Alternating between present and past, first and third person narration, the story follows the members of Liu family.

I can’t say this enough: you don’t have to like the characters or their choices or think they’re good people for a book to be worth your time. A book begging to be read on the beach, with the sun warming the sand and salt in the air: pure escapism. It’s truly the perfect inaugural book for SJP Lit and I couldn’t be more honored to be working with the extraordinarily talented Elysha Chang. Here, the themes include family fractures, working-class and undocumented immigrant lives, miscarriage (though underexplored), self-knowledge, parental expectations, and loss.I’m excited and honored to publish A Quitter’s Paradise, the debut novel by standout literary talent Elysha Chang. What do you inherit from a mother who refused to make herself known, even to the people she loved most? The story switches and jumps rather abruptly back and forth between timeline ; the present, Eleanor's childhood and her parents' migration. In A Quitter's Paradise, the darkly humorous debut by bold, new voice Elysha Chang, a young woman does everything she can to ignore her mother's death, even as unearthed family secrets become increasingly inextricable from her own. With multiple POVs, I also felt detached to the characters and I had expected some characters to be deepened.

While all this is going on, the child is told they will take care of their aging parents, grandparents? Finally, Eleanor is in a dissatisfying relationship with a white man – who she herself describes as condescending – and then this dissatisfying relationship is never addressed, she just persists in it? Likewise some of the secrets the family kept close were culturally different perhaps from the secrets more common in Western literature, but all of this is why it is so good to read well-written novels by people from cultures not our own.

A Quitter's Paradise, debut novel of Elysha Chang, follows a young woman's journey to make sense of herself, to find who she is and what she wants, and to process the grief she holds inside her heart after the death of her mother. Let me start by saying that this book is so beautifully written and charming, that I'm already a fan of Elysha Chang.

g., expanding empathy for other characters than Eleanor), the perspectives never really gelled together well. There's a sense of desperation in this book, to have something solely your own, when it seems like at every turn life makes a grab for something. I personally struggle with litfic that isn’t really plot driven — although I did love the writing style and flow of the book through different perspectives.Elysha Chang employs multiple points of view in this novel and while I can see the utility of that (e. In A Quitter’s Paradise, the darkly humorous debut by bold, new voice Elysha Chang, a young woman does everything she can to ignore her mother’s death, even as unearthed family secrets become increasingly inextricable from her own. In this way, she could become what her mother Rita “ envisioned a modern scholar to be: someone actively engaged in disappearing, in self-effacing, someone hermited within themselves… Eleanor never corrected mistakes, never offered opinions, convictions, suggestions, clarifications. It was an efficient way to employ a dual timeline with clarity, even when switching back and forth between Eleanor past and present. He may not find the precise answer, but his quest for it, in Go’s elegant and incisive prose, is perpetually captivating.

Our soon-to-be orphaned narrator’s mother is a substance-abusing teenage single mom who checks out via OD on his 11th birthday, and Demon’s cynical, wised-up voice is light-years removed from David Copperfield’s earnest tone. One of Kingsolver’s major themes, hit a little too insistently, is the contempt felt by participants in the modern capitalist economy for those rooted in older ways of life.

It is this Aquino-Marcos meeting that Lito uses to entice his disaffected son, now a middle-aged American journalist. As Eleanor's avoidance of her feelings results in a series of outrageous-often hilarious-choices, her actions begin to threaten all she holds most dear. In 2013 New York City, Eleanor Liu is on track to fulfill her late mother Rita’s low expectations, having dropped out of a neuroscience graduate program to work in her classmate-turned-husband’s lab.