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A review by emilydang
But the Girl by Jessica Zhan Mei Yu
challenging
emotional
reflective
sad
tense
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
4.0
This is the book for burnt out gifted kids, and the ones carrying the dreams of immigrant parents and their struggle to give them that opportunity.
Needless to say, I had a love-hate relationship with this book. This book has unpacked the experience of being a child of immigrants so deeply that I physically had to step away from it at moments. I don't think I would do it justice trying to articulate how well it understood the dynamic between grandparents and parents who pinned every hope on their child, the endless giving from their end and how strong that love is. But also how it feels on the other side, to have parents who love you fiercely but don't know how to communicate that to you. To not know your parents beyond these acts of service. To feel claustrophobic, trying to control variables that are out of your hands to ensure their sacrifices don't go to waste. How all of this work for your future just makes you a product of everything in the past, and gives you a lot of shit to work through as a person in your early 20s.
I honestly don't have the words to make this a coherent review on that end - you just have to witness it for yourself. It also has a look at how this can affect your relationships with other people, touches on some experiences universal to all women (and fetishisation specific to asian women), and how it feels to belong to two cultures and none at all. It inverts the 'coming of age' story because when Girl goes overseas for her residency, she doesn't find her place in a different place or amongst different people, but has an introspective journey focused on the people she left back home.
I will say that it was a bit of a slog to get through. The first chapter I thought I would dnf because I really didn't connect with the writing style. It felt so emotionally cold and the first person perspective was just carrying us like a join-the-dot drawing. Some of the sentence structures threw me off because it would be a compound sentence, then complex and then stunt the narrative voice with a very random simple sentence that was quite jarring.
It did improve once you got further along, but the writing just continued to be a bit of a hurdle for me. There is a very strong author voice in the narrative and sometimes it made it feel a bit unbalanced. The anecdotes and cuts to various memories or other times was very abrupt and there was no flow to the book as a whole. It jumps to and fro a lot and would have been a 2-3 star based on the first 50% but the existential crisis was just done so well that I had to give it props.
Needless to say, I had a love-hate relationship with this book. This book has unpacked the experience of being a child of immigrants so deeply that I physically had to step away from it at moments. I don't think I would do it justice trying to articulate how well it understood the dynamic between grandparents and parents who pinned every hope on their child, the endless giving from their end and how strong that love is. But also how it feels on the other side, to have parents who love you fiercely but don't know how to communicate that to you. To not know your parents beyond these acts of service. To feel claustrophobic, trying to control variables that are out of your hands to ensure their sacrifices don't go to waste. How all of this work for your future just makes you a product of everything in the past, and gives you a lot of shit to work through as a person in your early 20s.
I honestly don't have the words to make this a coherent review on that end - you just have to witness it for yourself. It also has a look at how this can affect your relationships with other people, touches on some experiences universal to all women (and fetishisation specific to asian women), and how it feels to belong to two cultures and none at all. It inverts the 'coming of age' story because when Girl goes overseas for her residency, she doesn't find her place in a different place or amongst different people, but has an introspective journey focused on the people she left back home.
I will say that it was a bit of a slog to get through. The first chapter I thought I would dnf because I really didn't connect with the writing style. It felt so emotionally cold and the first person perspective was just carrying us like a join-the-dot drawing. Some of the sentence structures threw me off because it would be a compound sentence, then complex and then stunt the narrative voice with a very random simple sentence that was quite jarring.
It did improve once you got further along, but the writing just continued to be a bit of a hurdle for me. There is a very strong author voice in the narrative and sometimes it made it feel a bit unbalanced. The anecdotes and cuts to various memories or other times was very abrupt and there was no flow to the book as a whole. It jumps to and fro a lot and would have been a 2-3 star based on the first 50% but the existential crisis was just done so well that I had to give it props.