than understandable, though, and they make this novel one worth passing along to readers with mixed feelings about their heritage—or those who could use a little sensitivity training.