Honestly…intended to give this fewer stars, but upon reflection it was well written. It’s just that the abuse suffered by this teenager is pretty extreme, and really isn’t excused by or atoned for adequately in the very late and quiet reckoning that happens in the book, so it feels like being made an unwilling accomplice to crimes. Admittedly, the setting seems to be sometime in the 80s (I don’t remember if it was explicitly stated-?), and a lot of the things many of us experienced then would count as abuse today, so maybe that’s not a fair complaint to hold against this author, but I still would have appreciated more catharsis for the length of suffering.
From my distress tho lol it’s clear it was evocative, and I’m glad of the final revelations the mc had.

Thanks to NetGalley for my copy!

This mother daughter story got under my skin. Even those with the greatest relationships will find moments in this book that make them nod and also want to cry. This whole thing has an air of claustrophia and Pung makes us truly feel the feelings and makes the reader uncomfortable. Sometimes the beast and the prince are the same person and we are reminded of this time and time again here.

Unexpectedly poignant and just so real! Pung did an excellent job of making the reader go back & forth between hating and empathizing with Karuna's Grand Mar. Karuna, a teenager, becomes pregnant and learns some new truths about her own mother as she herself prepares to become a mother and has to face how love may look different to different people. In this case, the way her mother chooses to express it causes a lot pain and confusion at the same time that she is being transformed by her own role as a new mom. There was some really beautiful writing surrounding the power of motherhood and it was almost surprising that it rose up out of the otherwise average writing. I did like the character developing and the overall simplicity in the story telling with some really beautiful nuggets.

This was an amazing read. Karuna is a biracial only child living in Australia with her White father and Chinese mother. They're life is solidly middle class until her parents divorce and she is left consoling her mother, losing her home and losing touch with her best friend when she starts attending a new public high school. Karuna then finds herself pregnant at 16, contending with her mother's control (it's supposed to be love but its not), her father's distance and the jeers of strangers who view her ethnicity with disdain or fetish. Like any excellent book, this book brought on strong emotions and made me miss the characters when I finished the book.

Thanks to Net Galley and HarperVia for giving me access to this novel prior to its US release.

The main character Karuna who is a mixed teenager living in Australia is resenting her mother but has conflicting emotions because she must rely on her. She becomes pregnant and has to deal with the reality of her situation.

I never expected to like all characters within a book but It was extremely hard to empathize with many in the book. Especially Karuna. I did however really enjoy that the book was separated into "then" and "now". It helped put the pieces of the novel together. Overall the novel was okay to read and I do look forward to the audiobook. I honestly think that would help my understanding and my enjoyment of it better.

4

"One day, a boy in a nice silver car gives sixteen-year-old Karuna a ride. So Karuna returns the favor."

Set in Melbourne, Australia, Karuna is pregnant.

Her mom has been overprotective her whole life, but when her father leaves them, it turns into a whole new level. As an act of rebellion during summer, Karuna gets involved with a slightly older boy who works as her neighborhood's tutor. Her mom forced Karuna to go there while she works during summer break, but what was meant to be homework help became something more. Resulting in an unexpected pregnancy, Karuna must grapple with her new identity as a mother herself.

Reading about Karuna's pregnancy and the actions of her overbearing mother made me feel frustrated and uncomfortable. Filled with stuffy imagery and uneasy descriptions of her mother's actions once she finds out Karuna is pregnant is hard to read, so go into this expecting to be unsettled. The theme shows how emotional abuse isn't okay, even if the person says they do it out of love. The balance between love and control between Karuna and her mom is the center of the story. After discovering the pregnancy, Karuna's mother decides that to protect her daughter she will keep her confined in their 14-story public housing flat by locking the front door and keeping the spare key because it's for "her own good." Her way of showing love is warped like that. As tension and animosity build, Karuna and her mother's relationship is put to the test. Emotional abuse isn't okay, but can or should a daughter forgive her mother?

Alice Pung encapsulates the different dynamics brought upon a family from generational, cultural, and personal differences in a compassionate and open way. The ending of the book is not the decision everyone should take when dealing with a similar situation, but it's Karuna's. She makes it at the end of her journey - with Pung showing a tender understanding of how difficult it is to grow up, find your own voice, and make the decision to forgive your mother or not.

Thank you, NetGalley for the Arc!

Amazing family drama that made me feel anger, pity, sadness, sympathy, and hope. Alice Pung took a simple common story and with her creative text and emotional words, made me sympathize and root for the main character in a way that I was screaming, “Just find a way to leave that crazy mother!”

Karuna is being raised in Australia by her Australian father and Filipino mother. The reader sees Karuna’s mother in the eyes of Karuna and begins to understand the need for her to try to escape her mother’s obsessive controlling behavior. Events happen to cause Karuna’s mother to become even more possessive of her daughter, which leads Karuna to begin a hopelessness that seems impossible to overcome.

