Published by Penguin Press on 12 Sep 2017
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In Shaker Heights, a placid, progressive suburb of Cleveland, everything is meticulously planned – from the layout of the winding roads, to the colours of the houses, to the successful lives its residents will go on to lead. And no one embodies this spirit more than Elena Richardson, whose guiding principle is playing by the rules.
Enter Mia Warren – an enigmatic artist and single mother – who arrives in this idyllic bubble with her teenage daughter Pearl, and rents a house from the Richardsons. Soon Mia and Pearl become more than just tenants: all four Richardson children are drawn to the alluring mother-daughter pair. But Mia carries with her a mysterious past, and a disregard for the rules that threatens to upend this carefully ordered community.
When the Richardsons’ friends attempt to adopt a Chinese-American baby, a custody battle erupts that dramatically divides the town and puts Mia and Mrs. Richardson on opposing sides. Suspicious of Mia and her motives, Mrs. Richardson becomes determined to uncover the secrets in Mia’s past. But her obsession will come at unexpected and devastating costs to her own family – and Mia’s.
I chose this book because…
Everyone was talking about this book last year! Miraculously, I didn’t have to wait too long on the library waitlist to get my hands on a copy. Excited to get into such a highly-acclaimed book by an Asian-American author!
Upon reading it…
This novel began as a slow, small town story. 100 pages in, I was surprised that there wasn’t more happening; I had heard so many people raving about this book, so I suppose I expected there to be a little more drama in such a sensational book.
I was looking for the moment the story would pick up. And I found it (the custody battle). And it built. And I cried. But it wasn’t the drama that got to me. It was the characters.
This book got to who we are as humans, as individuals, and it touched on themes of art, identity, motherhood, and love. It introduced characters as their roles in their community, like they were dolls to be moved to a script, a sort of storytelling from a distance. As the story carried on, each character and their relationships came to life and were unraveled so that we could see each person for who they were, what they believed in, what they loved, who they loved, how they loved. We could see the reasons for the choices they made and the consequences that led. The layers to each person make you question what matters, what matters more, what’s enough.
Similarly, for most of my life, I have always seen people for the roles they played in mine. It wasn’t until college that I started breaking out of that and noticing the people behind those roles — my mom as her own person, my dad as his own person (my parents had lives before my own?? wow. mindblown), my brothers as their own people, a professor as their own person, a barista as their own person, a bus driver as their own person. Even for myself, I’ve been trying to figure out who I am apart from the role that I play — no longer a student, so who?
Even if you don’t relate to this book in the specific way that I did, I believe that there’s something for everyone to take away from it. (For the record, I relate to this book in so many more ways, but this is one place to start.)
I know that I’ve come to this book later than most people. But I think this book came to me at exactly the right time. Lately I’ve been grappling with something in my heart that I won’t get into here, but I wouldn’t be exaggerating to say that this book healed me in some ways.
A beautiful story that came to me at a perfect time. 5 stars, through and through.
★★★★★
What are you going to do about it? In those words she heard a permission to do what she’d always been told not to: to take matters into her own hands, to make trouble.
I don’t have a plan, I’m afraid. But then, no one really does, no matter what they say.
The photos stirred feelings she couldn’t quite frame in words, and this, she decided, must mean they were true works of art.
She had learned…how your life could trundle along on its safe little track and then, with no warning, skid spectacularly off course.
To a parent, your child wasn’t just a person: your child was a place, a kind of Narnia, a vast eternal place where the present you were living and the past you remembered and the future you longed for all existed at once.
It was so easy, she thought with some disdain, to find out about people. It was all out there, everything about them. You just had to look. You could figure out anything about a person if you just tried hard enough.
All her life, she had learned that passion, like fire, was a dangerous thing. It so easily went out of control. It scaled walls and jumped over trenches. Sparks leapt like fleas and spread as rapidly; a breeze could carry embers for miles.
The young are the same, always and everywhere.
In the books she read, every stream might be a river god, every tree a dryad in disguise, every old woman a powerful fairy, every pebble an enchanted soul. Anything had the potential to transform, and this, to her, seemed the true meaning of art.
I’ll take a tree over a person any day.
You’ll always be sad about this. But it doesn’t mean you made the wrong choice. It’s just something that you have to carry.
It had been a long time since her daughter had let her be so close. Parents, she thought, learned to survive touching their children less and less… It was the way of things, Mia thought to herself, but how hard it was.
It was like training yourself to live on the smell of an apple alone, when what you really wanted was to devour it, to sink your teeth into it and consume it, seeds, core, and all.
Most of the time, everyone deserves more than one chance. We all do things we regret now and then. You just have to carry them with you.
When she looked down, she saw no safety net, only a forest of skyscrapers stabbing upward like needles upon which she would be impaled. Could you blame her for tucking her daughter onto a safe ledge while she herself plummeted?
But there would be love, too, so much love. With that, you could get by with so little. It was enough for the basics: rent, food, clothes. How did you weigh a mother’s love against the cost of raising a child?
What made someone a mother? Was it biology alone, or was it love?
But the problem with rules, he reflected, was that they implied a right way and a wrong way to do things. When, in fact, most of the time there were simply ways, none of them quite wrong or quite right, and nothing to tell you for sure which side of the line you stood on.
She did not even have words, only a feeling, a terrible hollow feeling, as if everything inside her had been scooped out raw.
Sometimes, just when you think everything’s gone, you find a way.
Sometimes you need to scorch everything to the ground, and start over. After the burning the soil is richer, and new things can grow. People are like that, too. They start over. They find a way.
It’s all right to take time and see what grows.