The Many Misfortunes of Eugenia Wang - Stan Yan - ★★

AUTHOR: Stan Yan

GENRE: Middle-grade Graphic Novel.

PUBLICATION DATE: September 30, 2025

RATING: 2 stars.

In a Nutshell: A middle-grade graphic novel about a Chinese-American girl who suddenly gets premonitions about the future. The storyline is a bit weird, with some of the darker content left unexplained. The characterisation is also overly stereotypical for the Asian mom. I liked bits and pieces of this book, but as a whole, it didn’t come together for me. Mine is an outlier review.

Plot Preview:

Twelve-year-old Eugenia harbours dreams of becoming an artist. But her mom is adamant that Eugenia choose a more stable and secure career path. Eugenia also wants to celebrate her birthday on the actual date, but as 4 is an unlucky number in Chinese culture, Eugenia never gets her wish. This year, Eugenia is determined not just to have a birthday party on the 4th but also to apply for a summer art camp scholarship.

When Eugenia gets hit on the head with a sneaker during PE class, she suddenly starts getting visions of a major fire on her birthday. The fire stays constant in the visions, but the casualties keep changing. Is it some hallucination because of her head injury? Or is someone trying to warn her against celebrating her birthday on the 4th?

The story comes to us in Eugenia’s first-person perspective.

Bookish Yays:

🌸 The friendship between Eugenia and her best friend and neighbour Keisha. Loved their bond and also the banter.

🌸 Keisha is Black and has two dads, both of whom are active in her upbringing. Despite Eugenia’s mom being negative about everything, she never comments on Keisha’s race or her parental situation. Nice to see this normalised depiction of mixed-race friendship and same-sex parenting.

🌸 The artwork. The colours are great. Reality is shown in bright pastel hues while Eugenia’s scary dream is in monochrome shades of fiery red. The characters are also decent. I like how the Chinese characters weren’t drawn in clichéd style of oval faces and slit-like eyes.

Bookish Mixed Bags:

🌹 Eugenia as a character. I felt sorry for her, but I also felt a bit annoyed at her behaviour in a few scenes. Tough to like a middle-grade character unconditionally when they are setting a bad precedent, no matter how valid their reasons are.

🌹 The heartfelt conversation Eugenia has with her younger brother in the second half of the book. Shows a realistic issue faced by siblings. If only this understanding and empathy wasn’t limited to a single scene.

Bookish Nays:

🌵 Too many subtopics. The result hence feels a bit too cluttered.

🌵 The portrayal of Eugenia’s mom – so horribly and hyperbolically stereotypical! I get that some Asian moms are genuinely like that, but as this is fiction, there ought to have been some redeeming points as well. Without this, that turnaround at the end feels too instant and unconvincing.

🌵 The depiction of the tussle over lucrative career choices. Most Asian moms get the bad rap for wanting their kids to be only highly-rated professionals such as doctors, engineers and lawyers. But the rationale is that of financial security, all the more valid in case of immigrant parents who have slogged for their family’s happiness and want more for their kids in the new country of residence. Showing a one-sided picture isn't justified. It plays further into the stereotypes.

🌵 Not much depth to the remaining characters. They shine in some scenes, but on the whole, I didn’t feel like I got to know them at all.

🌵 The writing about the “crush”, filled with heart eyes and dreamy looks. Never a fan of romantic tingles being included in middle-grade fiction.

🌵 Eugenia’s bad dream. Quite interesting how it changes in the subtle details each time. The recurrent dreams have a clearly spooky vibe, but the rationale behind the dreams and their altered details is never clarified. Moreover, they stop as suddenly as they started, with no explanation about how the sneaker hit triggered the nightmares or who was responsible, or why they appeared only to Eugenia. I hated that there is no explanation of any kind – real or occult – provided to those scenes.

🌵 The Ouija board scene. Not comfortable with its inclusion in this book, especially as it was overly convenient and underutilised.

🌵 So many communication issues! Half of Eugenia’s and her mom’s issues would have been sorted early had they spoken honestly to each other. But the book rarely capitalises on the scenes with potential for heartfelt discussion.

🌵 The ending. Abrupt and lacking in clarifications.

Overall, I had expected to love this book far more, but the repetitive plotline, the lack of resolution, and the abhorrent portrayal of Eugenia’s mom (I expected much better of an OwnVoices work!) didn’t endear the book to me. It has its moments, but on the whole, I wouldn’t count it as an enjoyable reading experience for me.

The Goodreads rating for this middle-graphic novel is quite high. (4.46 stars at the time of writing.) So mine, the only 2-star rating so far, is very much an outlier opinion. Please read the other reviews before you take a call on this work.

Recommended to those interested in an OwnVoices graphic novel of a young girl’s dilemma and are okay about not getting all the answers.

My thanks to Simon and Schuster Children's Publishing and Atheneum Books for Young Readers for providing the DRC of “The Many Misfortunes of Eugenia Wang” via NetGalley. This review is voluntary and contains my honest opinion about the book. Sorry this didn’t work out better.