MAY 2023 - AudioFile
This audiobook, a romance at its core, is about the interwoven relationships among three couples. It also recounts a basketball star's challenges on and off the court and his relationship with his girlfriend, who helps produce K-dramas--dramatic shows with structured plots in South Korea. The narrating tag team of Jee Young Han and Tommy Kang do a marvelous job with the voices. Han brings a high level of emotion to the characters, getting across their frustration with racism, anger over a character's cancer, and dramatic performances of the shows themselves. Kang alternates as various key players, especially the star player who goes by the name Powerball. Basketball fans will recall Jeremy Lin's ascendance, which this story loosely resembles, and audiobook fans will enjoy this for its attentive narration. M.B. © AudioFile 2023, Portland, Maine
Publishers Weekly
★ 10/10/2022
Novelist and critic Salesses (Craft in the Real World) offers a brilliant and scathing chronicle of two Asian Americans as they try to find their place in contemporary sports and media. As the first Asian American in the NBA, Korean American Won Lee is poised to become a star after he steps in for his injured Knicks teammate Paul Burton (nicknamed “Powerball!”), his winning streak earning him the nickname “the Wonder.” But he’s also confronted by casual and at times cutting racism from teammates, coaches, and fans, as well as professional jealousy from an ESPN reporter, Robert Sung, who played high school ball with Powerball! and used to imagine himself in Won’s shoes. Meanwhile, Won’s girlfriend, Carrie, is fighting an uphill battle in her efforts to bring Korean television dramas to an American market. Using language that is hilarious, caustic, and poignant, Salesses effectively interrogates whether and how Asians can contribute to American celebrity culture without meeting the same old racism in return. Robert’s profile of Won, for instance, ends up with a reference to China in the headline, and when Carrie risks pitching a K-drama with American characters, an executive asks if she can “hear how that sounds like you don’t know what you’re doing.” Incorporating both Won and Carrie’s perspectives while also weaving in plots and scripts from K-dramas, Salesses fills the page with all the bold, kinetic confidence of an athlete striding onto the court. Agent: Ayesha Pande, Ayesha Pande Literary. (Jan.)
author of I Hold a Wolf by the Ears Laura van den Berg
When Won is signed by the New York Knicks, it seems at first that his dreams are coming true, but instead he is drawn into a world rife with high-stakes rivalry, subterfuge, and corrosive racism. The Sense of Wonder is equal parts a love letter to the intricate art form of basketball; a blade-sharp page-turner that delves deep into the rotten heart of America; and an ode to kdrama and the liberating power of love. Matthew Salesses brilliantly upends expectations on every page and, by the end, a powerfully new kind of story surfaces. The Sense of Wonder is revelatory and original and I absolutely loved this novel.
author of The Tenth Muse and Forgotten Country Catherine Chung
Matthew Salesses's new novel is so freaking good I can't stand it. Blistering, confident, full of swagger and heart, it is also an exhilaratingly smart treatise on race and our collective imagination that lays bare our limitations before blasting joyfully past them. A must read!
author of Counterfeit Kirstin Chen
Sharp, funny, and searingly original, The Sense of Wonder is a tour de force from one of the most inventive writers working today.
bestselling author of With Teeth and Mostly Dead T Kristen Arnett
What a pleasure to read work that spits off the page, fiction that vibrates and twitches with life. The Sense of Wonder is exactly that kind of book, one that refuses to let you forget about it, a novel that wants you to remember its story long after the initial read is done. This is a wildly physical book, the beating heart of it smashed up against the ribcage of the binding, thumping hard, demanding attention. I have never read anything like it. Matthew Salesses is a genius and The Sense of Wonder is a genuine marvel.
