The Epic Crush of Genie Lo

The Epic Crush of Genie Lo is a fantasy novel by the American writer F. C. Yee, published in 2017.

Genie Lo is one of the many Ivy-hopeful overachievers in her quiet suburb in the Bay Area, and the kind who wins. When she is not playing volleyball she is working at her books, and at the question of how to get into Harvard, which is the thing she is really aiming at.

All of that is rearranged when her home town is besieged by hellspawn taken straight out of Chinese folklore. A new student in her class, Quentin Sun, becomes her self-appointed guide to fighting the demons. To Genie he is an attractive transfer student with an oddly formal command of English, and in another reality he is Sun Wukong, the Monkey King, down to the fur and the taste for peaches.

What he insists on is that Genie has an inner power of her own, strong enough to level the gates of Heaven, and that she has to summon it. The fate of her friends, her family and the whole Bay Area depends on her doing so, and every second she spends working out what she really is is a second in which the people she loves are in danger.