Reviewed by Jeffrey Canton
Li Charmaine Anne, Crash Landing (Annick Press, 2024), 288 pp., $18.95.
More and more adult readers are turning to young adult (YA) fiction. But young and old alike will enjoy Crash Landing, the 2024 debut novel by Li Charmaine Anne, which was last year’s winner of the Governor General’s Award for Young People’s Literature. Li (who uses she/they pronouns) has sensitively mined their own personal sexual, gender, racial, cultural and mental-health intersections to fashion a subtle and complex coming-of-age story with broad appeal. And as you will see in the pages of Crash Landing, Li is very much into skateboarding!
Li, who was born in Toronto after her family immigrated from Hong Kong, is a graduate of the Creative Writing and English Literature BFA program at UBC. Prior to the publication of Crash Landing, Li established herself as a wide-ranging freelance writer with credits that include both fiction and essays, including pieces that have appeared in This Magazine, The Tyee, and Plenitude, as well as their Medium blog, which includes personal essays on internalized racism, class and queerness, social-justice commentaries and cultural critiques. Some of these touch upon Li’s personal interests in skateboarding and snowboarding, music, books and reading, and the natural beauty of the Pacific Northwest, all of which play a part in Crash Landing.
In a nutshell, the novel follows 17-year-old Jay Wong through her final year in high school in Vancouver in 2010 and 2011, mirroring Li’s own time in high school. Over the course of that school year, Jay begins to grow into the person she wants to be, discovers things about herself that surprise her, identifies talents she didn’t know she had and—perhaps most important—she comes out and falls in love for the first time. On the fateful
first day of the school year, Jay meets Ash—and from that moment on, Li takes you on one fabulous ride! Jay and Ash’s bond over a love of skateboarding:
As if she senses my thoughts, she asks, “You skate?”
I mumble, “Um. Kinda?”
She makes a hybrid laugh-scoff noise. “You can’t ‘kinda’ skate. You’re either a skater or you’re not.” She gestures at my board. “C’mon, show me your moves.”
Crash Landing offers readers an exquisite glimpse into how it feels to be a teen on the verge of coming out, as Jay manoeuvres through the ups and downs of a new and exciting friendship with Ash. And as that relationship evolves, we watch as Jay is gradually swallowed up by the ever-exciting, frightening and overwhelming complexity of her first same-sex relationship.
At the same time, Li also gives us a fascinating view of what it’s like to be part of a Hong Kong diaspora family, with parents who often seem overprotective of both Jay and her career-driven younger sister Wendy. Wendy’s life seems on track and perfect, but she has her own problems, and issues related to both race and class intrude into the sisters’ home life. Add to all this the changes and challenges offered by Grade 12: Its assignments, expectations, and friendships—all aspects that are particularly well-handled by Li. One key friendship for Jay is with David, who, not unlike Wendy, seems to have his future neatly mapped out—but it turns out he’s harbouring secrets of his own.
Li brilliantly creates intersections between school life and the personal sphere. Jay and Ash are assigned to read Virginia Woolf’s gender-fluid novel Orlando at the same time as they are caught up in their tenuous dance around their attraction to one another. Skateboarding brings Jay and
Ash together and also influences Jay’s activities at school: Jay begins filming and editing videos of Ash’s skateboarding, which not only strengthens their bond but also helps Jay build a portfolio for art-school applications. Meanwhile, Ash uses the videos to enter skateboarding competitions, opening new opportunities for both. Jay meets and becomes accepted by Ash’s skateboarding family and community, creating relatable tensions between Jay and her own parents. And like his friend Jay, David develops a same-sex relationship of his own.
As Li points out, the immigrant experience differs for each young person as they navigate relationships with their parents. Jay and Wendy have complicated relationships with Ma Mi and De Di—while Ash’s family life is much more unsettling: she feels that her parents just don’t care what happens to her. Ash and Jay share Cantonese heritage, while David is Korean Canadian. At home, he deals with a father who is hypercritical and a loving, but powerless, mother.
Crash Landing is well-paced and beautifully layered, though there are moments that drag: a subplot about Jay’s internet research trying to uncover Ash’s personal secrets adds little to the story. Much more satisfying is the relationship between Ash and Blake, a slightly older guy who offers Ash a place to stay when tensions run high with her parents. Blake is willing to help Ash out but clearly doesn’t consider her an equal. Meanwhile, Jay tries to sort her own resentful feelings about Blake—is she jealous of his relationship with Ash, someone with whom she herself clearly wants to be more than “just friends”?
Li’s stunning depiction of skateboarding culture is a highlight of Crash Landing. They bring all the skateboard tricks vividly to life through elaborate and lovingly detailed descriptions, while also giving readers a sense of the importance of community within skateboarding social networks—particularly for Asian teens, who Li indicates were an uncommon sight in skateboarding circles back in 2010. She also makes it clear that gender
bias pervaded the scene—but cleverly subverts this when Ash travels from Vancouver to Kelowna for a skateboarding competition.
One quibble this reviewer would like to raise relates to the book’s editing. Even though Li is Canadian and Annick Press is a Canadian independent publisher, it was clear to this reader that this book was edited looking toward an American market. A number of terms used at various points in the novel—calling a university calendar a “viewbook,” suggesting that a high-school course felt like it was being taught as a “college” course, the fact David isn’t the student council Event Coordinator but is in charge of “Event Coordinations”—these editorial choices seem awkward. This may be a minor point, but for a book that had an editor, an expert reader as well as a copy editor and a proofreader, these uncommon usage choices seem at odds with the otherwise Canadian feel of the novel.
Crash Landing is at once a queer coming of age story, a sensitive exploration of race, class, family and friendship—and an awesome skateboarding epic: Jay herself would call it “sick.” Li astutely assesses the values and limitations of skateboarding culture while perfectly capturing the thrill of doing ollies, grinds, slides, and flips. Best of all, despite the plethora of teen-angst issues that Li neatly deals with, the novel never feels heavy handed—the reader becomes deeply embedded in the ways that Jay copes and evolves, rather than drowning in her problems. Crash Landing is powerful, poignant, and unforgettable.
Jeffrey Canton began his freelance career interviewing queer writer Patrick Roscoe for Xtra! in 1990, writing features on LGBTQ2S+ creators including Makeda Silvera, Timothy Findley, Jeanette Winterson, Peter McGehee, and Doug Wilson, and later writing the newspaper’s “Between the Covers” column. He’s currently the Children’s Books columnist for The Globe and Mail.
