This book was stunning! It was clearly written from a personal place! I don't usually feel the need to highlight quotes as I read, but the prose was so beautiful that I found myself noting down quotes to save. Not a fun read, but a beautiful and heartwrenching story of a woman conversing with her son after he commits suicide, based off of the author's life.

I am fortunate to have not yet known loss, especially a loss as wrenching as that of a child or to suicide. I cannot possibly understand what that feels like, but I wanted to read Li’s latest novel on the basis of the great reviews she’s received.

In Where Reasons End, life inspires art. Li imagines a series of discussions between a mother in mourning and her son Nikolai, dead by suicide. The unnamed mother struggles to understand what drove her son to suicide and constantly finds him in her dreams where they talk about life and death, and bicker over inanities like mother and child often do. Li is truly is a gifted writer; her prose is simple yet manages to encapsulate the mother’s and son’s emotions.

Thank you to NetGalley, Random House, and Yiyun Li for the privilege of reading this title prior to its official data of publication.

Li's Where Reasons End is a heartbreaking meditation on a mother's grief. It's a brief conversation between a fictional mother and son that hits close to home for writer Yiyun Li, whose own son committed suicide. This book is brief, but powerful. It leans in to the sorrow, but it also isn't afraid to explore the depths of love, joy, and humor that make a life as well.

This is a bite-sized book at less than 200 pages, and Yiyun Li has left her mark on it, making it feel epic in proportions.

Where Reasons End is an imagined conversation between a mother and her son she lost to suicide. What you need to know is that Yiyun Li also lost a child to suicide, and she wrote this book in months just after.

I’m not sure how I can summarize this well other than to say that Li’s portrayal of grief is honest, precise, poignant, and profoundly resonant, and yet these words are not enough. The care in which she takes with this topic could only be taken from someone who knows it, someone who has lived this grief deep inside her heart.

The searing pain of loss juxtaposed with the intricate beauty of a mother’s unconditional love...It’s a heartfelt masterpiece, and my words are inordinately inadequate.

Thank you to the publisher for the complimentary copy. All opinions are my own.

What a wise, beautiful book. Where Reasons End is a book of imagined conversations between a mother and her teenage son, who has died by suicide. This synopsis on its own is likely tragic enough to scare away certain readers, but I'd encourage them to pick this book up anyway. This book is not so much about the way her child's life ended but about the love and respect mother and son have for each other. Even though Nikolai is part of his mother's core, we see how she has allowed him to individuate. We see how they tease, comfort, and learn from each other. The writing is very poetic and each word carefully chosen. I could tell as I was reading that this would be a book that I could revisit at another season in life and take different things away from it. Thank you to Random House and Netgalley for sharing an e-copy of this book with me in exchange for my honest review.

This is the conversation no one wants to have. The narrator is talking to her dead son Nikolai. Nikolai was a typical snarky, a little obnoxious and intelligent teen until he wasn't. Until he committed suicide. This doesn't descend into maudlin but it is grief soaked, as it should be. I'm not sure what the market for this is or how to recommend it because it's a topic that no one wants to broach. There are no answers and there's no happy ending but it's a fascinating imagined dialogue. Tanks to Netgalley for the ARC.

“The unspeakable is a wound that stays open always, always, and forever.... There is no good language when it comes to the unspeakable, I thought. There is no precision, no originality, no perfection.”

In the case of Yiyun Li’s novel “Where Reasons End,” the unspeakable is the suicide of the narrator’s 16-year-old son, Nikolai—a boy the same age as Li’s own son was when he took his own life. This book, written in the aftermath of that suicide, is a series of imagined discussions between Nikolai and his mother in the three months after his death. There is no sentimentality or mawkishness here; Li is not angry or accusatory or searching for answers or reasons—“I didn’t want to explain: A mother’s job is to enfold, not unfold.” And that is what “Where Reasons End” does—it enfolds the reader in these conversations between Nikolai and his mother, who banter and argue and reminisce about words and writing and grammar and philosophy with a fierce intelligence that brings their relationship alive and makes its loss all the more profound and heartbreaking. “I had but one delusion,” Nikolai’s mother writes, “which I held onto with all my willpower: We once gave Nikolai a life of flesh and blood, and I’m doing it over again, this time by words.”

I thought this book was stunning. The suicide of a child must be all parents’ worst nightmare—it certainly is mine. And reading “Where Reasons End” means facing this fear head on and exposing yourself to the full searing force of a mother’s raw grief. It was not an easy read by any means, but one that was so brave and beautifully wrought that I devoured it in spite of the difficulty. There are so many passages from it that I highlighted and could quote here, but I’ll end on something Nikolai’s mother says about her attempt to address her grief through her writing: “Words fall short, yes, but sometimes their shadows can reach the unspeakable.” Li’s words in this extraordinary book do just that. Highly recommended.

