Swimming Back to Trout River by Linda Rui Feng is a poignant and introspective novel that is a perfect fit for readers who appreciate stories about family, cultural identity, and the immigrant experience, and are drawn to lyrical prose and nuanced explorations of the human condition.

I couldn't get through this title. It ended up not being for me, but I hope it finds a hope with other readers.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for the ARC.

I've never read a book about the Chinese Cultural Revolution, so I knew I had to read this. The writing was lyrical and poetic, and I could easily picture all of the characters in my head. A story that included so much about family and relationships and the cultural revolution. There was so much grief and loss but the story was beautiful. Wonderful book.

This was a beautifully written story of a father’s quest to reunite his family before his daughter’s twelfth birthday. Junie’s dad first leaves China for the US searching for a better life against the backdrop the China’s Cultural Revolution. Later her mom also goes to the US leaving Julie with her grandparents. Junie wants to stay in China with her grandparents and doesn’t realize her parents are living separately in the US. This book is filled with tragedy and some triggers but it is a great read. I thank NetGalley and publisher for the opportunity to read this ARC.

Poetic story of a family divided., but also one that for me moved slowly and that I had difficulty connecting with. It just wasn't the story for me.

I have tried to read this book so many times. I found the beginning to be very confusing and I think I'm just not a fit for this author.

I know that it is highly rated by many people but I couldn't get into it no matter how hard I tried.

Since I DNF the book I will not be leaving a review on any purchasing sites.

Thank you for the opportunity to read and review this novel

Spanning multiple decades and perspectives, set in San Francisco and a small village in China, this beautifully written book asks tough questions about the ties that bind us to each other and to the different versions of ourselves—past, present, future, alone, with others. This is about the slow unraveling of a small family, but it’s also about the ways each character reaches back into the past and tries to make peace with what they once were. The pacing is a little slow at the beginning, and I wasn’t totally satisfied with the conclusion, but I’ll be remembering these characters and their passions for a long time.

Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for the ARC and for their patience with me (pandemic-induced reading slump has been a real thing).

This is a familial saga about the lives of four Chinese individuals. It touched me deeply and to my very soul. I will not be forgetting this story anytime soon. For anyone that liked Pachinko, this one is definitely for you. Kirkus reviews describes this book as “filled with tragedy yet touched with life-affirming passion”. I couldn't agree more. I can't wait to see what this author does next!

The writing in this book is intricate, poignant, and simply elegant. The ethereal feeling the author is able to convey with a few simple words strung together demonstrates a level of artistry that is seldom seen in fiction writing. It incorporates the full-bodied verboseness of prose balanced with the lyrical essence of poetry.

I thought this book would be about immigration, living through the Cultural Revolution, being raised by grandparents, and familial challenges. But it turned out to be so much more. It's about human beings who are flawed and deeply affected by past traumas. It's also about the magic of music its transformative nature.

The names in the book threw me off a bit. They are not names I would traditionally associate with this time period and place. But this did not take away from the amazing characters that Feng constructed.

Linda Rui Feng’s epic sweep of a novel, set during the 1970s and 1980s, in China and the United States, explores the interwoven stories of 4 major characters: Momo, an engineer who moves to the United States in search of a better life; Momo’s wife, Cassia, who’s haunted by the memories of a stillborn child and dead lover who died at the hands of the Red Guards; their handicapped daughter, Junie, who was born without legs; and Dawn, Momo’s violinist friend from college days. Momo, then Cassia, move to the United States, leaving their young daughter in the care of her paternal grandparents, residents of Trout River, a rural small town in China, promising to reunite with Junie when she turns twelve. Feng does a terrific job developing her four main characters, as they wrestle with the ghosts of their past and endeavor to pursue their dreams. Feng writes with lyricism and feeling, making this a excellent and engrossing literary read.

This book about a Chinese couple with a daughter who is born disabled starts well before they meet during the cultural revolution in China. I didn't love the book at first but once they are adults and life circumstances separate them, the book got really good. This is a story that will stick with me for a long time.

This has been one of the more absorbing books I have read recently. In a story that spans from the 1960s to the later 1980s and moves from China under Mao to the American prairie, this novel gives views of lives that are so foreign to my experience but feel so important to know.

Momo and Cassia meet during the time of the Cultural Revolution, when merely being together essentially marks betrothal. And that is their wish. Both have had earlier experiences which are only slowly revealed. The speaking or not speaking of life’s events and feelings will be a major issue throughout this story, as individuals deal with the effects of things left unsaid. Momo and Cassia have a child, Junie, and she becomes the focus for the future.

But China changes, opens to the world, and exchange programs begin, sending Momo alone to America when Junie is very young. The novel then plays out, moving around in time as we learn more of the earlier lives of Momo and Cassia, the immigrant experience to America, the connections to the world of the arts and more. Human connections, and disconnects, are everywhere here.

