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quippeThe Blurb On The Back:
Leigh Chen Sanders is sixteen when her mother dies by suicide, leaving only a scribbled note:
”I want you to remember”.
Leigh doesn’t know what it means, but when a red bird appears with a message, she finds herself travelling to Taiwan to meet her maternal grandparents for the first time.
Leigh is far away from home and far away from Axel, her best friend, who she stupidly kissed on the night her mother died - leaving her with a swell of guilt that she wasn’t home, and a heavy heart, thinking she may have destroyed the one good thing left in her life.
Overwhelmed by grief and the burden of fulfilling her mother’s last wish, Leigh retreats into her art and into her memories, where colours collide and the rules of reality are broken, The only thing Leigh is certain about is that she must find out the truth. She must remember.
16-year-old Leigh Chen Sanders lives with her Taiwanese mother (a piano teacher) and American father (a former musician who is now a sociology professor specialising in the Far East) together with a cat called Meimei in Fairbridge, USA. Her mother suffers from depression, going through bouts that are so serious that she is unable to get out of bed let alone teach her piano students. Leigh can’t help noticing the fact that her father has to travel so much for his work seems to make her mother’s depression worse.
Leigh finds solace in her gift for art and the fact that her teacher thinks she’s good enough to apply to the Kreiss Festival for young artists in Berlin (a highly competitive festival where the best 12 applicants have their work shown in a gallery), although her father thinks she should focus on more academic and practical subjects instead so that she can support herself as an adult. She also takes comfort in her relationship with best friend Axel, who - like her - is biracial (Puerto Rican and Filipino) and has a gift for art, but whose mother left their family when he was young. If Leigh is being honest with herself, however, she knows that what she feels for Axel goes further than friendship, but she’s scared that he won’t feel the same way and that fear is reinforced when he starts dating another girl at their high school.
On the same day that she finally kisses Axel, she returns home to find that her mother has committed suicide. There was no note, but in the bin Leigh and her father find some scribbled out sentences, one of which says: “I want you to remember”.
As Leigh tries to come to terms with her grief, she sees a mysterious red bird flying near her house, which leaves a box for her that’s filled with photos of her mother and people she doesn’t know and other artefacts. When she shows it to her father, he reveals that contrary to what her mother always told her, she has grandparents living in Taipei, Taiwan. Convinced that the bird is her mother and the box a final instruction to her, she is happy when her father decides to take her there to visit them, only for him to abandon her shortly after arrival following an argument with her grandmother.
Unable to speak much Mandarin, Leigh is uncertain how best to understand what her mother’s final message and box means. Help comes from a young Taiwanese woman called Feng who is friendly with her grandparents and who offers to take Leigh to places that were important to her mother while strange incense sticks that came in the box of artefacts take her on a journey through her family’s memories. Leigh is certain that somehow she can piece everything together to understand what her mother wanted and why she was the way she was, even though that means uncovering painful secrets and learning things about herself in the process …
Emily X. R. Pan’s debut YA novel is a powerful and moving look at what it means to live with a parent with depression that incorporates Chinese spiritual beliefs with a magical realist twist. Leigh is a believable protagonist, forced to navigate grief and first love and Pan does well to show her gift for and love of art. Although a little overwritten in places for my taste (purely a personal thing), I will definitely check out her subsequent work.
In an author’s note at the back of the book Pan says that while she had been working on this book for several years, it was only after the loss of a member of her family to suicide in 2014 that she realised she wanted to explore grief within this book. I think that this is something that really comes through in the text through Leigh’s longing to give closure to her relationship with her mother and try to make sense of what she did and why she did it. This does make for a difficult read at times - probably for me, most powerfully, when Pan alludes to what Leigh’s mother Dory did - but it also gives the book a strong sense of emotional authenticity and one that I think many readers will empathise with, regardless of their age.
The book also does a good job of incorporating its more magical realist elements - although Pan leaves it open to the reader to decide if the red bird and magical incense actually happen or are a by product of Leigh’s grief. Pan has a vivid way of describing colour and setting scenes and a scene where Leigh and her grandmother visit a city of ghosts and Leigh sees spirits moving in the trees is both eerie and wonderful.
I found the movement of the action from the US to Taiwan to be fascinating and Pan sets out how Leigh’s bi-racial status marks her as an outsider in Taiwan both to the inhabitants and her own grandparents and the way in which Pan describes Taiwanese traditions and beliefs with everyday life is evocative and interesting without being alienating. The uncertain relationship between Leigh and her grandparents (most notably her grandmother) works well on the page but while Pan does a sound job of showing the breakdown for the relationship between them and Leigh’s mother, I wanted to see more of how the events she discovers shapes Leigh’s view of them as this is not really explored. Equally, I was not wholly convinced by Leigh’s resentment of and antagonism to Feng and I think that the twist that emerges at the end will be obvious to readers.
