The Phoenix Pencil Company

By Allison King
** Publication Date 3 June 2025 **
​4.5 stars


A pencil is just a pencil to most of us. In Shanghai back before WWII, there was a family that had the ability to perform magic with pencils. It’s almost a lost art, until Monica Tsai wants to help her grandmother remember her past and wants to gather her grandmother’s stories before it’s too late.


Monica is a software engineer working on a project that links people through social media posts. She decides to try the software to reconnect her grandmother Yun with her long lost cousin Meng. What she uncovers leads her to a college student, Louise. It will be Louise that has the key to getting Yun and Meng back together. 


Yun grew up in Shanghai with her mother at their family’s pencil company. One day her cousin Meng arrives with her mother to stay with Yun and her mother. Yun doesn’t want her there and does everything she can to discourage a friendship with Meng. When a practical joke turns on Yun, she finds out that Meng knows family secrets that Yun doesn’t. 


Really beautiful story about pre-Communist Shanghai, Taiwan, and those whose families were torn apart by war and politics. Monica’s journal entries are interwoven with correspondence from Yun to Meng, piecing together the history of Monica’s ancestors. It’s so beautifully written. This novel wonderfully weaves the past and the present together into a cohesive story about families and the stories they share or hide. 


Long, but incredible read.