Ponti by Sharlene Teo is about a sixteen year old girl who tries to cope with her mother’s death. In Singapore in 2003, Szu lived with her mother, Amisa, and her aunt, Yunxi, in an old decaying mansion. Amisa was once a beautiful actress but now her roles look a bit different. She pretends to be a medium and performs séances for income.
Szu has no friends and her father abandoned the family at a young age. Therefore when Szu meets the abrasive and wealthy Circe (who also leads a lonely life), the pair form an unlikely bond that develops into an intense friendship. Szu’s friendship with Circe offers her a way to escape from her mother’s abuse and her loneliness.
Seventeen years later, the two friends have grown apart. Circe is going through a divorce and struggles to keep up at work. A new project comes across her desk. They are planning to remake the cult seventies horror film “Ponti”. This was the project that has defined Amisa’s short lived film career. It is the film that Amisa still gets recognition for. Circe is taken by surprise by the new project and it brings up memories of the two women in her past. She is plagued by guilt and it consumes her conscience and her every waking moment.
The novel is narrated by young Amisa, past Szu and modern day Circe. The story has themes of friendship, family, belonging, abandonment, consequences, and memories. It also illustrates that things we do while we are on the cusp of adulthood might come back to haunt us years later.
I found the novel to be a boring and pointless read. I felt that there wasn’t any story or any character development. When the book ended, I had more questions than answers: Why did Szu's father leave? Why was Amisa so mean to her daughter?
As I kept turning pages, I was expecting the story to surface. Instead it was more and more pages of lush descriptions. I wish that the author spent more time exploring the relationships between the different female characters. I felt like the author just touched the surface level about the relationship without going in further detail. While the book was an easy and fast read, I would have preferred reading a novel that had more going on.
