Reviews with content warning for Racism - I Am Not Jessica Chen

Reviews tagging 'Racism'

I Am Not Jessica Chen by Ann Liang

33 reviews

sweetsxrrxw's review against another edition

4.0

emotional hopeful reflective medium-paced

Plot or Character Driven: A mix

Strong character development: Yes

Loveable characters: Yes

Diverse cast of characters: Yes

i just finished reading this book after many months of being stuck in a reading slump and, honestly, right now my head is so full of thoughts that i am certain i will forget to write everything i'd like to tell, so i this review is going to have different subsections. although, i'd like to start off by saying i would have loved to read this book back when i was sixteen. it's true that, even now, from time to time, i can't help but wish i could be someone else; but i am sure that younger me would have loved this book so much.

academic success and family expectations

while reading, like most people who have reviewed this book, i felt so connected and related a lot with jenna. i am also an overachiever, someone who craves academic validation so bad that my whole life has revolved around it since i was young.
but now i realize i might have also been a jessica to some people, especially during primary school. while it's true that i had no friends for 1/3 of that stage and i had absolutely never been popular, i was the best at every subject (except for physical education, for sure). however, of course, success is temporary and once i started secondary school i began feeling a bit more like jenna: insecure, hating being at second place, feeling like no matter how many all-nighters i pulled my grades were never high enough and that i was always secretly competing with a bunch of people.

i'm shrinking myself down, down as small as physically possible when the teacher forces me to join the group of best friends in the back, like the unwanted product in a clearance sale. i'm pretending i can't hear when one of them whispers, "god, not her," but maybe the whole point is that i can hear them.

and when my family boasted about me being smart in front of relatives, with me being there too, i always felt uncomfortable, like an imposter, even when i knew i was always doing my best.

i'm simply not that good. not in academics. not in extracurriculars. not as a student, or a daughter, or a human. it doesn't matter if i crammed my brain to the point of breaking with formulas and dates, threw myself into classes [...] something in me is missing. lacking.

moreover, as a daughter of immigrants, there is always this never-ending guilt creeping in. guilt about how you're supposed to use all of your potential, to use the academic chances your parents never had but are now offering you, just so that somehow you can repay them in a future. in case you're wondering, imposter syndrome does not blend well with this crushing sense of remorse.

how am i supposed to confess to my parents that everything they've done for me—leaving behind their old lives, moving across the world, spending what should've been vacation money on overpriced textbooks, waking up at down to drive me to tutoring centers, all so i could have a better education—was for nothing?

self worth and loss of identity

i think the topic of adapting or even losing parts of your personality, letting go of things you genuinely loved doing, just to become a better version of yourself was very interesting. just as jenna recounts in the book, we spend so much time scrutinizing ourselves in the mirror, analyzing all of our flaws until our face simply becomes boring and ugly. we detest being bad at things. but, at the end of the day, it is this little museum of failures or gallery of trying that makes us human and unique.

i guess sometimes you just have to go through some big event (maybe switching bodies with someone you admire? lmao) just to see how beautiful the cracks and the ordinary things in your life are, just to realize there's always gonna be at least one person who truly loves the real you.

chasing perfection requires a lot of self-deprecation but, once again, if you come from a specific background, it's pretty easy to mistake your purposes and goals for your values...

"no, you think i'm perfect. you think everyone's so much better than they really are, and you think you're so much worse than you really are. i was only a goal to you," he tells me, swallowing. "i was a dream, someone unattainable, something you built up inside your head. you forget how well i know you, jenna. there's nothing you want more than to want—you'll obsess over something, and convince yourself that so long as tou get it, you'll be happy, but then once you do, you're immediately dissatisfied and want something else."

that's what we do, isn't it? we turn pain into a story, because then it has a purpose. then, we reason, there was a point to it all along. but sometimes pain is just pain, and there's nothing particularly noble about clinging to it.

i really like the detail of how jenna started to slowly disappear from everyone's life. not only her stuff was thrown in the garage. but also all of her ways of self-expression started to fade too. like, her self-portraits (aka something she enjoyed doing) slowly getting blurry was a bit scary but also a nice way to convey the message.

