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ADOPTEE READING BOOK REVIEW
The Minimalist by Kailee Pedersen
Reviewed by Karen Pickell
The Minimalist is the second novel by Chinese adoptee Kailee Pedersen. Her first, Sacrificial Animals, was named a Best Horror Book of 2024 by the New York Times, and her new book is billed as a “gruesome and unsettling psychological drama.” I’m typically a nonfiction reader, but I was interested in trying something new and curious to see how Pedersen would weave adoption into a horror story.
The tale is told by Mia Voss, who was adopted by an American couple from an orphanage in China and who as a child was able to play classical compositions on the piano after hearing them only once. At the age of ten, Mia begins studying with a famous composer named Ryder Wakefield—best known for his early work in minimalism, a musical style featuring repetitive patterns—who becomes a father figure to her as well as her musical mentor. Ryder is the adoptive father of Oliver, a piano prodigy, who at the age of five was abandoned in America when his Korean mother returned to her homeland without him. Mia and Oliver fall in love, though their relationship also reeks of sibling rivalry.
The story centers on how Mia navigates the deaths of these two closest people in her life, whose legacy is now in her hands. Via flashbacks and Mia’s internal musing, we learn about her unsatisfactory childhood, her struggles with relationships, and her feelings about her own adoption.
Mia is filled with self-loathing which drives her to harm herself physically in an attempt to remove her flaws. From an early age, she has fixated on the real-life composer Carlo Gesualdo, who in 1590 murdered and mutilated his adulterous wife and her lover and whose subsequent musical compositions are said to express his tortuous guilt. The Minimalist careens into the supernatural when a drop of Mia’s blood manifests a new line of written music. She is driven by an unquenchable need to succeed, to be seen. She is imprisoned by what she feels she owes Ryder and Oliver.
Throughout The Minimalist, I noticed references to the adoptee experience that I recognized from my own life as well as from the true stories of Asian American adoptees. Pedersen has done a thorough job of conveying how complicated and heartbreaking it can be to go through life as a transnational, transracial adopted person. In the characters of Mia and Oliver, she describes the synergies as well as the conflicts that adopted people can have with each other. And she has also included a well-rounded cast of adoptive and birth parents to represent a myriad of familial experiences.
I was distressed, though, by an overarching sense of hopelessness in this novel. I am not generally one who favors trigger warnings, but in this case I do think that one is warranted. There are many vivid descriptions of self-harm in The Minimalist. While I recognize that violence is a hallmark of horror stories, and I admit that I’m a newbie to this genre, I do have concerns that a reader who is in a vulnerable state of mind might feel overwhelmed.
Pedersen has a degree in Classics, specializing in ancient Greek, and she is also an opera singer. Those influences are apparent in The Minimalist via numerous references to the story of Apollo and the satyr Marsyas as well as the opera Madama Butterfly, both of which have gruesome endings. Ryder also refers to Mia as his Rachel, referencing La Juive (The Jewess), another opera with a tragic ending, making it clear that this novel likewise is intended to be read as a tragedy.
The structure of the novel itself echoes the minimalist music described within, with its layering of repeated patterns of thought that propelled me forward and kept me wanting to read more. In addition to classical music and adoption, issues around Jewish heritage and LGBTQ identity are explored. Overall, I found The Minimalist to be a fascinatingly complex psychological exploration that I’ll be thinking about for a long time.