I can’t say this enough: you don’t have to like the characters or their choices or think they’re good people for a book to be worth your time. What do you inherit from a mother who refused to make herself known, even to the people she loved most? In Eleanor and her family, Elysha Chang has created captivating characters, who continuously surprised, delighted, and intrigued me—so much so that I didn’t want to leave them. She is seeing another PhD candidate in the program on and off, Samir, despite being married to her husband. With multiple POVs, I also felt detached to the characters and I had expected some characters to be deepened.

This isn’t the worst book I have ever read—the author does have talent at writing—but it’s down there in the bottom fifteen percent.In the present timeline however, I couldn’t relate much to Eleanor and the outlandish decisions she made, many of which I thought were a bit over the top — so much so that I actually found her annoying, especially near the end of the story. Lito, the story’s dying protagonist, prepares his circuitous yarn by asserting “the best way to fit one story among other stories is, I think, always wise to consider. Rita often criticized her daughters for infractions that either didn’t exist or were contradictory to the point of confusion.

The writing in this one is fairly accessible; I finished the book over the course of two days while I was in vacation in California. In the months following her mother’s death, Eleanor makes increasingly risky and bizarre choices, such as spending unsanctioned time with a primate from the lab, before decamping for her childhood home in New Jersey, where she goes through Rita’s belongings and begins to grasp a greater sense of her life. But there are larger themes of forgiveness running throughout the book, primarily regarding Lito’s father and the priest; Lito and the priest; Lito and his father; Lito’s son and his father. A graduate of Columbia’s MFA Program, she has received fellowships from the Center for Fiction and Kundiman.

Eleanor thought, just because her mother's marriage was an unhappy one, so hers will be one as well? Our main character is quite messy and I’m so in support of messy and nuanced Asian American protagonists. This book is still in a different vein, though, as it is primarily about grief and trying to overcome the obstacles of immigration and attempting to find the American Dream for one Taiwanese family.