romance
one thing i loved about this book is how it made me giggle, blush and kick my feet several times. sure, this is all fiction and there's no aaron cai's in real life, but he really brought back the hopeless romantic that was buried in me and i love that. i think he might be one of ann liang's best love interests.

i do think that the reason why he left was kind of stupid. i think it would have been better if he said he came back because he missed her, instead of telling her he couldn't handle the idea of jenna rejecting him after her limerence faded away. however, him being the "what do you think" and "you make my world bigger" kind of guy made me forget about that lmao.

secondary characters
both aaron and jessica are supposed to be secondary characters to this story, and while we got a closer look at aaron's life and personality, i feel like jessica's was brushed off. i get that maybe that's the point: perfection equals superficiality. however, i would have liked to see a bit more of her "flawed" self and her relationship with her cousin

especially since we didn't get much closure, considering the whole body switch thing. it would have been nice if we got a few more looks at their dynamics after it was all over

.

overall
even though the plot was quite predictable at times, i genuinely enjoyed this read and i would actually love to watch it as a movie adaptation. i could see it playing in my head while reading, so i definitely think it has full potential to be on the screens!

Content Warnings

strawberrypisces's review

4.75

dark emotional hopeful mysterious medium-paced

Plot or Character Driven: A mix

Strong character development: Yes

Loveable characters: Yes

Diverse cast of characters: Complicated

Flaws of characters a main focus: Complicated

Content Warnings

heyitsaugusta's review against another edition

3.75

funny lighthearted mysterious medium-paced

Plot or Character Driven: A mix

Strong character development: Yes

Loveable characters: Yes

Diverse cast of characters: Yes

Flaws of characters a main focus: Yes

Content Warnings

sskkist's review

4.0

emotional hopeful reflective medium-paced

Plot or Character Driven: Character

Strong character development: Yes

Loveable characters: Complicated

Diverse cast of characters: Yes

Flaws of characters a main focus: Yes

this is my second book by this author, but ann liang does a fantastic job of creating these characters that feel so raw and real - and this book was no exception. jenna especially was so authentic and so flawed and so human, and I really enjoyed having her as this book's pov protagonist. while I did finish this wanting certain elements of the story to have been further fleshed out (for example, while we do get some exploration into jessica's struggles, it felt like we'd barely scratched the surface by the time the book was over), and I think this could have benefited from an epilogue tying up some of those loose ends, this was a thoroughly enjoyable and painfully relatable book, and I can't wait to read more of ann liang's work!

Content Warnings

nosferasu's review

3.0

emotional funny mysterious reflective tense fast-paced

Plot or Character Driven: Character

Strong character development: No

Loveable characters: No

Diverse cast of characters: No

Flaws of characters a main focus: Yes

As I experienced with This Time It's Real (2023), Ann Liang seemed to have composed this novel with one message to convey and decided to cram several other messages as she was nearing the finale. Even the overarching theme—the definition and parameters of "enough" for someone coming from an underserved minority group—was half-baked at best, as the three characters representing "enough" were all one-dimensional: Jenna Chen, whose "enough" boiled down to achieving the same things as her model student cousin; Jessica Chen, being the most intelligent person in the room; and Aaron Cai, "avenging" his mother's death by becoming a physician skilled enough to treat the illness that killed his mother. Jenna Chen was so deep in self-pity that at times her first-person narration of the story became very annoying to follow. It didn't help that the narrative's attempt at dispelling Jenna Chen's spiel of self-pity only manifested in Aaron Cai beginning to call her out for that mindset around chapter 15—after over 70% of the novel had gone by. Jessica Chen's character, whom I believe was planned to be dismantled via her diary entries, remained unchanged because the novel spent more time snooping into Jenna Chen's mind than the entries of Jessica Chen's actual diary, which Jenna Chen accessed while living in the body of Jessica Chen. On top of that, Aaron Cai was so one-dimensional he is better described as a deus ex machina conjured to trigger Jenna Chen into character development. He was introduced as the person with the most tragic background in the trio, but I didn't get to really experience him as a character with a tragic background because Jenna Chen kept spoon-feeding the reader with facts about how Aaron grew up in his neglectful father's dysfunctional household. One could argue that this shallow way of writing Aaron Cai speaks for Ann Liang's unfamiliarity with a struggling household, but then there's Alice Sun from If You Could See the Sun (2021).

