woobat 's review for:

Joan Is Okay by Weike Wang

5.0

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Rounded up from 4.5. This was quiet and character driven, which often doesn’t work well for me, but Joan was odd and interesting enough that I didn’t get bored. At the heart, this was about the immigrant experience and what home means to different people. The pandemic was certainly there, but it didn’t bother me like I was afraid it would. I think because Joan was a doctor, her experience of the pandemic was very different from mine (and so it didn’t really trigger a lot of the awful feelings of that time for me). I’m still not a huge fan of no quotation marks.