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pridiansky's review
dark
mysterious
reflective
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
4.0
First thing's first, as usual. This cover is abominably bad. It's like if a kid was taking a multimedia class in high school and this was one of their first shitty photoshop edits. I mean, come on. What the hell is up with this cheap-ass cover??? It's an embarrassment, and if I was the author and didn't have any control over the cover (usually they don't), then I would be pissed that the novel I took such care in writing was dressed up in this tacky gradient number with a random Asian woman with her hair all squiggly, like it was pasted in there totally slapdash, with absolutely no thought invested. Ugly ugly ugly. I wish there was an underline feature to emphasize my distaste. And there are no alternate covers, so you can't even buy a different edition. A poor cover can kill a book's success. If I saw this in a bookshop, cover facing out, I would ignore it (I got this from a one dollar shelf at my local college library.)
As far as the story goes, a warning: If you like stories that wrap up cleanly, don't pick this book up. None of the characters are likeable and there are no heroes. They're all very flawed and human. The ending wraps up in a true-to-life way where sometimes we don't always "solve the mystery" like in Sherlock Holmes. The main character we follow in the present is left in the dark about a lot of things and has to deal with it alone. You as the reader are privy to more information than he is, but there is still a lot of information that we never find out about, either. I believe this was the intention of the author, as the character who ran away didn't want to be found and got her wish in the end.
***Spoilers Ahead***
There are two perspectives in this book; One is the present, where we're following Robert, a cop whose wife divorced him and ran away to Vegas to be with another man. Spoiler alert: He hasn't gotten over it. The other perspective takes place in the past, following the Vietnamese woman who left him. The chapters in her perspective are actually letters to the daughter she abandoned, explaining why she did what she did. I will warn you that the choice was made to put these chapters in italics, probably to give it a handwritten quality. That didn't bother me, but if that annoys you, you might not enjoy reading it. For me personally, her chapters were compelling and pulled me into the story the most. The chapters in the present with Robert were a bit boring at times, mostly because Robert pissed me off. Frankly, he's an emotionally maladjusted dumbass. He's not sympathetic and I didn't care about his feelings. I don't think he was meant to be likeable, but he reeks of Privileged White Man and Entitled Cop Energy. Consider those his official titles. The dude is an insufferable dickhead, but so full of self-righteousness. The epitome of Dunning-Kreuger, he's just so fucking stupid and has the emotional intelligence of a tick, but he is so dumb that he can't understand how dumb he is. There's some hardcore White-Knighting going on with his character where he thinks he's going to save this woman from her current husband because he's abusive and dangerous, even though he's hardly any better. Everything that he's doing is for himself. He thinks that he cares about his ex-wife so much, but he just wants the self satisfaction of being the one who can "fix" her or possess her. He can't even call her by her real fucking name, and insists on using the name Suzy (For fuck's sake, SUZY?? Really?? The literal worst name ever. I apologize to anyone with the name Suzy, but damn). Get this, the name was taken from A PREVIOUS GIRLFRIEND!!! He named her after someone he used to date!! How fucking degrading is that? Just because he doesn't want to call her by her real name because the name Hong is, according to him, a name that could be made fun of in a sexual way in America. My ass, buddy. Ugh, he is such a douchebag. Fuck you, Robert. You don't just get to rename someone like they're a pet dog that you adopted from the Humane Society. He calls her Suzy til the very end. He never changes his tune, which means that he learned absolutely nothing. He doesn't care about Hong at all. He only cares about his own selfish needs and his lack of closure. I was stoked that he was sad and alone still by the end of the book. It was fantastic to have it end with him wallowing and feeling sorry for himself indefinitely. My compliments to the author. Gave me the warm fuzzies, hahahaha.
I hemmed and hawwed over a rating for this book, but decided on a 4. There are things that I connected with and enjoyed, particularly the way the character of Hong was portrayed. This character is an absolute mess and I felt that her trauma and instability were so well written. A lot of people have said how they didn't understand or like this character, but I found her so identifiable and I deeply sympathized with her pain.
This is a character who never had the opportunity to live her own life or make her own decisions. More specifically, all the men in her life want her to be something she's not, even her first husband who she loved and missed after he died. She doesn't want a child and ends up having one before she's even mentally an adult herself. There's a powerful quote there where she says:
"It should have felt natural, invigorating, as it would for any woman, but for me it was like a sudden and incurable affliction. I had only recently been given a brand-new version of myself to walk around in, and just when I started to feel comfortable inside it, I was forced into yet another version that seemed not only alien but unbearably permanent. Once you became a reality inside me, I knew I could never go back to being anything else.
Your father, however, immediately wrote his family and went about building a new crib and a bigger dining table, and three or four times a day he playfully caressed my flat belly as though the bump was already there. Before you ever actually existed, you were already the center of his life."
The men in Hong's life don't value her for herself. They project their wants and needs onto her and assume that she feels the same. They don't ask what she wants, and on the rare occasion when they do ask, they don't actually want to know. Life just happens to Hong and it is clear as day how smothered and trapped she feels in these situations. She's never living, but is instead doing her best to survive in the circumstances that have been forced upon her. A lot of the reviews were annoyed with the ending, because we never find out what happens to her or where she went. But, that's what the character wanted, so I was deeply satisfied with the ending. She FINALLY got what she wanted after all that time. A chance to maybe start her life fresh and live for herself without all of the shackles of the past tugging her to the bottom, and without all these disgusting men molding her into their ideal subservient woman with no thoughts and desires of her own. It's implied that she escapes back to Vietnam, the only place that ever really felt like home to her. Since the ending is left so open, it is my wish that Hong can now live the life that she wants and can heal. The rest of the characters feel irrelevant to me.
