Thanks to Netgalley and Knopf for the ebook. A lovely autobiographical fiction, where the author recreates her mother’s life, first as she’s born into a wealthy family from Shanghai and then comes to America for college and ends up stranded once China explores into an all consuming Communist Revolution. Her mother marries, has five kids and never goes back to China and never sees her mother again. And that really is the heart of the novel: Mother and daughter relationships that are loving, but also angry and in this case violent and withholding. There’s a wonderful device that snakes through the whole book where as the daughter is writing the book, she is constantly in conversation with her mother, even though her mother has passed away.

The story flowed well and the characters were well developed. I recommend this book and look forward to more from this author.


****Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for providing an ARC in exchange for my honest review****