I would like to thank Random House and NetGalley for providing me an ARC of this book in exchange for my honest review.

I spent a long time reading “Where Reasons End” by Yiyun Li. It wasn’t because it was dense or complex narrative in any way. I knew what Yiyun was about. It was just that I had an unusually emotional response to nearly every page. Simply put, “Where Reasons End” made me constantly want to cry.

Where to start? “Where Reasons End” is a “discussion” that a mom is having with a son who has recently killed himself. Moreover, it is between a mom who is a published author, and and a son is a budding writer. Language is central to the dialogue: words, phrases, parts of speech, metaphors. Meanings are bickered about and discussed. “Where Reasons End” is less a story than a poem, or even a paean about loss. The mom is clearly dealing with a tragedy in the best way she knows, allowing her to begin addressing trauma, pain, guilt, and maybe shame. It is beautifully written, and, yes, enough to make you cry.

Thank you Random House and NetGalley for the opportunity to read an Advanced Copy. Much appreciated.

I was looking forward to deviating from my usual genre of thrillers into something with a little more depth. Unfortunately, I had a difficult time getting into this book. The author’s words were powerful, but the storyline was too heavy for me.

This novel was both compelling and disturbing because suicide is such a personal issue, even when presented as fiction. This novel is about a mother who carries on a conversation with her sixteen-year-old son after he has committed suicide. These conservations are a lifeline of sorts for both of them as her son adjusts to his death and the mother with her loss of her son, Readers experience the mother enduring her first Christmas without her son, and the son reminding her to not wallow in grief. The mother is a writer, and the son was a poet, so there are many conversations evolved around words, mainly his, but for me, as the mother replays the final hours on the day that he killed himself, wondering what she missed, I wished there had been an answer, a response from the son, because sixteen is too damn young to die.

This short novel imagines a series of conversations between a grieving mother and her dead son. Ostensibly it is about grief and the questions that arise after the sudden loss of a loved one. A loved one that should not have died first. However, I really didn't find this book all that emotionally moving. Some people will describe the mother/son interactions as witty, but for me, the son's voice is very snarky. In some ways, this tone keeps the book from being maudlin. But I will admit to thinking to myself on occasion, "are you sure you miss this kid?" Of course, as a mother, I know how what kids say and what kids feel can be entirely divorced from one another, but the banter kept me from feeling as much empathy as perhaps I was supposed to be feeling.

Putting all that to the side for a moment, this book is about something else beyond loss and death. It is about words. And for me, that was the most compelling reason to read this book. If you are a person who likes to think about the language, how it used, and what it really means, you will love this piece of literature. I see this book as one that will be used in college lit classes forevermore. There's so much to discuss and unpack here that I truly regretted reading it alone.

“I was almost you once, and that’s why I have allowed myself to make up this world to talk with you.”

Told in 16 short narratives about a mother who's trying to come to terms with her son's death, asking herself, 'How could that have happened?' 'What went wrong?' She created conversations with him just to keep him and memories of him alive. Can memories last or only be replaced by new ones?

I felt each word leadened with grief, guilt and regrets, her days lived with wishful thinking and hopes, and what ifs and could haves.

She reminisced their days and moments spent together, baking, sharing and discussing stories and poetry that they wrote/had written. She missed sharing their love for music, knitting, and language. Was there anything she could've done differently that would've prevented him from commuting suicide? Why didn't she see it coming? Were kids really so good at hiding and parents bad at seeking?

How do you say goodbye? Do you want to say goodbye? How do you deal with such a great loss? Are there words or sufficient words to describe this feeling?

Such a heart-wrenching book. As a mother, it left me teary and thinking of those who have lost their loved ones. It's difficult to even think about it, what more talk and write about it. Albeit a little repetitive in some parts, overall it's an insightful, moving and beautifully-written book. Must read for mothers.

Thank you Netgalley and Random House for providing a free eARC of this book in exchange for an honest opinion. All opinions are my own.

Wow. A mother and a son having a conversation. Here’s the twist, her son is dead. He committed suicide at 16. I wouldn’t say that’s a spoiler, it’s not like the 6th sense when you discover Bruce Willis was dead this whole time. It is the premise of the story I suppose. A mother simply trying to understand why. I enjoyed their banter and bickering back and forth about the ways to say things. I felt it was a book about words, and I loved that.

This extended conversation between a mother and the child she has conjured through her writing in the raw immediate grief following the suicide of her son is both heartbreaking and haunting. Much of their imagined conversation is philosophical in nature (life, time, meaning), some is nostalgic, the rest concrete as they debate constraints of language. The narrative momentum waned for me at times, as the mother desperately prolonged the conversation with her written son, but there is no denying this is a powerful book about the mind-altering states of grief.

