Drawing on recent debates in globalization studies and Asian American studies, and developing the insights of scholars concerned with transnational, diasporic, postcolonial and cosmopolitan themes, Eleanor Ty skilfully negotiates an array of discourses in her lucid analysis of experiences of movement in a selection of important yet often overlooked contemporary Asian North American narratives. While these experiences are fundamental to North American literary history, variations in their portrayal – for example, adventure, exploration, escape and displacement – depend on racial and immigration histories in America and Canada, and, increasingly, globalization. A global economy dominated by transnational corporations profiting from increased efficiency in the movement of capital, goods, services, information, people, behaviours and beliefs reproduces, as Ty observes, globality. She describes globality as an “unfastened” condition in which subjectivities and borders have become “loosened, opened, or detached,” while “critical globality” comprises narratives that “interrogate, critique, and sometimes playfully engage with the effects of globalized conditions” that both “constrain” and “empower” Asian North Americans (xxi, xiii, xxviii).

After elucidating key terms and theoretical paradigms in relation to the diversity of Asian North American identities and locations under globalized conditions, Ty organizes Unfastened into three main parts, with two chapters apiece, all but her first chapter, “The 1.5 Generation,” and conclusion featuring previously unpublished material.

In Part One, “Doing Global Dirty Work,” Ty analyzes negative experiences of movement for Filipino immigrants to the US in Brian Roley's American Son and Han Ong's Fixer Chao, and for female Asian sex workers in Lydia Kwa's This Place Called Absence and Nora Okja Keller's Fox Girl. As dirty and violent as their work is, Ty notes that the protagonists in all four of these novels do experience some level of empowerment or “recuperation” through crime and desire that contributes to their survival.

In Part Two, “Performing and Negotiating Transcultural Identities,” Ty's focus is generically and critically speaking more “playful.” Betty Quan's and Sunil Kuruvilla's plays, Mother Tongue and Rice Boy, dramatize how experiences of movement are complicated not only by race but also by disability. Set in the global city of Toronto, Nina Aquino and Nadine Villasin's play Miss Orient(ed) and Deepa Mehta's film Bollywood/Hollywood utilize comedy and the carnivalesque to critique or “twist” the global American ideal of “the pretty woman,” specifically beauty-pageant Barbie Dolls and Pretty Woman's Cinderella character, warning of its dangers to Asian North American women and, in the film especially, recognizing the “vibrancy,” as opposed to loss, “of being between worlds” (77, 86).

In Part Three, “Future Perfect: Feminist Resistance to Global Homogeneity,” Ty responds to a shift in Asian North American narratives from realism to fantasy. Chitra Divakaruni's The Mistress of Spices and Larissa Lai's Salt Fish Girl feature shape-shifting protagonists who transport Asian myths into contemporary and futuristic American cityscapes as a “tactic” to “thwart” rigid expectations regarding genre and gender (xxxvi). Hiromi Goto's science fiction fantasy The Kappa Child and Ruth Ozeki's ecocritical novel All Over Creation also employ this tactic, albeit in relation to the model-minority stereotype. These two novels also move beyond identity politics towards “organic politics,” with Ty claiming that Goto and Ozeki are “uneasy about the well-being of our planet” (120, 128).

“Coda: Rethinking the Hyphen” concludes Ty's engaging and exciting analysis of globality and Asian North American narratives, her final chapter offering thought-provoking questions about the relevance of “hyphenated” terms such as Asian American and Asian Canadian vis-à-vis globalization. Although unwilling to relinquish the hyphen, mainly for reasons of antiracist critique, Ty proposes “Asian global” as a “model of the geography of identity” responsive to “the increasingly transnational, transcultural, and fluid potential that is seen in many recent works” by Asian global authors, Salman Rushdie, Shyam Selvadurai and Michael Ondaatje among them (132, 133, 141).