There are occasional Chinese terms used and defined to explain a character’s belief or action. Subtle and not so subtle differences from Western thoughts or philosophy. These are introduced in ways to help define a character in a wonderful mid-book section.

Highly recommended for those who would like a contemplative novel.

A copy of this book was provided by Simon & Schuster through NetGalley in return for an honest review.

I did not know much about the Chinese Cultural Revolution before reading this book, and enjoyed learning about the Maoist regime through this family saga. Rui Feng does a great job foiling out each character's flawed history so that we meet them each with compassion. The ending was so sad!

It’s taken me awhile to put together my thoughts on this book. It was so emotional and beautiful. I loved the way this was written. I enjoyed the story and the bond of the family. I will be telling others to read this book.

Swimming Back to Trout River opens with Cassia and her five year old daughter Junie traveling to Trout River where Junie will live with her paternal grandparents. Junie settles into life there, and, when learning at age 10 that her father plans to return for her, Junie despairs at the idea of leaving her grandparents and the only home she remembers. Momo, Junie's father, dreams of the day he can reunite his family, both his daughter and estranged wife, and give his daughter a better life than she could have in China.

The author then takes the reader back in time, introducing Junie's parents, Cassia and Momo, more fully, as well as Momo's university friend Dawn. We get a glimpse into their childhoods and also how they met and what life was like for them during the Chinese Cultural Revolution, including the violence and oppression by the Red Guard, which changed all three of their lives irrevocably. They each faced hardships and heartbreak that would continue to impact them for years to come.

Dawn was the one who introduced Momo to the magic and power of music during their university years. The two had a falling out over the course their lives should take, but their love for music would stay with them always. Music is a theme that runs throughout the novel, whether it be a violin concerto or the melodic sounds of every day background noise. Cassia appears later in Momo's life, when he is working as an engineer and she a nurse. He falls for her right away, she more reluctantly. They give birth to a beautiful daughter, a daughter without legs, who they name Junie.

As Junie is being raised by her grandparents in China during the 1980's, riding on a wooden horse with wheels and ever curious about everything around her, the reader finds Dawn, Momo and Cassia in the United States, trying to make their own ways in the world. The author brings us a novel with hope at its center, amidst grief and loss, pain and suffering. The relationships between the characters as well as with themselves are central to the novel. It wasn't surprising to learn the author Linda Rui Feng is also a poet. Her writing is beautiful.

The novel got off to a slow start for me, admittedly, but I was soon lost in the lives of the characters and felt a part of their world. While Junie's story is an integral part of the novel, I was most drawn to her parents' story and that of Dawn's during the time of the Chinese Cultural Revolution. I felt for each of them at various parts in the novel, angry on their behalf and wishing and wanting more for each of them while hoping for the best--that they would find their peace. I wanted that so much for each of them. There is a twist near the end that has left me a bit unsettled. I wish the author had gone in another direction, but it is her story to tell, not mine. Overall, I found Swimming Back to Trout River a worthwhile read. If you are prone to crying like I am, have a box of tissue handy.

"Swimming Back To Trout River" is about beginnings and endings, making and destroying, daring and shrinking, and the difference between existing and living. Linda Rui Feng has written an elegiac novel that lets a Western reader experience life vicariously as several Chinese people who are so sharply and distinctively drawn that takes no effort to "become" them in imagination. Universal to all people is to make their dreams come true, both the ones for themselves and for the ones they love. In this novel, such dreams are frustrated by things as small as likes and dislikes and things great as cataclysmic political events. Even what seems to be Fate gets turned on its ear.

Couples who may appear destined to make a life together are split apart by death, or great distance, or misunderstanding of one another. Sacrifice is less a choice made out of selflessness and more of an imposition of a blind monster determined to mold a generation into a unity by denying individuality. Yet individuals resist and persist, they dream and rework dreams, they lose lives here and recreate them there. Underneath the turmoil is an invisible constancy, the pull of roots withstanding the current of a small local river that seems determined to disperse everyone out to sea.

This is more than a saga of diaspora, or family, it is a symphony of the music of life that is best navigated by improvisation, by acknowledging the entanglement of traditional with contemporary, and by adapting one's central theme to the variations of the fickleness of Fate. Dreams can only come true if allowed to come as they are. For Momo and Cassia, Dawn and June the interwoven stories of their lives make a composition that sings on the page.

Story of a couple and their daughter during China's Cultural Revolution and the couple's move and estrangement in the US. Definitely some sad and painful events with beautiful writing that you can't rush through.

I’m judging the L.A. Times 2020 and 2021 fiction contest. It’d be generous to call what I’m doing upon my first cursory glance—reading. I also don’t take this task lightly. As a fellow writer and lover of words and books, I took this position—in hopes of being a good literary citizen. My heart aches for all the writers who have a debut at this time. What I can share now is the thing that held my attention and got this book from the perspective pile into the read further pile.

