Next Time Will Be Our Turn was the perfect book to read on an airplane, because so much of it involves characters travelling from one country to another, reflecting on what makes a home a home and what it means to live somewhere that doesn’t have room for their whole self. Fair warning, though: it did make me cry in public at a few points.
We start in the POV of Izzy, a 16-year-old Chinese-Indonesian girl living in Jakarta, as she prepares to face the trial of her large wealthy family’s Chinese New Year party. The night is thrown into complete chaos, however, when her nainai—her 73-year-old grandmother and the family matriarch—shows up with a white woman on her arm. And kisses said white woman. Barely a year after the death of Nainai’s husband of fifty years. The whole family is scandalized, except for Izzy, who has been keeping her own queerness a secret due to the cultural and social homophobia that persists in Indonesia. Unhappy, she goes for a late-night walk after the party and encounters Nainai, who tells Izzy her life story.
Most of the rest of the book is in Nainai’s—Magnolia’s—POV, as she takes us back to the distant past of the mid-’90s. (Yes, we’re apparently in the near future. It’s never explicitly stated but Magnolia is 13 in 1995 and 73 at the start of Izzy’s narrative, so 2055 it is. More on this later.) First Magnolia’s older sister Iris and then Magnolia herself are sent from Indonesia to L.A. to attend college, where the goal is more for them to attract husbands than learn anything. But when Magnolia arrives on campus, the first person she speaks to is a strangely compelling white woman named Ellery. As a 16-year-old “FOB” (fresh off the boat) from Indonesia, Magnolia doesn’t understand why she finds herself so drawn to Ellery, or why it makes her feel so funny to learn Ellery has a girlfriend—Magnolia is in America to find a husband, after all.
Magnolia’s story is not just about Ellery, or internalized heteronormativity, or the American immigrant experience. Her relationship with Iris is the main driver of the plot. Ellery and Magnolia’s other relationships—including with the man Magnolia ultimately marries—are important to Magnolia’s development from a naïve teenager into a young woman determined to run her own life, but it’s Iris who’s the most important part of Magnolia’s history. The two swing together and apart, hopscotching from Jakarta to California and back again as life takes them in different directions, until they are tied together once and for all.
I loved watching the slow development of Magnolia’s self-awareness and her queerness, and, though it was infuriating from a feminist perspective, the way she learns to weaponize societal misogyny to manipulate her husband and family into doing what she wants. The tension between a family who expects her to marry a man, her own desire to take control of her life, her feelings for Ellery, and her other familial responsibilities kept me reading eagerly. I did not expect the climax or the revelations at the end, but I cheered for Magnolia the whole way through.
The only aspect of the book that I didn’t whole-heartedly love was the near-future setting. It’s nice to see a book about a queer family member passing their wisdom down to a younger generation, and it was a trip to revisit the ‘90s and the societal homophobia of the era in North America. However, I found it threw me out of the story to have Izzy in 2055 feeling as though it was just as impossible for her to be queer as it was for Magnolia more than 50 years earlier, and their conversation barely skates over the issue. I won’t pretend to know the intricacies of queer rights in Indonesia, though I do know that they are limited, that the country has strong religious and cultural forces opposing them, and that few people are able to be openly queer there. Still, I find it hard to believe that nothing has changed since the ‘90s and now, or that there are no reasons to believe that progress might be creeping forward between now and 2055, for that matter. It’s still a fight to hang on to our rights all around the globe, but change has happened, and not exploring that made the end of the book fall a little flat for me.
Nevertheless it was a great read and a unique journey through two cultures foreign to me and to each other: ’90s California and Indonesia. Just be prepared for the ‘90s fashion flashbacks. Oh god, the bucket hats…
Thanks to NetGalley for the eARC. Next Time Will Be Our Turn is out Nov 11. Learn more and find preorder links at Penguin Random House.
Content warnings: homophobia, domestic abuse
Kathryne Slant (she/her) is a queer Canadian writer and general pop culture enthusiast. She wants to spend less time online and more time at puppy yoga. Find her @SapphosHands.bsky.social.
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