The Phoenix Pencil Company by Allison King

This was another miss for me from the Reese Witherspoon book choices--which is not the norm at all, but I am on an unfortunate streak. The Phoenix Pencil Company is essentially told via diary entries, whether electronic, handwritten, or magically recorded, split primarily between two perspective characters. One is a contemporary computer science student, working with a professor to code an app that connects people based on common interests expressed in social media posts and diary entries. The other is her grandmother, who had worked alongside her mother, aunt, and cousin at a magical pencil factory during World War Two before immigrating to Taiwan and eventually America. When the app puts one of the leads in contact with another university student who had met her grandmother’s cousin, it triggers frantic remembering on the part of her grandmother and a bit of romance on her own part, with both stories heavily seasoned with difficult questions about the ethics of privacy and preservation. There are a lot of good points about the story, and it is written competently, but it just didn't hold together for me.