Perhaps a good subtitle for this post would be: "In which our curmudgeonly reviewer once again doesn't love a book most others adore." I take no pleasure in this, people. I love a good book. I love to fall into a book and disappear. I'm generally pretty hard-core about the 50-page rule, with certain exceptions, including Tournament of Books finalists, and this book is one of those. If it wasn't, I would not have finished it.
What's truly frustrating to me about this book in particular is I think there's a great book in there somewhere. Had there been someone providing the author with strong editorial guidance, this could have been amazing. It's got a compelling story, which opens with the lines: "Lydia is dead. But they don't know this yet." Attention-grabbing opener, yes?
Lydia is the middle child of Marilyn and James Lee. James is Asian, and his marriage to Marilyn in the 1970s raises a good many eyebrows. He and Marilyn have some issues, namely that James, who grew up in a small American town and was pretty much shunned, wants nothing more than for his children to be popular and have lots of friends, while Marilyn, a frustrated medical student who has to give up her education when she becomes pregnant, becomes obsessed with making sure her first daughter (Lydia) has the opportunities Marilyn had to give up, whether Lydia wants those opportunities or not. It's a screwed-up family in which all hopes and dreams are put on Lydia, whose Asian roots are apparent except for her mother's blue eyes. Her parents focus on her to the neglect of their other two children, a son (Nathan, Nath for short) and youngest daughter Hannah.
Wow. Compelling stuff, right? This should be an emotionally blistering novel. At times, it is--more than once, I found myself cringing and wondering if I've ever been as damaging a mother as Marilyn, and when we find out what actually caused Lydia's death, it's a deeply emotional moment.
Which is why the novel's shortcomings are so frustrating. The potential! What this could have been!
The structure is problematic. After that great opening, we're launched into long--looooooong--sections of backstory. Backstory annoys me, especially when most of the book is told that way. If it's so important, maybe it shouldn't be backstory. I can see why the author wanted to open with Lydia being dead, but if we aren't going to move forward from that moment, maybe it's not the right way to open the book.
The book hops all over the place, time-wise. It becomes hard to track sometimes, and it feels so unnecessary. There's no advantage to this disjointed timeframe approach.
What's more, so much of the backstory is repetitive. There are countless scenes of Marilyn and James pressuring Lydia to be the person they each wanted to be while ignoring the other children. We get it. We don't need to have it jack-hammered into our brains.
Speaking of jack-hammering, points are driven home in heavy-handed text, like when Ng explains how Asians and whites were not allowed to be married in Virginia during this time period. Which is pretty much how she does it--she just drops that little history lesson in the middle of the story, with no connection to anything going on in the book at that moment. What if it had been used in a scene between Marilyn and her disapproving mother, who came from Virginia for the wedding?
There's a pivotal scene about halfway through which I won't spoil, but the relevance of the scene depends on the reader buying the idea that young children are tremendously precocious and emotionally intelligent and can identify and articulate really abstract ideas and metaphors. This reader didn't buy that.
Then, for all that's "too much", there are also missed opportunities. In one scene, Lydia (backstory, not dead) thinks about the things her parents have done over the years and remembers her mother not letting her go to a birthday party because she had a science fair project to finish. No mention of what James thought of this--James, who wants Lydia to go to every party and have friends all the time. This could have been an epic scene between the two parents, but nope.
There's a subplot involving a neighbor boy named Jack that is both not quite fully developed and too plot-heavy.
Many of the characters, especially Marilyn and James, do some pretty unlikable things. I'm all for unlikable characters if they're interesting, and Marilyn and James are, but some of the things they do strain credulity. James in particular does some things after Lydia's death that I found hard to believe for his character. It's almost as if the author wanted to shock us and tried too hard.
So, this is a long post, because I feel frustrated and longing for the days when publishers actually worked hand-in-hand with authors, helping them shape their work into something better. This is the frustration, not so much of having read a bad book, but of having read a book that could have been so much better.
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