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	Mohrbooks Literary Agency Sebastian Ritscher

BLOB: A LOVE STORY

Maggie Su

For fans of Nightbitch and Fleabag, BLOB follows the life of Vi Liu, a sardonic twenty-three-year-old college drop-out who works the front desk at a hotel in Central Illinois.

A second-generation biracial Taiwanese American, Vi's story is rooted in McDonald's drive-ins, underground gay bars, gin and sodas, and microaggressions. But her life changes when she finds a breathing blob outside a drag show and decides to take the creature home with her. As her pet blob becomes sentient, Vi learns she can control him, and she decides to mold him into her ideal partner: a white man. Vi's desire for love forces her to confront her past - her lonely childhood, an ex-boyfriend who unfriended her, and her own internalized racial otherness.

A mix between the comic absurdity of Sayaka Murata's Convenience Store Woman and the speculative conceit of Ling Ma's Severance, BLOB explores the process of identity construction and the difficulty of human connection. This is a wonderfully quirky first novel.

Maggie Su currently serves as the associate prose editor for The Georgia Review. She holds an MFA in fiction from Indiana University and a PhD in creative writing from University of Cincinnati. Her work has appeared in Four Way Review, TriQuarterly, Juked, DIAGRAM, Mid-American Review, Joyland, Split Lip, The Offing, and elsewhere. She previously served as assistant editor for Cincinnati Review and Acre Books, fiction editor for Indiana Review, and senior reader for Ploughshares. She currently lives in Athens, Georgia with her partner, cat, and turtle.

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Book Published 2025-01-28 by HarperCollins Young Readers - New York (USA)

Comments

In Maggie Su's funny debut novel, a Frankenstein-like monster turns on his flailing creator. this is a sharp, funny and poignant look at what it means to connect with another being, and yourself. Read more...

In Blob: A Love Story, Su's prose breathes magic, humor, and empathy into everything it touches. This meditation on change (and the weird, startling, and even otherworldly ways it can manifest) plunges the reader into the can't-look-away mess of the narrator, Vi's quarter life crisis as she navigates encounters with heartbreak, self-evolution, and alien lifeforms. You'll want to read this in one sitting, but try to savor it: there are gems of laughter and insight to be unearthed on every page.

Like a beguiling literary love child of Melissa Broder and Jeff VanderMeer, Blob enthralls with raw intimacy and Frankensteinian science. This is a novel that dives headfirst into the gelatinous messiness of early adulthoodwith its bad jobs, bad boyfriends, and bad decision-making - finding self-actualization along the way. Maggie Su's debut will make you laugh, shriek, and cheer for its wayward, wobbly inventions. Blob is not to be missed!

Unique, heartfelt, and hilarious, Blob: A Love Story is a delightfully inquisitive meditation on relationships and identity. What responsibility do we have in the creation of our relationships? What do we bring and leave behind? And what repercussions exist when we force ourselves into an identity instead of nurturing our real selves? This winsome book pulls off the impossible feat of examining our deepest existential questions with equal parts tenderness and droll.

Maggie Su has written an inventive, utterly unique debut. BLOB is not only a deliciously creepy, deeply entertaining take on modern relationships, it's also a moving look at new adulthood, and the inherent vulnerability that comes along with figuring out exactly who you're meant to be.

UK: Sceptre

A rollicking fun, funny, poignant coming of age story, filled with honesty and delight.

Blob is absolutely charming. Maggie Su's writing is imaginative and funny. Vi is a deliciously messy narrator who will make readers laugh, yes, but also think deeply about the relationship between love and generosity. A pleasure.

In this slyly self-aware and gently comic novel, a twenty-four-year-old college dropout, Vi, who is stuck in a dead-end job and getting over a bad breakup, discovers a blob on the ground outside a dive bar.But problems arise when Bob starts to feel desires of his owna turn that both accelerates the novel's sharp plot and enriches its examination of the complex relationship between longing and identity. Read more...

There is so much at play in this wondrous novel. Vi, struggling to place herself in any context that makes sense within the world, earnestly leads us into a wild experiment, to turn a blob into the man of her dreams, and I was transfixed by her voice. This is a book that looks at identity and desire in profoundly interesting ways.

In Su's marvelous debut, a Taiwanese American woman sculpts a seemingly perfect partner out of a sentient blob. Su's clever conceit provides a catalyst for Vi's revelatory introspection, as she faces her self-destructive tendencies and the difficulties of being human. The result is a top-notch tale of arrested development.

"Su's debut novel is a semisurreal exploration of love, loneliness, and coming of age. Vi, a 24-year-old half-Asian college dropout in a Midwestern town, struggles with disconnection and self-discovery until she encounters a strange blob that she gradually fashions into her perfect mate, only to see him rebel."