AWA Book Review: Until Even the Angels by Suzanne Scott Tomita (2024)

By Mandakini Arora

Until Even the Angels, by AWA member Suzanne Scott Tomita (see Member Spotlight, this issue), is a mystery novel that inventively tells a story of an underprivileged girl’s coming of age in colonial Singapore. 

Mei Mei, an unwanted baby thrown into the waters off Penang in 1938, is rescued by Ling Li. Later, a “Jesus lady” finds the two of them work in Singapore as domestic staff in the black and white house of Tessa and Angus Hamilton. Angus’s niece Honour arrives to live with the Hamiltons and Mei Mei and she become friends — though Mei Mei is sharply aware of their unequal circumstances. Young teenagers, both girls are attracted to Pash, the nephew of the Hamiltons’ Tamil maid.

The story fast-forwards to 1999 London. Mei Mei, whose name is now Isabelle Goh, has been shot in the head. Detective Ayesha Nur is on her case. It emerges that Isabelle is implicated in a web of international intrigue. 

Moving backward and forward in time and across places, the story alternates fluidly between Mei Mei’s first-person account of her childhood and a third-person narration of the London investigation. 

Intersecting with real history, the fictional narrative draws in Maria Hertogh, a Dutch Eurasian girl adopted by a Malay woman during the Second World War. She was claimed by her biological parents in 1949. The Singapore Supreme Court ruled for her to be returned to them and riots erupted in 1950, as many Muslims protested the judgement. In Until Even the Angels, Tessa and Angus are killed in the riots (no spoiler — the book’s back cover mentions this). Their baby daughter, Rosie, disappears, her whereabouts becoming a matter of suspense in the later part of the novel, along with the question of who shot Isabelle Goh.

The book is boldly imaginative, touching on history, crime, coming of age, sexual predatoriness, race and class divides in a colonial society, adoption, mental health, and transnational nexuses of domestic labor. Various strands of the story tie together neatly at the end although, intrigued by some characters, I wished I could have known them in greater depth. 

Suzanne’s prose is elegant, often poetic — when Mei Mei describes people and situations in colors, sounds, and smells, for instance. Words on the radio are variously “the color of charcoal” and “ignite[d] to a burnt orange.” Mei Mei’s greenish brown envy is “the color of tripe before it is boiled.” The Hamiltons’ neighbor smells of “anger and power and danger,” his name “an angry sound, like an outdoor garden chair being dragged across flagstones.”

Until Even the Angels is an easy read, with characters whose motivations and actions offer much scope for speculation and for animated discussion in book clubs.

---

Mandakini Arora co-chairs the Writers’ Group of the American Women’s Association, Singapore, and reviews books for their online magazine. As travelling_bookmark, she shares book news on Instagram. With a PhD in History from Duke University and an MA in Creative Writing from LASALLE College of the Arts, she is a collector and writer of women’s stories. She welcomes comments on the books she reviews at  mandakinni@gmail.com