Sarong Party Girls

Description

On the edge of twenty-seven, Jazzy hatches a plan for her and her best girlfriends: Sher, Imo and Fann. Before the year is out, these Sarong Party Girls will all have spectacular weddings to rich ang moh - Western expat - husbands, with Chanel babies (the cutest status symbols of all) quickly to follow. Razor-sharp, spunky and vulgarly brand-obsessed, Jazzy is a determined woman who doesn't lose. As she fervently pursues her quest to find a white husband, this bombastic yet tenderly vulnerable gold-digger reveals the contentious gender politics and class tensions thrumming beneath the shiny exterior of Singapore's glamorous nightclubs and busy streets, its grubby wet markets and seedy hawker centres. Moving through her colourful, stratified world, she realises she cannot ignore the troubling incongruity of new money and old-world attitudes which threaten to crush her dreams. Desperate to move up in Asia's financial and international capital, will Jazzy and her friends succeed? Vividly told in Singlish - colourful Singaporean English with its distinctive cadence and slang - Sarong Party Girls brilliantly captures the unique voice of this young, striving woman caught between worlds. With remarkable vibrancy and empathy, Cheryl Tan brings not only Jazzy, but her city of Singapore, to dazzling, dizzying life.

Born and raised in Singapore, Cheryl Lu-Lien Tan is a New York-based journalist. She is also the author of A Tiger in the Kitchen: A Memoir of Food and Family, and edited the fiction anthology Singapore Noir. She has been a staff writer at the Wall Street Journal, InStyle magazine and the Baltimore Sun.

[A] powerful, occasionally astonishing story about materialism, status and manipulation...fascinating. * Daily Mail * Delectably vulgar, it perfectly captures Jazzy's world and is joyous to read . . . The book's brilliance lies in its reflection of the racism, sexism and classism in Jazzy's society, and her growing awareness and ability to handle it...Lu-Lien Tan has done a fantastic job of bringing Jazzy to life and of balancing the juxtaposition of traditional and contemporary values in Singapore. An absolute summer must-read. * The Skinny * a subversive critique of Singapore's gender and racial hierarchy * gal-dem * [A] very funny, irreverent, sharp-eyed debut . . . Jazzy's voice is the heart and soul of the book: tart, spirited, brazen, naive, knowing. * Slate * Utterly irresistible....I fell in love with Jazzy's fresh, exuberant voice and trenchant wit. In her debut novel, Tan is saying something profound and insightful about the place of women in our globalized, capitalized, interconnected world. -- Ruth Ozeki In Singapore, this satirical novel of predatory beauties would be regarded as deeply subversive - for the rest of us, and anyone familiar with life in that little island city-state, it is hilarious and original. -- Paul Theroux Scarlett O'Hara would have met her match in Jazeline Lim, the brazen, striving, yet ultimately vulnerable heroine of this bold debut novel. -- Julia Glass, National Book Award-winning author of THREE JUNES Darkly funny, Sarong Party Girls is one very determined woman's journey through modern Singapore, an intoxicating crossroads of culture, money and ambition. Her voice is utterly new and engaging, bringing her world to vivid life from the first sentence. -- Ayelet Waldman