Bolaki, Stella. Unsettling the Bildungsroman: Reading Contemporary Ethnic American Women’s Fiction.

Dense and thoroughly researched, Stella Bolaki’s Unsettling the Bildungsroman: Reading Contemporary Ethnic American Women’s Fiction attempts to “open up more space for debate around the Bildungsroman by examining its intersection with life-writing forms that seem unable to coexist harmoniously with it,” as Bolaki mentions in her introduction (13). More specifically, the book focuses on four well-known ethnic American women writers and their stories of trauma, death, disrupted movement, margin...