I'm also not sure what Ann Liang was trying to achieve cramming attempts at dissecting issues such as classism, the model minority paradigm, and the commodification of a student's life in the education business industry near the end of the novel. It's frustrating to follow Jenna Chen as she reeled back from experiencing those topics only to never even think of her experiences again throughout the entire novel. What's worse is that Jenna Chen was so close to turning out a villainess adamant on stealing Jessica Chen's life until she experienced the racist and misogynistic root of the model minority paradigm, which drove her to rescind her "new life" as Jessica Chen. That behaviour didn't prove any development of Jenna Chen's character; if anything, it only cemented her character as a weak-willed self-pitying person who flees the scene at the smallest hint of hardship—which contradicted Aaron's spoon-feeding the reader about Jenna's character as an obsessive person for whom even stealing another person's life was not enough. The ending can't even be called anti-climatic considering Jessica Chen readily accepted that her cousin practically stole her life and couldn't even perform it well with no protest whatsoever. Jessica Chen's reaction to the issue with her academic integrity was, again, spoon-fed to us by Jenna Chen, so Jessica's character remained largely un-deconstructed, which deviated from the premise of this novel.

If you're here from This Time It's Real or I Hope This Doesn't Find You: it's basically the same story with different characters set in the USA instead of mainland China.

If you're here from If You Could See the Sun: don't. Or please do, but place the bar on the floor.

Content Warnings

of_fantasy_and_fibre's review against another edition

emotional funny reflective medium-paced

Plot or Character Driven: A mix

Strong character development: Yes

Loveable characters: Yes

Diverse cast of characters: Yes

Flaws of characters a main focus: No

I thought I wasn't much of a mood reader but this book came as a break from a high fantasy series. The descriptions in this book do a wonderful job of showing us who Jenna is, from her artistic descriptions of everyday scenes and her inner monologues ranging from the broken systems we inhabit to the taste of an overpriced baked good. This body switch story takes a lot of the familiar tropes but infuses them with different layers from a middle class teen diaspora perspective, each which add their own complications and pressures. This was overall a wholesome story about what it takes to start on the road to self acceptance and self love. I do wish we could have seen Jessica's perspective a bit more, novella maybe? This one is for people who like coming of age and body swap stories and would like a whole slice of life view from an experience that might be different from their own.

Content Warnings

sarahhornblende's review against another edition

4.0

emotional reflective medium-paced

Plot or Character Driven: A mix

Strong character development: Yes

Loveable characters: Yes

Diverse cast of characters: Yes

Flaws of characters a main focus: Yes

Content Warnings

mila_miffy's review

4.5

emotional hopeful inspiring reflective slow-paced

Plot or Character Driven: Character

Strong character development: Yes

Loveable characters: Yes

Diverse cast of characters: Yes

Flaws of characters a main focus: Yes

one of the most beautiful books I've read this year. the writing is deliciously lyrical and visual, and Ann Liang masterfully captures the reader's emotions by so authentically portraying the internal struggle and self-hate that comes with feeling like you're never enough. it was so accurate and Jenna's pain was so real. the way Liang wrote Jenna as a messy teenage girl in the middle of her journey to self-acceptance and self-love was incredibly refreshing; she didn't hold back from being honest about what that experience is like even if it meant Jenna made some impulsive and emotional decisions sometimes, but that truly made me love Jenna all the more for it. Liang's descriptions of her thoughts and feelings were poetic and moving, and her character arc and growth was beautifully constructed. I felt that by the resolution I was feeling all of Jenna's joy and relief alongside her, and it takes an incredible story to be able to do that. all in all, a fantastic book I know I won't be able to stop thinking about.

Content Warnings