The narrative of a grieving mothers conversations with her dead son.
Coming to terms with his suicide she imagines the things they would talk about after he is gone. Beautifully written this book is raw with emotion and flips between her life without him and her memories of life with him.
Often poetic, this book will make you stop and think, and encourage you to have the seemingly meaningless conversations with the ones you love.

'Since Nikolai’s death I had asked people to send poems. They came like birds from different lands, each carrying its own mourning notes.'

I felt the deep sorrow expressed in this novel so much I researched the author. I wondered, did she herself lose a son to suicide, only to discover more about Yuyin Li’s own breakdown. Li wrote a memoir Dear Friend, from My Life I Write to You in Your Life while she was struggling with deep depression. In Where Reasons End, Yuyin Li tells a fictional tale of a mother composing a story in conversation between she and her son, who has taken his own life. This is a story about the elusive presence of grief, how it transforms us even if we don’t understand it. It is a mother reflecting on memory, where her son can now only live for her, and questioning how memory isn’t enough. If she can just keep the conversation going, she can keep him alive, stop the essence of him that lingers from escaping, disappearing. Too, she knows words are incapable of expressing the all consuming sorrow, pain. That clichés cannot carry us through life, nor the losses in one. How to recapture time? How to breathe and exist through the worse thing that can ever happen, to know her son has succeeded in the biggest win of hide-and-seek.

“I was almost you once, and that’s why I have allowed myself to make up this world to talk with you.” Our narrator promised her son she would understand, didn’t she? Her own past sufferings, were they inherent in the blood? She can’t lose him more than she already has. The old things remain, things Nikolai made or wrote, remembrances of the Nikolai his friends knew, objects she has never kept tract of nor made an effort to freeze in time, not much of a keeper of life’s detritus nor treasures unlike other mothers whom fiercely cling to ‘things’. This conversation is made up, right… but “sometimes what you make up is realer than the real.” Such a bright boy, whose perfection hurt him too much to anchor him to the world.

Not a day will pass, when you’re left behind, that you don’t imagine how your loved one would react to each of your remaining days, from the mundane to the eventful. It truly is a novel about ‘inescapable pain’ and the solitude of grief. There is a gut wrenching chapter, Catchers in the Rain that left a lump in my throat because there isn’t anything thing left to catch, she can longer be her child’s safety net. This isn’t the sort of novel that makes you weep with the obvious moments, nor is it an attempt to explain suicide. Though through the intimacy between mother and son, remembering even the stories he himself wrote where the boy characters often died hints that maybe he was sad for a long time, and she didn’t see. Or maybe not, maybe that’s what we do in the aftermath, look for reason where maybe there is none. Maybe fiction is just sometimes fiction. The Nikolai she gives life through writing is as witty and biting in her creative story as he was in life. She utilizes her gift of authorship (which her son himself showed promise of early on) to attempt to soothe herself and carry on in this abyss she never asked for.

Yes, Nikolai took his own life but it is as much about motherhood because even when it is taken from you in such a way, you are still a mother. How should one find meaning in their child’s death, in this backwards way to travel in time, when a child should never go first, especially through their own hand? With the novels closure, I want to ask only who are you today, instead of how are you?

Publication Date: February 5, 2019

Random House

I wanted to like this book, but I just didn't have it in me. The majority of it was a rambling mess that I just didn't have the energy to try and sort out. There were bits and pieces scattered throughout that started to make more sense, but honestly I had basically given up on the book by then, so it really didn't matter. Had this book been longer, I probably wouldn't have finished it, but given it's length I plugged through out of principle. There was a lot of potential here, and the premise could have created an amazing book but this just wasn't it. I'm disappointed in the book; maybe there's something here I'm just not getting, and if that's the case, I'm also disappointed in myself for not being able to grasp what this could have been.

Brilliantly imagined, witty repartee between a grieving mother and the 16-year old son she has just very suddenly lost. Reading this appealed to my predilection for grammar-related banter, and my fear of raising teen-agers, but I'm afraid it failed to consume me as many other tales of loss have: Ravel's The Cat, Gilmour's A Perfect Night to Go to China, Kay's To Dance with the White Dog, Quindlen's One True Thing, etc. I had hoped that the references to other suicidal teens, the mom's being Chinese, and the existence of a younger son/absence of a partner would lead to an eventual reveal of some kind, but I found this read as lilting as it was perplexing.

Yiyun Li is an extraordinary writer,her books are lyrical.Where Reason Ends is so gut wrenching a sons suicide a Mother’s continuing conversation with him a mother’s pain heartache addressed what could of been .A mother’s love that never dies.A book that will stay with me,#betgalley #WhereReasonsEnd #Randomhousebooks,