A review by sophiahelix
The Love Wife by Gish Jen

4.0

Really a 3.5 star rating, but I'll give it the extra star for ambition and scope. I didn't find the multiple narrators confusing, except for how it undermined my natural desire to "side" with one character or another in the complicated mess Jen creates for them -- every time you feel one person is being treated unfairly, you switch to another POV and understand why. I loved the frank exploration of identity and adoption and interracial families, even when it made the book a little hard to read, emotionally speaking (one character's outspokenness is especially painful). The pacing of the book is off (75% of it is at slow speed, until the last quarter of the book races onwards, only to crash into a major climax in the last five pages), which is something I've noticed in many modern American novels, but I enjoyed it all the same.