Melissa Chadburn's electrifying debut novel, A Tiny Upward Shove, opens with a gruesome death observed by "Aswang," a shape-shifting creature of Filipinx folklore, who knows "about the slow agonies of death" because she reanimates the body of 18-year-old Marina, "murdered on a pig farm in a place called Port Coquitlam," the penultimate victim of a serial killer. Aswang serves as partial narrator to a story that mainly belongs to Marina.
Marina's Lola (grandmother in Tagalog) ensured a happy childhood in Monterey, Calif. Mutya, Marina's Filipina mother, was a teenager when she was briefly married to Marina's Black father and Marina was born. But when another boyfriend convinces Mutya to move to Los Angeles, Marina is separated from Lola's nurturing protection and soon becomes a statistic of neglect and violence, landing at a group home. Marina's bunkmate Alex's childhood couldn't have been more heinous: five months into a perfectly matched adoption, Alex's birthmother reclaimed her, only to enable three years of torture. Marina, one year older than Alex, emancipates earlier from the court system. Her parting promise to find Alex's adoptive mother leads Marina to Vancouver, where no good deed goes unpunished--deception, drugs, slavery, slaughter await--until Aswang can finally wreak overdue revenge.
The violence is graphic and relentless, yet bearing witness seems equally mandatory: this horror is reality, especially for girls and women of color. Chadburn--who experienced foster care herself--grounds her novel in what she's seen, what children and adults have (not) survived. Writing with remarkable grace, even surprising moments of transporting joy, Chadburn creates a miraculous literary platform to claim these missing stories. --Terry Hong, Smithsonian BookDragon