Here’s some early sentences that nabbed me:

“The cadence of that litany—listen to them, they know what’s good for you—merged with the rhythmic rattle of the train until the two sounds became indistinguishable.”(1)

Whatever Junie would become—and Cassia could not fathom it any more than she could her own future—it had to start with this. (brilliant transition!)(5)

“He was born whimpering instead of bawling, into a world where Japanese bombs flattened buildings and turned electric wires into clotheslines for severed human limbs.” (so much information packed into this beautiful harrowing sentence. (10)

“... gossamer threads we put out into the world turned into filaments into tendrils, and that what people called destiny was really the outward contours of billions of these tendrils, as they exerted their tug on each of us.” (19)

It is hard to believe that Swimming Back to Trout River is a debut novel. The writing and story are remarkable. Don’t sleep on this one, it is a story that will stay with you a long after you turn the last page!

Thank you NetGalley, author, and publisher for the opportunity to read this book. The opinions in this review are entirely my own.

🐟
🐟
🐟
#SwimmingBacktoTroutRiver
#LindaRuiFeng
#NetGalley
#SimonandShuster
#multiculturalbooks
#debutnovel
#love
#family
#againsttheodds
#whatshouldireadnext
#bookstagram
#bookreview

"Junie rested her hiccuping head against Grandpa’s bony back as he pedaled on the bumpy road, wobbling and clanking. Across the thin fabric of his sweat-soaked shirt and against Junie’s cheek, his ribs rose and fell with his breathing. She recognized that moment as the beginning and the end of something—though she was too young to say exactly what that something was. But she knew, without really knowing she did, that the gossamer threads we put out into the world turned into filaments, and filaments into tendrils, and that what people called destiny was really the outward contours of billions of these tendrils, as they exerted their tug on each of us. "

Swimming Back to Trout River is a story of connection and separation, of love and loss, of yearning and disappointment, of growing, striving, succeeding and failing. It is a story of enduring the worst of times, surviving an unquiet heart and a world in upheaval. We follow several characters as they cope with lives severely impacted by their experiences coming of age in China during the Cultural Revolution, a traumatic period that left as many as twenty million dead, and ruined millions more lives and careers.

Dawn was introduced to music early, when her grandfather received a piano from a Russian conductor, (a long-term loan) before Sino-Soviet relations soured. She wanted to be of use in the world, but her heart sought a different form of creativity.

"Her most vivid childhood memories were about music, and although they commanded attention, in the end they led nowhere. She remembered crouching on the floor under the piano as her grandfather played it above her. She was five, it was the year before her parents died…In her mind, she wasn’t just under the piano; it was more like she was wearing it as a cloak. Its vibrations enveloped her, echoed in her chest, and emanated down to her toes, claiming her, and she hugged her knees tight just to keep herself in place."

There are further steps forward in her musical journey but when she is accepted to university, it is her intention to be an architect, do something practical, build things for the country. However, a chance to be in a school orchestra rekindles her musical flame.

It is while she is at university that she becomes friends with Momo. He is smitten with her and is more than happy to have her teach him how to play the violin. But he is practical, an engineering student, seeing the world through the lens of math and physics. While they do not fully connect, there is a connection, a seed planted, and despite his eagerness to be a good party man, Momo continues to feel the need for music in him. Of course, the Red Guard was not happy with people having a love of music outside the sanctioned state product, at a time when enjoying any other music was considered very un-woke, and did their best to destroy alternate perspectives.

After college, Momo is working as an engineer at a factory in northeast China when he meets Cassia, who is working as a dental assistant. A year later they are married. It is not long before they have a child, Junie, an otherwise healthy girl who is born with truncated lower limbs.

We follow Momo from tales of his childhood in the 1940s and 50s, through university, from his fealty to the Party Line and belief in science to the exclusion of all else into a broader view of the world. We see his interest in music from his introduction by Dawn to his fanboy appreciation of a young virtuoso, long after and far away. We watch his affections, from his connection to Dawn through his love of Cassia to his love for his daughter, and growth as a parent. The story takes us into the mid-1980s, when Junie will turn twelve.

We only get to see Junie as a child, being raised by her grandparents, not an unusual situation in 1980s China, managing her physical challenge, a curious, bright girl. It is one of the few disappointments of the book that we do not get more time with her, as she appears primarily at the beginning and a bit near the end of the story. She is a vibrant presence who deserved more pages. It is she who offers the most direct consideration of our attachment to place.

