Book Review — Blob: A Love Story. With her debut novel, author Maggie Su…

By Sarah Stege

Blob: A Love Story, Maggie Su’s debut novel, was published by HarperCollins in January 2025, but don’t be deceived by the title. Blob is not a romance…it’s something else entirely.

Vi Liu, a college dropout and hotel receptionist, finds a sentient blob and shapes him into her dream boyfriend. Su uses dry, often dark humor that reads like live access into Vi’s sarcastic mind.

Blob abandons the tropes of a romance novel for a bildungsroman with a singular surreal element. Blob will appeal to readers who enjoy weird, genre-bending fiction.

When Vi finds the blob outside a bar, its sad beady black eyes move her hardened heart — slightly softened by alcohol at this point — and she takes it home. At first, she thinks of her role as more of a foster parent to the blob. But when she discovers that it takes very literally her command to “give me a hand” and begins to take the shape of a human, she begins to form the blob into her ideal partner.

With a slip of Vi’s tongue, the blob becomes Bob, the ironic symbol of normalcy she wants for herself: considerate and likeable — not self-centered and aimless like herself.

Su braids past and present in Blob, using memories of Vi’s ex, family interactions, and her childhood mistakes to explore her personality and desires.

In other people — both her current and past acquaintances — Vi sees and envies her definition of normal: her bubbly coworker Rachel, her successful pediatrician brother Alex and her ex-boyfriend Luke, of whom she says:

I always thought the easy way he existed in the world would rub off on me, but I was never as capable as him. Every winter he helped pull cars out of the snow with his truck and tow chain. He called the cable company when our internet went out. He was strong enough to wrap his arms around me and squeeze all the air out of my body. The world was meant for him.

She refers to him as a “golden boy” and uses the same title for a friend who fears his parents won’t love him so much if they find out he is gay. What Vi sees as familial love turns out to be a façade. Although she doesn’t hide most of her unglamorous moments from her family, Vi does conceal secrets to keep her family’s already-negative perception of her from going any lower.

Every character helps the reader see Vi better, usually by what she is not.

Vi fits no molds. She’s pessimistic, heartless even, but her childhood offers no trauma to explain this. She’s half Vietnamese, but her parents didn’t push her to be an overachiever, so she doesn’t fit the stereotype of an Asian academic superstar. Nor does she fit the friendly Midwesterner stereotype. She considers herself unattractive, unkind, and otherwise unlikeable.

Her apartment is a mess, her fridge desperately needs a deep clean, and her response to problems flip-flops between alcohol and sober sarcasm; this is only a glimpse of the mess she’s turned her life into.

A book full of contradictions and broken tropes may not seem universally appealing. First off, for readers averse to 243 pages of sarcastic and pessimistic commentary, Blob is a no-go. One flashback takes the reader to the night before Vi and Luke broke up. When he said, “You’re smothering me,” she side-stepped conflict with sarcasm: “‘That’s an easy fix,’ I said. My voice was high and loud, like the scrape of a bumper on blacktop. ‘We’ll get rid of the pillows. I can’t smother you without pillows.’”

This dialogue contains compact wit, whereas most of the novel uses moments of dry humor, along with comical imagery: “I imagine [Bob] collapsing like an overcooked souffle, deconstructing into something even less than a blob, just a trickle of liquid on my parents’ new floor.” Vi’s sarcasm defines her tone throughout the novel, in both her conversation and narration.

The humor is just one of many elements that make Blob an original debut. Loneliness and connection, identity and culture, control and freedom — these are the issues of real life that Blob doesn’t shy away from. From the vantage point of her “puke-yellow” rug, Vi realizes, “There’s things you don’t notice until you’re on the ground — the cobwebs in the corners, the dead beetle under the couch.”

For readers who long for the rock-bottom perspective that most novels neglect, Blob is the book.

About the reviewer: Sarah Stege is an undergraduate at Lakeland University and editor-in-chief of Lakeland’s student news site, The Mirror.