Ask a Bookseller: ‘Blob: A Love Story’ by Maggie Su

On The Thread’s Ask a Bookseller series, we talk to independent booksellers all over the country to find out what books they’re most excited about right now.Theresa Phung works at Yu & Me Books in Manhattan’s Chinatown. She recommends “Blob: A Love Story” by Maggie Su. Su tells of Vi Liu, a young Taiwanese-American woman, who discovers a sentient blob and attempts to mold it into her ideal partner, leading to unexpected consequences.Theresa says: The blob, as it watches TV, starts to gain more and more human emotions, human physical features, and is basically becoming a human being. Our heroine decides, “What better thing to do than to groom this blob into the perfect boyfriend?”So it doesn’t go that well, at least initially, in many ways, like her, trying to teach this blob to be a person ends up sort of revealing a lot of the ways in which she is not a very good person — whether that means her job, her personal relationships, her family, her friendships. The more she tries to sort of teach this alien entity how to be a human being, she really ends up teaching herself how to be one. — Theresa Phung