I cannot say enough accolades about Alice Pung’s writing, and I highlighted many phrases that I do not want to forget; like the following: “We have been like two puzzles that someone dropped on the floor. We didn’t know which bits belonged where. We were too frantic putting ourselves back together again that we just grabbed at pieces of each other. We were hasty, pressing our sharp corners down whether they fitted or not.” Ms. Pung created a protagonist that I became so invested in that seeing her life struggles was incredibly frustrating. But to see Karuna change, grow and become stronger, I forgot she was not real. I finished this novel wanting to know more about Karuna and her life after the ending.

I highly recommend this novel if you love a fantastic story about mother-daughter relationships and how we can learn from suffering and overcome the trials that we sometimes create for ourselves.

Thank you HarperVia and NetGalley for sending me this wonderful Advanced Readers Copy. #NetGalley #OneHundredDays

Thank you Netgalley for this book in exchange for my honest review.

I have to admit that I was expecting to read a book about an Indian main character because the name "Karuna" is a name in South Asia so that was a bit of a surprise but as is with asian cultures, I was not surprised to see how they shared similar traditions of parents showing their love for their children through control and wanting to protect their kids by not letting them make their own mistakes.

Unfortunately, Karuna has made a mistake and an irreversible one when she finds herself pregnant as a single 16 year old and worse, she has repeated her mother's mistake who was abandoned by her husband. This was a tough read emotionally to see the abuse dealt by her mother and yet to reconcile that with what the author (and Karuna) clearly want to forgive as her tough love. I love reading about other cultures so I did also like that it was set in Australia.

While this book triumphed via an easy, free-flowing writing style, it was at times uncomfortable to read. The book depicts a mixed raced family living in Australia. The mother is of Chinese origin while the father is a much older Australian. The mother maintains a beauty studio in the home where she transforms brides into perfection with her makeup expertise. The husband works on cars. They have nothing in common and constantly clash on parenting styles with their daughter Karuna. At around the age of 15, Karuna's father finally checks out of the marriage. Karuna and her mother's living situation changes drastically when they must move into a small apartment while the mother works two jobs to make ends meet.

I admired the mother's work ethic and survival instinct, but her personality was disastrous. I found her conduct to be so mentally abusive towards her daughter, and wasn't surprised at all that the husband left her. I found myself getting stressed out as I experienced the crazy ass interactions with her daughter. The main thrust of the book occurs when Karuna gets pregnant at sixteen and the aftermath of this life-altering development. From the beginning, the book reads as if Karuna is writing to her child about the whole situation, which was a clever mechanism. I found the book very interesting as I simultaneously recoiled at the mother's abusive behavior.

Thank you to the publisher HarperVia who provided an advance reader copy via NetGalley.

Thank you, NetGalley and HarperVia, for the ARC as an exchange with honest review.

This book gives me variety of emotions. I am mad, happy, suffocated, desperate, happy, relieved, angry, all throughout the book. There is also hint of frustration for most part, a hope for Karuna and her baby, for them escape from Grand Mar.

The writing doesn't disappoint, neat and direct, which I can enjoy easily. It conveys the story really well that I can still remember my hands were shaking from certain parts.

A great book to enjoy for your weekend!

It was cool to see a book in second person. I wasn’t expecting that. I didn’t enjoy the writing style itself, but it should be a solid three stars for the target audience. Four to five for the right readers.

Thank you to NetGalley and HarperVia for the ARC.

Growing up Asian in an Australian world that barely sees you; being raised by a mother steeped in the ancient ways of her ancestors, we meet Karuna. When she becomes pregnant, her mother basically imprisons her in their tiny apartment. And though her mother means well, all Karuna feels is helpless and alone. This is the story of how Karuna learns to stand up for herself and her daughter and come to terms with a mother who loves her, but is unable to show it.

I loved this story. It was beautifully written; lyrical in its flow. And I truly felt for all the characters. I highly recommend it.

This was such an amazing book!! Once I started I couldn't stop reading, I loved reading about the main character grow into the girl she ended up being, standing up for herself, and becoming the best she could be. I wish the book never ended. I'll forsure read it again.

I read just about anything, though this type isn't my preferred genre. I couldn't put it down and finished it in less than 24 hours.
My 31 yr old dtr thinks I am a narcissist. She lives here at home with her two children aged 11 and 3. Both children have different fathers and the later is not involved in the child's life. She is not appreciative of the 11 years of free babysitting, free room and board and the free gifts I bestow on my grandchildren. I want my OWN life. But because of her poor decisions that's not possible right now.
I get this premise behind the controlling, but here at home it's my daughter with her son. He can't breathe without her asking how many breathes are you taking. I intervene for my grandsons sake.
This book is less about control and more about cultural differences. If you know of the Filipino culture, this makes sense to you. If you don't, go find one and ask them.
I loved the story with one exception. The release of control happened to quickly and to easily after the social services came. Was it really that easy? More should have been explored between singles mothers, teens and the time period - was it the 80's? In 1980 I was a sophomore and the majority of the 800 students knew of the one girl walking the halls taking class 7 months pregnant. I'm 59 and can tell you her name. But I won't.
Overall I enjoyed the storyline and the characters and the style of writing.

