A Quitter's Paradise

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The writing itself was quite good though, so I would definitely be interested in reading more from Elysha Chang in the future.

I think the closest comparison you could compare this book to is Disorientation, which is about another PhD student trying to uncover a secret about a Chinese poet she’s studying. The reader watches Eleanor self destruct and avoid her feelings until her reckless behavior catches up to her. 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.I find the parental/child relationship hard to take, and more of a business than dictionary definition representation of family. Eleanor Liu is the daughter of Taiwanese immigrants who secretly married her boyfriend of eight months. Summer’s here, the days are longer, and we’re delivering lots of Poured Over Double Shot episodes to help you plan your summer reading, starting with Jonathan Eig and Héctor Tobar on June 1st.

Recommended for fans of books like The light of eternal spring by Angel Di Zhang and Banyan moon by Thao Thai.

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.

At the same time, she is conducting illegal experiments with mice from the lab, and if she gets caught, it could mean the end for her husband along with her. I think it was a pretty solid book, and it might be a debut (Googling future me verified this: it is a debut book). 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. The time jumps were abrupt and breaking the flow and the characters' evolution, which unfortunately made me disconnect and consequently care less about them. 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.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! 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.