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What happens when Reese Witherspoon picks your book? A Cambridge author explains.
Allison King’s debut novel, “The Phoenix Pencil Company,” was just named the June pick for Reese's Book Club.
Cambridge-based author Allison King is making waves with her debut novel “The Phoenix Pencil Company,” which has just been named the June 2025 pick for Reese’s Book Club.
King, who has lived in the Boston area since 2015 and settled in Cambridge in 2019, is also a 2023 LitUp fellow – a program launched by actress Reese Witherspoon’s media company, Hello Sunshine, to uplift emerging voices in literature.
The fellowship, which launched in 2020, supports unpublished women and nonbinary writers through a fully funded retreat, mentorship with a published author, and marketing support from the book club.
Reese’s Book Club was founded in 2017, and is one of many celebrity book clubs that have launched previously unknown or debut authors to stardom. RBC praised the novel as a “deeply personal, thought-provoking” read, noting that it’s the first RBC selection written by a LitUp fellow.
“The Phoenix Pencil Company” follows college freshman Monica Tsai, a quiet coder and devoted granddaughter, as she uncovers long-buried family secrets. When she discovers that her grandmother, Yun – who fled war-torn Shanghai in the 1940s – once worked at the Phoenix Pencil Company, Monica’s journey into the past begins. What she finds is a magical family secret: the ability of the women in their family to “reforge” pencils, reviving the memories contained in the words once written with them.
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Blending fantasy, history, and emotional depth, King’s novel explores identity, legacy, and the mysterious forces that connect generations. Described as part cross-generational family saga, part magical tale, the book has drawn comparisons to Ruth Ozeki’s “A Tale for the Time Being” and Matt Haig’s “The Midnight Library.”
Boston.com talked with King about her debut novel, getting picked by Reese’s Book Club, and more.
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Responses have been edited for length and clarity.
What is “The Phoenix Pencil Company” about?
Allison King: The book is about a pencil company. Half of the book is set in 1940s, 1950s Shanghai at a pencil company that is afloat during the many wars that are going on at the time. They make pencils, and the magic is that the family can secretly revive what a pencil has once written before. So if I had written a diary entry with a pencil, and then I left the pencil around, and somebody in this family got a hold of the pencil, they could basically figure out what I had written.
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It kind of opens up a lot of possibilities. It’s both a cool power and also a kind of sinister one. That’s what I wanted to explore there.
There are two main characters in the book. There’s Monica, who is 18- or 19-years-old. She’s in college, and she is home for the semester in the Boston area to take care of her grandparents, who are in their 90s. Her grandmother has just been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s and that’s why she’s home for the semester to help her grandparents out. Monica is a software engineer and she’s working on this project and hoping that it will help her reconnect her grandmother with her grandmother’s long lost cousin.
The other main character is her grandmother, Yun, and she tells her story from the 1940s and 50s about her and her cousin growing up in this pencil company. I also grew up with my grandparents, and my grandmother also had Alzheimer’s. Monica is dealing with it when she’s 19 or so, whereas I went through it when I was much younger, from elementary school to high school.
This book was a way to process the relationship I had with my grandmother, who I was very close to. It was this weird feeling of me growing up and understanding the world as she declined.
What’s your life like as a writer and author?
I’ve been writing since I was a kid, just random stories. After college, I started taking it a little more seriously, and I was writing short stories mostly, and trying to submit them to various short story markets and working on novels at more or less the same time. That was always something that I did, along with my full time job as a software engineer – honestly, doing it like weekends at night.
How did the idea for the story come about? What was some of your inspiration?
The thing that really sparked it for me was reading this book called “Last Boat Out of Shanghai” by Helen Zia. It’s a non-fiction book that follows people who fled Shanghai during the 1940s and 1950s.
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My grandparents lived through that time period and also left China during that time. I began to imagine what their story was, but I kind of fantasized about this family that has a pencil company, and they are going through all the other real world events that are depicted in the non-fiction that I had just read.
The other half of the book follows Monica and her adventures in Cambridge. I was kind of intimidated by all of the research I had to do for the historical parts, so I wanted Monica’s sections to be very familiar. She lives in Cambridge because I live in Cambridge, she does a lot of similar things to me – that’s why she’s also a software engineer. Her story is more about coming to terms with both her grandmother’s memory loss and also her work in technology.
Are there any local Cambridge or Boston spots featured in the book?
Her grandfather is a former MIT professor. At one point, she and her love interest bike through Cambridge a bit and they see some turkeys. They go to the Charles River, and they kind of hang out around there. They also go to South Station.
You are the first LitUp fellow to be picked for Reese’s Book Club. What made you apply to the fellowship?
At one point I saw that Reese’s Book Club had this fellowship opportunity, and I figured I’d apply. There’ve been lots of things that I’ve applied for that I haven’t gotten. This was kind of the same thing, saying “Oh, I’ll apply to this, and we’ll just see what happens.” This one was pretty unique, because they wanted you to submit your whole manuscript that you had so far.
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One of the requirements was that your main character or the story has to be about a woman going through something (because that’s typically the kind of books that Reese’s Book Club chooses). I figured mine fit that.
I submitted it, and it was quite a few months before they got back and said that I was in. So that was really cool. But before that, I was just using the deadline of the fellowship to even get my manuscript done or in a place that seemed presentable.
How was the fellowship experience?
It was really cool. Reese’s Book Club has a lot of authors, and so I think they just asked their existing community if any of those authors wanted to be a mentor. Not only are you paired with an established author, you’re paired with an established Reese’s Book Club author, which is pretty cool. I was paired with Adrienne Young whose book “Fable” had been chosen by Reese’s Book Club a few years back. We were paired because we were both working in fantasy settings.
Take me to the moment when you found out that your book was going to be the June pick for Reese’s Book Club.
It’s a little hard to describe. I knew it was being submitted to the various book clubs and I think because I was a LitUp fellow, we all kind of hoped that [Reese’s Book Club] might be interested in the book, or at least they already knew about it. I think that gave me a bit of a step up, but it was definitely not a certain thing. At some point I thought, maybe they won’t want to take any of their LitUp fellows.
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At that point, it was January. My editor sent me a pretty cryptic email, something like ‘Can you get on a phone call?’ And she’s never really done that before. I got on the phone call…And they told me the news. I was in the middle of my work day, as I’m still doing software, so it was kind of a great surprise.
It was excitement mixed with nervousness about more people knowing about the book. I had a lot of mixed feelings, but mostly happy and very grateful and excited to work with the Reese’s Book Club team.
In 2019, Vox wrote an article about the power of celebrity book clubs like Reese’s “to catapult titles to the top of the bestseller lists.” How do you feel on the precipice of all of this?
I remember when I talked to Adrienne [Young] during our fellowship and she told me that Reese’s Book Club changed everything for her. She had other books before that didn’t do as well, and then this one got picked and it helped all her previous book sales as well. It just really changed her life. I don’t have previous texts, but I think regardless, things will probably be different, and I’m not quite sure what to expect yet.
If you had a magical pencil in real life, is there a specific memory or moment you’d want to revisit?
I’d love to see some of the stories I used to write as a kid, to see what they were like. I think a kid’s imagination is just so different, and it’d be cool to relive some of that.
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