From the Publisher
"A brilliant and scathing chronicle of two Asian Americans as they try to find their place in contemporary sports and media...Salesses fills the page with all the bold, kinetic confidence of an athlete striding onto the court."—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"A remarkable novel of love, obstacles, and possibilities...The Sense of Wonder explores multiple Korean American experiences through vivid, unforgettable characters. [Readers] will love the depth of the characters' perspectives on being people of color in a white-dominated society."—Booklist
"[Salesses's] storytelling is crisp while avoiding easy frothiness. A smart, very meta take on love, sports, race, and media."—Kirkus Reviews
“What a pleasure to read work that spits off the page, fiction that vibrates and twitches with life. The Sense of Wonder is exactly that kind of book, one that refuses to let you forget about it, a novel that wants you to remember its story long after the initial read is done. This is a wildly physical book, the beating heart of it smashed up against the ribcage of the binding, thumping hard, demanding attention. I have never read anything like it. Matthew Salesses is a genius and The Sense of Wonder is a genuine marvel.”—Kristen Arnett, bestselling author of With Teeth and Mostly Dead Things
“Matthew Salesses's new novel is so freaking good I can't stand it. Blistering, confident, full of swagger and heart, it is also an exhilaratingly smart treatise on race and our collective imagination that lays bare our limitations before blasting joyfully past them. A must read!”—Catherine Chung, author of The Tenth Muse and Forgotten Country
"Sharp, funny, and searingly original, The Sense of Wonder is a tour de force from one of the most inventive writers working today."—Kirstin Chen, author of Counterfeit
"When Won is signed by the New York Knicks, it seems at first that his dreams are coming true, but instead he is drawn into a world rife with high-stakes rivalry, subterfuge, and corrosive racism. The Sense of Wonder is equal parts a love letter to the intricate art form of basketball; a blade-sharp page-turner that delves deep into the rotten heart of America; and an ode to kdrama and the liberating power of love. Matthew Salesses brilliantly upends expectations on every page and, by the end, a powerfully new kind of story surfaces. The Sense of Wonder is revelatory and original and I absolutely loved this novel."—Laura van den Berg, author of I Hold a Wolf by the Ears
MAY 2023 - AudioFile
This audiobook, a romance at its core, is about the interwoven relationships among three couples. It also recounts a basketball star's challenges on and off the court and his relationship with his girlfriend, who helps produce K-dramas--dramatic shows with structured plots in South Korea. The narrating tag team of Jee Young Han and Tommy Kang do a marvelous job with the voices. Han brings a high level of emotion to the characters, getting across their frustration with racism, anger over a character's cancer, and dramatic performances of the shows themselves. Kang alternates as various key players, especially the star player who goes by the name Powerball. Basketball fans will recall Jeremy Lin's ascendance, which this story loosely resembles, and audiobook fans will enjoy this for its attentive narration. M.B. © AudioFile 2023, Portland, Maine
Kirkus Reviews
2022-10-27
Romance and drama bloom around the NBA’s sole Asian American player.
For his fourth novel, Salesses takes some inspiration from the real-life story of Jeremy Lin, the Taiwanese American basketball player whose brief but phenomenal run for the New York Knicks in 2012 sparked a “Linsanity” craze. Here the player is Won Lee, an underappreciated Korean American point guard for the Knicks who capitalizes on a star player’s injury to lead a winning streak that the media punningly dubs the Wonder. Salesses alternates narration between Won and his girlfriend, Carrie, who’s a producer for K-dramas, Korean soap operas that have complex plots but operate within fairly rigid tropes As the Wonder inevitably fizzles, various dramas intensify, making the story a kind of K-drama itself. Won and Carrie are enmeshed in conflicts with an Asian American sports journalist manipulating the "Wonder" narrative, the injured Knicks star (nicknamed Powerball!), and both of their partners; accusations of infidelity abound. Woven among these troubles are a few of those K-drama tropes, not just boy-meets-girl, boy-loses-girl, but more abstract matters of fate. (“K-drama shines,” Salesses writes, “in the tension between certainty and wonder.”) In time, Carrie tries to get a basketball-themed K-drama off the ground, which creates its own set of complications. Salesses’ story is admirably multilayered, blending smarts about basketball, television, and the varying shades of anti-Asian racism, though he's less persuasive in arguing that incredible plot twists—convenient deaths and resurrections, stock setbacks, and heartfelt reunions—are more true to life than the tropes suggest. Still, Salesses takes his source material from both basketball and TV seriously, and his storytelling is crisp while avoiding easy frothiness.
A smart, very meta take on love, sports, race, and media.
