A Quitter's Paradise

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What kept this from being a perfect novel for me is that it tries to cover too much ground (it doesn’t quite manage the pithy restraint of CHEMISTRY or Rachel Khong’s GOODBYE, VITAMIN), and the ending left me scratching my head a bit.

A masterpiece that wrangles several lifetimes of wisdom, loss, and heartbreak into a slim novel you can clutch to your chest, pass on to your sharpest, most mercurial friends, and say: read this, feel this!This adds some key context to the decisions and guilt that Eleanor fields, on top of the grief, of having quit everything she—and her mother—had dreamed of her doing.

The story resides at the muddled intersection of grief, disillusionment, and complacency with surprising clarity. The narration is intimate, poignant, it's almost like reading someone's deepest thoughts: truly beautiful. Some authors I simply cannot get into their writing style, or even how they lay out their storylines, and while I did not absolutely love this novel, I thought the writing was well done. A bittersweet family saga about a young woman from a second generation immigrant family coping with her mother’s death. In the past timeline, we get to know Rita through her backstory, which plays a huge role in shaping her relationship with her daughters in their childhood years.The time jumps were abrupt and breaking the flow and the characters' evolution, which unfortunately made me disconnect and consequently care less about them. At once disarmingly provocative and compulsively readable, A Quitter’s Paradise is an unexpectedly funny study of the beauty and contradictions of grief, family bonds, and self-knowledge, exploring the ways we unwittingly guard the secrets of our loved ones, even from ourselves. The writing in this one is fairly accessible; I finished the book over the course of two days while I was in vacation in California. Portraying an avoidant character is fine, but Eleanor is avoidant in a pretty one-note, one-dimensional way throughout the entire novel, which made for a dull reading experience.

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. She ends up pregnant after quitting the program, but their marriage seems to be rocky from the fact he simply gets everything and she struggles. Throughout the book, we readers watch Eleanor make impulsive decisions that she can’t even understand or explain to herself. 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. The author uses the same things I've seen in other books -- the children assume their family debt, parents pressure them to pay as well show respect with dignity while paying these bills; don't complain or bring shame -- not further shame, just shame to the family.

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. I think the closest comparison you could compare this book to is Disorientation, which is about another PhD student trying to uncover a secret about a Chinese poet she’s studying. Penny, Eleanor’s former supervisor, disapproves of the arrangement because she believes Eleanor is a good scientist who’s not living up to her potential.