BLOB: A Love Story, by Maggie Su

Maggie Su’s debut novel, “Blob,” is a semi-surreal exploration of love, loneliness and coming of age. Vi, a 24-year-old half-Asian college dropout in a Midwestern town, struggles with disconnection and self-discovery while working the front desk at a budget hotel. One rainy night, she encounters a strange creature that might be a blobfish — “a beige gelatin splotch the size of a dinner plate” — outside a dive bar.

Eventually she takes the blob home, and learns it is not a fish. Eventually she names the blob Bob, and eventually Bob the blob turns into Bob the human, with “muscular tree-trunk legs, washboard abs, hips,” great equipment, blue eyes and movie-star good looks inspired by the pictures Vi shows him of Brad Pitt, Ryan Gosling, George Clooney, Leonardo DiCaprio and Hugh Grant. Their early days are spent idling on the couch, watching lots of reality TV, competitive cooking shows, “Jeopardy!” and, just once, porn. Idling because the blob grows his legs last. Idling also because Vi is at a low point in her life.

Bob comes to Vi at a crucial time, a charming antidote to her mundane obligations and psychological detachment. She’s recently been dumped by Luke, a “generic white man” who takes photos of her in which she “almost didn’t recognize myself,” looking “very sad and very Asian, like I’m being sold as a geisha and will eventually commit suicide to bring honor back to my family.” Her Taiwanese father and white mother, while generally supportive, don’t fully grasp her identity struggles, and her sense of rootlessness is further exacerbated when she belatedly learns her parents have sold her childhood home without telling her.

At Hillside Inn and Suites (the first job she’s had for longer than three months) she plays solitaire to avoid her overly cheerful co-worker, their painfully awkward assistant manager and various demanding, clueless clients. She befriends another misfit named Elliott, a “Chinese drag queen frat bro lawyer” who hasn’t come out to his family and hilariously recruits Vi to be his “beard.”