As far as the story goes, a warning: If you like stories that wrap up cleanly, don't pick this book up. None of the characters are likeable and there are no heroes. They're all very flawed and human. The ending wraps up in a true-to-life way where sometimes we don't always "solve the mystery" like in Sherlock Holmes. The main character we follow in the present is left in the dark about a lot of things and has to deal with it alone. You as the reader are privy to more information than he is, but there is still a lot of information that we never find out about, either. I believe this was the intention of the author, as the character who ran away didn't want to be found and got her wish in the end.
***Spoilers Ahead***
There are two perspectives in this book; One is the present, where we're following Robert, a cop whose wife divorced him and ran away to Vegas to be with another man. Spoiler alert: He hasn't gotten over it. The other perspective takes place in the past, following the Vietnamese woman who left him. The chapters in her perspective are actually letters to the daughter she abandoned, explaining why she did what she did. I will warn you that the choice was made to put these chapters in italics, probably to give it a handwritten quality. That didn't bother me, but if that annoys you, you might not enjoy reading it. For me personally, her chapters were compelling and pulled me into the story the most. The chapters in the present with Robert were a bit boring at times, mostly because Robert pissed me off. Frankly, he's an emotionally maladjusted dumbass. He's not sympathetic and I didn't care about his feelings. I don't think he was meant to be likeable, but he reeks of Privileged White Man and Entitled Cop Energy. Consider those his official titles. The dude is an insufferable dickhead, but so full of self-righteousness. The epitome of Dunning-Kreuger, he's just so fucking stupid and has the emotional intelligence of a tick, but he is so dumb that he can't understand how dumb he is. There's some hardcore White-Knighting going on with his character where he thinks he's going to save this woman from her current husband because he's abusive and dangerous, even though he's hardly any better. Everything that he's doing is for himself. He thinks that he cares about his ex-wife so much, but he just wants the self satisfaction of being the one who can "fix" her or possess her. He can't even call her by her real fucking name, and insists on using the name Suzy (For fuck's sake, SUZY?? Really?? The literal worst name ever. I apologize to anyone with the name Suzy, but damn). Get this, the name was taken from A PREVIOUS GIRLFRIEND!!! He named her after someone he used to date!! How fucking degrading is that? Just because he doesn't want to call her by her real name because the name Hong is, according to him, a name that could be made fun of in a sexual way in America. My ass, buddy. Ugh, he is such a douchebag. Fuck you, Robert. You don't just get to rename someone like they're a pet dog that you adopted from the Humane Society. He calls her Suzy til the very end. He never changes his tune, which means that he learned absolutely nothing. He doesn't care about Hong at all. He only cares about his own selfish needs and his lack of closure. I was stoked that he was sad and alone still by the end of the book. It was fantastic to have it end with him wallowing and feeling sorry for himself indefinitely. My compliments to the author. Gave me the warm fuzzies, hahahaha.
I hemmed and hawwed over a rating for this book, but decided on a 4. There are things that I connected with and enjoyed, particularly the way the character of Hong was portrayed. This character is an absolute mess and I felt that her trauma and instability were so well written. A lot of people have said how they didn't understand or like this character, but I found her so identifiable and I deeply sympathized with her pain.
This is a character who never had the opportunity to live her own life or make her own decisions. More specifically, all the men in her life want her to be something she's not, even her first husband who she loved and missed after he died. She doesn't want a child and ends up having one before she's even mentally an adult herself. There's a powerful quote there where she says:
"It should have felt natural, invigorating, as it would for any woman, but for me it was like a sudden and incurable affliction. I had only recently been given a brand-new version of myself to walk around in, and just when I started to feel comfortable inside it, I was forced into yet another version that seemed not only alien but unbearably permanent. Once you became a reality inside me, I knew I could never go back to being anything else.
Your father, however, immediately wrote his family and went about building a new crib and a bigger dining table, and three or four times a day he playfully caressed my flat belly as though the bump was already there. Before you ever actually existed, you were already the center of his life."
The men in Hong's life don't value her for herself. They project their wants and needs onto her and assume that she feels the same. They don't ask what she wants, and on the rare occasion when they do ask, they don't actually want to know. Life just happens to Hong and it is clear as day how smothered and trapped she feels in these situations. She's never living, but is instead doing her best to survive in the circumstances that have been forced upon her. A lot of the reviews were annoyed with the ending, because we never find out what happens to her or where she went. But, that's what the character wanted, so I was deeply satisfied with the ending. She FINALLY got what she wanted after all that time. A chance to maybe start her life fresh and live for herself without all of the shackles of the past tugging her to the bottom, and without all these disgusting men molding her into their ideal subservient woman with no thoughts and desires of her own. It's implied that she escapes back to Vietnam, the only place that ever really felt like home to her. Since the ending is left so open, it is my wish that Hong can now live the life that she wants and can heal. The rest of the characters feel irrelevant to me.
Content Warnings
Moderate: Physical abuse, Rape, Murder, Emotional abuse, and Violence
Minor: Abandonment
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