The Phoenix Pencil Company by Allison King

Book Description

Monica Tsai spends most days on her computer, journaling the details of her ordinary life and coding for a program that seeks to connect strangers online. A self-proclaimed recluse, she’s struggled to make friends. As a college freshman, she finds herself escaping into a digital world, counting the days until she can return home to her beloved grandparents. They are now in their nineties, and Monica worries about them constantly—especially her grandmother, Yun, whose memory has begun to fade.

Though Yun rarely speaks of her past, Monica is determined to find the long-lost cousin she was separated from years ago. One day, the very program Monica is helping to build connects her to a young woman, whose gift of a single pencil holds a surprising clue.

Review

Some stories reach straight into your heart and find the tender parts you didn’t know you carried. The Phoenix Pencil Company is one of those books. It’s a quiet, beautiful exploration of memory, identity, and how love can endure even when words fade.

The story’s magic isn’t about creating something new; it’s about remembering. It centers on the way writing and memory intertwine. In how the past can still speak, if we’re willing to listen.

I loved the idea of the echoes of words and emotions pressed into graphite. It’s a kind of magic rooted in empathy.

Listening instead of speaking, receiving instead of inventing.

The idea moved me deeply. As someone who writes about art-based magic, I recognized the same tension between preservation and transformation. The eternal conflict of holding on and letting go.

I also felt a strong kinship with its themes of cultural inheritance. As someone who’s half Japanese and writes a protagonist with Japanese ancestry, I appreciated how King portrayed identity. She wrote it as something quiet and lived-in rather than performative.

But what stayed with me most was the book’s portrayal of memory loss and the delicate, painful love that surrounds it. My stepmother is experiencing progressive memory loss. Reading this story made me ache in a familiar, complicated way. The mix of grief and tenderness that comes from watching someone you love slowly drift between past and present.

The Phoenix Pencil Company reminded me that remembering is an act of love. And sometimes, how the stories we keep alive for others become part of our own.

Content Warning

Abandonment, Alzheimer’s, Betrayal, Blood, Dementia, Government coercion, Grief, LGBTQ+ Romance, Memory loss, Self-harm, Sexual Content, Violence, War

The header photo is a composite image. Base image by Avrora Bch on Unsplash