Karuna, a mixed Filipina-Chinese and white teenager, fluctuates wildly between resenting her overprotective mother and recognizing her reliance on her. When a summertime experimentation (or rebellion?) results in a pregnancy, Karuna must contend with new realities that reveal parts of her mother that are both familiar and scary. Alice Pung uses the confinement period that is typical for many cultures as a means of exploring the complexities that arise when generations, cultures, etc. meet head-on. Karuna's weariness, naïveté, grudging acceptance, fear, and desire to survive all make appearances and there are hints that her mother has and perhaps continues to experience the same. Pung captures all of this subtly and ultimately leads the reader to understand the strength required in keeping on keeping on.

I don't expect to like every character in a book I'm reading, but it does help to have at least one character to at least halfway empathize with, and this book unfortunately did not provide that for me. I hope others enjoy it more than I did.

One Hundred Days follows Karuna, a 16-year-old spending all of her time in her and her mother's apartment as she awaits the birth of child. The book is written from Karuna's perspective as she write letters in her solitude for her baby to one day read. I could see where this book could be redundant and uninteresting to some readers, but I personally loved this book and the way that the repetitiveness of Karuna's thoughts was very reflective of her situation stuck in one place with nothing to do but think.
Karuna's home life is...complicated, to say the least. Her father left a couple of years before she became pregnant and her relationship with her mother is tumultuous. She has romanticized a version of her father in her head that doesn't reflect the nuanced reality - at times she even expresses resentment towards her mother for being so horrible he left, rather than recognizing that her father chose to leave them both. This was an excellent example of the human tendency to idealize and I think it was important that she ultimately began to realize her father's shortcomings. Her relationship with her mother is one marked by strife, cultural differences, and exhaustion. The blurb of the book suggests their relationship is meant to represent a grey area between tough love and abuse. While I was able to see that Karuna occasionally empathized with her mother rather than solely feeling anger for her, her mother's behavior was extreme and hard to forgive as a reader. Regardless, I found this examination on motherhood to be very interesting, both between Karuna and her mother and in Karuna herself becoming a mother.
The narration of this book follows a section of "Then" and a section of "Now." Often, with books that are split into two parts, I end up loving one part and feeling indifferent towards the other - that didn't happen here. Instead, I was fully enveloped by both parts. Not only did I love both parts, but I was also impressed by the smooth transition between them - they felt distinct, yet they still belonged together - and moving from one to the other wasn't choppy or disorienting.
By far the best part of this novel was Karuna's love for her baby, not only after she was born, but also before that - when she was left alone with her thoughts and spent so much time writing to and imagining the baby she would have. The baby was a clear beacon of hope and purpose for her, and her love for the baby and determination to show that love was touching and beautiful.
Overall, this book was both incredibly frustrating and stunningly moving.

This story is claustrophobic, difficult to look away from, and heart-rending. I ended up feeling deeply for both the daughter and the mother. It's a deep character study as well as intense . Told with a sense of unease and ultimately hope. Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for my ARC.

One Hundred Days is a kind of coming of age story about Karuna, the teen daughter of a single mother, and her relationship with her mother, who is referred to as Grand Mar through the book. Karuna is pregnant, and this book is written like a letter to her baby. I really liked the portrayal of the cultural divide between Karuna and Grand Mar. Grand Mar has a lot of ideas about motherhood and pregnancy that are still popular in some countries, but obviously Karuna's Australian doctors disagree with. (My coworkers in China argued with me a lot about how after having a baby mom should be on bed rest for a full month and not even shower.) Karuna and Grand Mar have a pretty rocky relationship because Grand Mar is controlling and domineering and obsessed with looks, and Karuna feels it's Grand Mar's fault that her dad left.

We, as readers, slowly start to see that Karuna's dad is also a jerk. But for me, as the story progressed and got the end, it felt like it was trying to make excuses for Grand Mar's abusive behavior. It's easier to feel empathy when you hear about Grand Mar's upbringing and relationship with her own mom, but it doesn't erase how she treated Karuna.

Overall I think this was an interesting read.

I am choosing not to finish this book. I was really intrigued by the concept and I love the intricacies of mother-daughter relationships. However, in my opinion, this book has very unlikable characters. This made me not care about the relationship between Karuna and Grand Mar and quickly soured the reading experience for me. For example, "Grand Mar" is portrayed as a very narcissistic, uncompassionate, downright mean person. And worse, I didn’t see much of a “gray” area. She wasn’t a human with problems, missing her homeland, feeling lonely. She was a naggy, unforgiving presence.

Karuna was, in my opinion, the epitome of “not like the other girls”. I understand she felt suffocated by her mother. But even as she writes to her child about her relationship with Grand Mar, there are no notes of reflection only resentment. Oh, but Karuna loves her father and constantly praises him? And she constantly judges Tweezer but likes that Tweezer admires her so she’ll be friends with her? I hate to say it, but this book feels so weirdly “anti-female” to me.

All that being said, I want to be transparent and say that I only got to page 44 in the book. However, I could not bring myself to read more. I already was not rooting for Karuna, the main protagonist, so I did not feel compelled to continue the story.