A Quitter's Paradise

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In terms of story arc, the first two-thirds or so was quite strong and kept me engaged, but then the last third of the story got a bit muddled and abstract, to the point that, in the end, I felt lost and was no longer sure I knew where the author was trying to go with the story. A masterpiece that wrangles several lifetimes of wisdom, loss, and heartbreak into a slim novel you can clutch to your chest, pass on to your sharpest, most mercurial friends, and say: read this, feel this! Rather than confront her grief and the ways she’s complicated her own life, she allows her actions to put her job and relationship in jeopardy.

Women make choices to get themselves ahead by forging practical relationships and marrying, only to slowly be out manuevered and forced into a corner to forfeit their own work, motivations. She is an art teacher who guides Demon toward self-expression, just as his friend Tommy provokes his dawning understanding of how their world has been shaped by outside forces and what he might be able to do about it. Chang explores the surprising contours of grief and the strange shapes we makes around our grief as we heal. One of Kingsolver’s major themes, hit a little too insistently, is the contempt felt by participants in the modern capitalist economy for those rooted in older ways of life. I struggled to really get invested in this debut that explores the complicated mother-daughter relationship between an Asian American immigrant and her daughter and the grief that comes when she dies unexpectedly.In sum, I wouldn’t recommend this novel and would encourage you to check out the titles I linked above, or other higher quality books, instead.

The narrative alternates between a past and present timeline, with the present one told from Eleanor’s first person perspective, covering her adult life where she and her husband Ellis are both scientists working on their PhDs.

Her short works have been published in Center for Fiction Magazine, Fence, GQ, The Rumpus, and others. In this way, she could become what her mother Rita “ envisioned a modern scholar to be: someone actively engaged in disappearing, in self-effacing, someone hermited within themselves… Eleanor never corrected mistakes, never offered opinions, convictions, suggestions, clarifications. Their relationship seems to have been mildly strained in the beginning, but it becomes increasingly obvious to me that Eleanor is struggling with the impacts of her mother’s death, leading to some of the decision she makes throughout the novel.

Narisa was a wild child who mostly did as she pleased, even if it meant hurting others in the process (especially Eleanor, whom she bullied and ridiculed relentlessly). It’s not necessary to have read Dickens’ famous novel to appreciate Kingsolver’s absorbing tale, but those who have will savor the tough-minded changes she rings on his Victorian sentimentality while affirming his stinging critique of a heartless society. Throughout the book, we readers watch Eleanor make impulsive decisions that she can’t even understand or explain to herself. While the immigrant experience sections felt a bit clichéd to the core, I found Eleanor parents' backstory (Jing and Rita) very compelling.A bittersweet family saga about a young woman from a second generation immigrant family coping with her mother’s death. This immigrant American story about the struggles of a Chinese family as they try to fit in, is thought-provoking and took time to read and contemplate.