A Quitter's Paradise

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This debut novel examines the grief of a young woman desperate to detach from the reality of her mother’s death and estrangement of her family. I really liked the present day plot and wished the story had focused more on the present Eleanor including the future of her work, her relationship with her best friend, her relationship with her husband, and her grieving her mother’s recent death. Punctuating Eleanor’s sections are dips into her family members’ lives, from both earlier years and long before she was born. 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.

A Quitter’s Paradise | Elysha Chang | 9781638930525 | NetGalley A Quitter’s Paradise | Elysha Chang | 9781638930525 | NetGalley

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. Still, I would like to think it provides a level of understanding and, if not that a nice steppingstone to great conversations with friends whose families have immigrated to the US. And, as if in keeping with the scientific method, the characters’ narratives are peppered with questions: “What was its purpose? What struck me about this book was that it was exactly what I was looking for, which was a brand-new voice who was telling a story unfamiliar to me,” Parker says, “but also a story that would connect with readers who were looking for stories of their lives, who had yet to experience them in a book. Hopefully, the Liu family will appear in future stories or maybe even they will get spinoff stories of their own.

The narrative switches between three time periods were sometimes rather difficult to follow, partly due to the Chinese names which were unfamiliar to me. We focused on the lost marmoset as a leading theme from the story, accentuating the strangeness and untethered feeling of being alone in the city. At once disarmingly provocative and compulsively readable, A Quitter’s Paradise interweaves Eleanor’s story with her parents’ in an unexpectedly funny study of the beauty and contradictions of family bonds and self-knowledge, exploring the ways we unwittingly guard the secrets of our loved ones, even from ourselves.

A Quitter’s Paradise by Elysa Chang - Ashley Hajimirsadeghi A Quitter’s Paradise by Elysa Chang - Ashley Hajimirsadeghi

I really appreciated the nuanced and sometimes difficult choices the characters made when it came to relationships, secrets, and being vulnerable with one another, especially when it came to difficult families and estrangement. At the same time, she is conducting illegal experiments with mice from the lab, and if she gets caught, it could mean the end for her husband along with her. What do you inherit from a mother who refused to make herself known, even to the people she loved most? I read on the subway’ I read waiting for meetings; I read while I’m waiting for someone to log on to a Zoom. The main obstacle to my simple, happy life,” muses Eleanor, the narrator of Elysha Chang’s debut novel, A Quitter’s Paradise , “was that I was prone to secret-keeping.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. And so I did, initially, just start looking for other sources of information—from her sister, her parents.

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I got some subtle metaphors here with the context of Eleanor’s family’s story, as they struggled consistently to get where they’re at and she gives up, while her husband is privileged. As A Quitter’s Paradise follows Eleanor’s winding journey to make sense of herself and her grief, her story is interwoven with those of her family members—from her parents’ lives in the military villages of Taipei, to their early days as immigrants in New York City, to Eleanor and her sister’s childhoods. I finished this book in one day, which is fairly unusual for me, and I believe other readers would do the same! This book is still in a different vein, though, as it is primarily about grief and trying to overcome the obstacles of immigration and attempting to find the American Dream for one Taiwanese family. Can we find a way to make sure we’re connecting with libraries and book sellers and then, of course, ultimately readers?But it wasn’t what I set my eyes on because I felt that it muddied the waters, and it took the purity away from the whole experience and the exercise of convincing an author to let me shepherd this alongside them. That’s funny, my parents are both classical musicians, and so some of my earliest memories are of going to rehearsals and lying in between rows of seats reading a book, which I hadn’t thought about in years. The material on this site may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, cached or otherwise used, except with the prior written permission of Condé Nast. 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.

A Quitter’s Paradise – Books and Mischief A Quitter’s Paradise – Books and Mischief

Soon, those characters bloomed to play a larger role than simply being in service of Eleanor’s narrative: A pair of brothers, decades earlier, became estranged during the Chinese Civil War, with one growing up in China and the other Taiwan; the origin story of the relationship between Eleanor’s parents, Rita and Jing, comes to light. What I was trying to express was that I didn’t want to co-opt an author and make them feel that that was my end point, that I just wanted to get my hands on the rights, you know? The surprise plot point at about 50% had me totally mindblown and was super well done (I won't spoil it for everyone else, but lol).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.