"Junie scooted over toward him on her knees, reached into the well-worn tub where his feet were planted, and poked at the gnarled sinews and bones in them.
'Your legs grew roots, Grandpa,' Junie said, 'like those trees by the river!'
He looked at her, then down at his own feet.
'Do you think my legs will grow roots like yours, when I’m older?' "

She also offers motivation for Momo, trying to weave his family back together again, and is a source of considerable emotional conflict for Cassia. In a way, it is the ties to Junie, direct or otherwise, that impel the other main characters to want to swim back to Trout River.

Both of Junie’s parents pursue opportunities in the United States, Cassia working in San Francisco, Momo pursuing a doctorate somewhere in the middle of the country. Momo writes home to tell Junie that he plans for them to all be together for her 12th birthday, in a year and half. But he does not tell her that he and Cassia have become estranged. So, a high bar.

In addition to the moving stories of the main characters, there is much thematic content in this book. Feng offers a notion of connectivity that morphs into something larger. The filaments, the tendrils of the passage quoted at the top of this review form a mat of destiny. There are plenty more, some a bit dark:

" …because of what happened to her the previous year in Beijing, Cassia understood that what set human events in motion were the most ethereal of tendrils, a kind of machinery no less powerful for its lack of discernible shape."
--------------------------------------
"He had assumed that even when the weight was at its heaviest, there had been a rope that tethered them to each other, such that pulling was possible."
--------------------------------------
"How did an umbilical cord turn into a noose?"

There is much on water as well, serving diverse needs, including as a connecting, unifying medium.

"'I don’t want to go anywhere,' she mumbled between spasms of breath. 'I want to stay here with you and Grandma, even when you are old, forever and ever—'
Grandpa started to shake his head when he heard the word 'forever,' but he saw Junie’s fever-red cheeks and stopped himself.
'If you send me away, I’ll turn,' she told him.
Grandpa stared at her.
'I’ll turn into a fish and swim back here,' she said, pointing to the direction of the river, 'from America!'
'From the river?'
'I’ll learn to swim for a long way,' Junie said. She’d seen America on a map, and it was across an expanse of textured blue. But what was an ocean, after all, but a bigger body of water? And didn’t adults say that all rivers drained into the sea? "

Cassia reacts to the Bay area climate as a source of comfort, maybe a way to stay hidden.

"To Cassia the fog had an inviting, tactile quality. Being in its midst must be like being embraced by the most benign form of water, because you could be immersed in it without drowning. "

In the Pen America interview Feng says:

"Though I didn’t always grow up near bodies of water, in my writing I find myself drawn to rivers and coasts, probably because they gesture toward circulation and connectivity, and yet also have unique moods when observed on the time scale of days, years, decades, and even centuries."

In an interview with LitHub, asked to summarize her book, Feng replied, "How to improvise a life. The fluidity of where we call home. The resilience of the imagination. How the titanic forces of history precipitate in smaller, more recessive lives." She offers a vibrant look at what it means to be a Chinese immigrant in the USA, whether in an above-board visa-holding status, or as a defector, a student, or a menial laborer.

"What I hope to show with characters like Momo is that the experience of emigration, however hopeful, involves a kind of sundering, a giving up of people and things that otherwise sustain them. And because much of what they give up—the fabric of an extended family, rootedness to a place, an honest narrative of one’s own past—are wholly invisible, they often find it hard to articulate the shapes of these more wayward forms of grief." - from the Pen America interview

Gripes are few for this one. More screen time for Junie is the largest. There is a twist near the end that I thought was unnecessary. Those who have read the book will know what I am referring to.

This is a beautiful, lyrical novel. There is a richness of language here that will reward patient, gently-paced reading. It will surprise no one, given the artistry of language and the power of imagery in the novel, that Linda Rui Feng is, in addition to being a novelist, a published poet. She is a writer of short fiction as well. A cultural historian, teaching undergraduate and graduate students at the University of Toronto, she offers a look at personal ways in which the Cultural Revolution impacts her characters. In Swimming Back to Trout River, Feng has given us characters who have been shaped by the tumultuous era in which they came of age. They struggle with issues of love, of career, of terrible loss, grief, and of a desire for roots while being uprooted. Their stories are moving, and the trials to which some of them have been subjected are enraging. Thankfully, you will not have to paddle upstream to give this one a look. Swimming Back to Trout River is a dip worth taking.

"…this morning, while driving the last stretch of road with a storm gathering, I thought: Is it possible that grief too is like music? Maybe once grief begins, you cannot simply cut it off. Rather you have to let it run its course the way an aria comes to its last note. You cannot stop grief in its tracks any more than you can cut off the aria at just any point you deem convenient.
And maybe, like someone said, love is a wound that closes and opens, all our lives."1


Review posted – May 14, 2021

Publication date – May 11, 2021


I received an e-galley from Simon & Schuster via NetGalley in return for an honest review.

For the complete review, formatted, with links, please check out my posting on Goodreads - https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/3770439518