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alisonburnis 's review for:
A Quitter's Paradise
by Elysha Chang
emotional
mysterious
reflective
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
A Quitter’s Paradise is one of those books that I’m not entirely sure I liked, but I will think about for a while. It transcends enjoyment.
Eleanor gets married to Ellis, her mother dies, and she drops out of her PhD program. Ellis hires her as a lab assistant at his postdoc, where she officially helps him and unofficially conducts her own research. And everything is fine, until she accidentally sets the lab on fire, steals a marmoset, and tries to make sense of her life without her mother. Alternating with the story of her parents’ migration to the US and her childhood, Eleanor is just trying to figure out who she is amongst all of the chaos.
Eleanor is kind of a flat character, but it works well: she’s accommodating, quiet, and probably a little depressed. She makes terrible and inexplicable choices, but her air of casualness about everything is more endearing than obnoxious. This is a book in which lots happens and also nothing at all. It’s impressive how Chang manages to elude any concrete statements in the novel, to match with how I felt about it.
I received this ARC via NetGalley.
Eleanor gets married to Ellis, her mother dies, and she drops out of her PhD program. Ellis hires her as a lab assistant at his postdoc, where she officially helps him and unofficially conducts her own research. And everything is fine, until she accidentally sets the lab on fire, steals a marmoset, and tries to make sense of her life without her mother. Alternating with the story of her parents’ migration to the US and her childhood, Eleanor is just trying to figure out who she is amongst all of the chaos.
Eleanor is kind of a flat character, but it works well: she’s accommodating, quiet, and probably a little depressed. She makes terrible and inexplicable choices, but her air of casualness about everything is more endearing than obnoxious. This is a book in which lots happens and also nothing at all. It’s impressive how Chang manages to elude any concrete statements in the novel, to match with how I felt about it.
I received this ARC via NetGalley.