A review by sb_037
Joan Is Okay by Weike Wang

slow-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Character

2.75

This book had a lot of promise, but in the end, it was a book about nothing. It’s uniquely written, there are no chapters and there is no explicit dialogue (there’s no use of quotes), and while it’s around 200 pages, it took me much longer to get through it that I thought it would. The first 2/3rds of the book sets itself up for something, perhaps an interesting commentary on the Asian immigrant experience, a tale of reckoning with your aging parents as you enter adulthood, the demands of perfectionism as a child, the numerous flaws of the current medical system. But it falls so flat, with a disappointing and rushed reversal on all the growth and building that had been done. It ends with Joan attempting to convince the reader that she is, like the title suggests, okay and that suggesting otherwise would be rude and closed-minded. It was frustrating and extremely disheartening to read.