The Phoenix Pencil Company by Allison King is a luminous debut novel that weaves together memory, technology, and family legacy into a quietly magical story. It follows Monica Tsai, a socially withdrawn college freshman who prefers coding and journaling over trying to make friends. While working on a digital platform designed to connect strangers, Monica is constantly preoccupied with thoughts of her elderly grandparents, especially her grandmother Yun. Yun’s memory is beginning to fade, and she is determined to find a cousin she was separated from long ago.
Everything changes when Monica’s program connects her to a stranger whose simple gift of a pencil carries an unexpected secret. That single object becomes the key to a long-hidden story, one that stretches across decades and continents. Through letters and fragments of memory, Monica begins to uncover Yun’s past, from her life in wartime Shanghai and her work at the Phoenix Pencil Company to her eventual journey to Taiwan and California.
At the center of this story is a unique form of magic: a family’s tradition of embedding secret messages into pencils, messages that can only be revealed through a process of reforging. This quiet enchantment never overtakes the emotional core of the novel. Instead, it deepens the sense of connection between generations and highlights the need we all share to preserve the stories that matter.
The novel beautifully balances emotional realism with an imaginative premise, using the epistolary form to explore multiple layers of love, loss, and legacy. What lingers most is the deeply human urge to be remembered and to pass down the truth of who we are. The Phoenix Pencil Company is not just a story about the past, it is a celebration of the fragile but powerful threads that bind us to one another.
Releasing July 22 from William Morrow, this is a novel that will resonate with anyone who has ever held onto a memory, a keepsake, or a story, hoping it might last.