The relationship between Leigh and Axel is not something that readers of YA have not seen before but Pan still makes it sweet and credible with the pair’s mutual attraction being obvious to the reader but not to the characters and Pan does a good job of showing Leigh’s fear and longing as she experiences being in love. The introduction of another friend Caro seemed to me to be unnecessary and is really there as a plot device both to make Leigh reflect on what love is and compare Caro’s happy and accepting family with her own. This in turn ties in with my main criticism of the book which is that it was overwritten in places for my tastes in that Pan is heavy handed with the use of similes in some scenes and I just wanted to see it pared back. That said, it is a personal thing and I accept that some readers will find that style of writing more sumptuous.
Clearly this is a book about suicide and what I will say is that it is handled sensitively and there are links at the back for people who want help. Again, being picky I couldn’t help but notice that in my copy most of the assistance is US-based and I wish that the UK publisher had put in more UK resources, but to be clear that is not the author’s fault at all.
Ultimately, I thought that this was a moving, considered read and a very strong debut. My personal style preferences aside I will definitely keep an eye open for Pan’s other work.
The Verdict:
Emily X. R. Pan’s debut YA novel is a powerful and moving look at what it means to live with a parent with depression that incorporates Chinese spiritual beliefs with a magical realist twist. Leigh is a believable protagonist, forced to navigate grief and first love and Pan does well to show her gift for and love of art. Although a little overwritten in places for my taste (purely a personal thing), I will definitely check out her subsequent work.
Thanks to the Amazon Vine Programme for the review copy of this book.
Leigh Chen Sanders is sixteen when her mother dies by suicide, leaving only a scribbled note:
Leigh doesn’t know what it means, but when a red bird appears with a message, she finds herself travelling to Taiwan to meet her maternal grandparents for the first time.
Leigh is far away from home and far away from Axel, her best friend, who she stupidly kissed on the night her mother died - leaving her with a swell of guilt that she wasn’t home, and a heavy heart, thinking she may have destroyed the one good thing left in her life.
Overwhelmed by grief and the burden of fulfilling her mother’s last wish, Leigh retreats into her art and into her memories, where colours collide and the rules of reality are broken, The only thing Leigh is certain about is that she must find out the truth. She must remember.
16-year-old Leigh Chen Sanders lives with her Taiwanese mother (a piano teacher) and American father (a former musician who is now a sociology professor specialising in the Far East) together with a cat called Meimei in Fairbridge, USA. Her mother suffers from depression, going through bouts that are so serious that she is unable to get out of bed let alone teach her piano students. Leigh can’t help noticing the fact that her father has to travel so much for his work seems to make her mother’s depression worse.
Leigh finds solace in her gift for art and the fact that her teacher thinks she’s good enough to apply to the Kreiss Festival for young artists in Berlin (a highly competitive festival where the best 12 applicants have their work shown in a gallery), although her father thinks she should focus on more academic and practical subjects instead so that she can support herself as an adult. She also takes comfort in her relationship with best friend Axel, who - like her - is biracial (Puerto Rican and Filipino) and has a gift for art, but whose mother left their family when he was young. If Leigh is being honest with herself, however, she knows that what she feels for Axel goes further than friendship, but she’s scared that he won’t feel the same way and that fear is reinforced when he starts dating another girl at their high school.
On the same day that she finally kisses Axel, she returns home to find that her mother has committed suicide. There was no note, but in the bin Leigh and her father find some scribbled out sentences, one of which says: “I want you to remember”.
As Leigh tries to come to terms with her grief, she sees a mysterious red bird flying near her house, which leaves a box for her that’s filled with photos of her mother and people she doesn’t know and other artefacts. When she shows it to her father, he reveals that contrary to what her mother always told her, she has grandparents living in Taipei, Taiwan. Convinced that the bird is her mother and the box a final instruction to her, she is happy when her father decides to take her there to visit them, only for him to abandon her shortly after arrival following an argument with her grandmother.
Unable to speak much Mandarin, Leigh is uncertain how best to understand what her mother’s final message and box means. Help comes from a young Taiwanese woman called Feng who is friendly with her grandparents and who offers to take Leigh to places that were important to her mother while strange incense sticks that came in the box of artefacts take her on a journey through her family’s memories. Leigh is certain that somehow she can piece everything together to understand what her mother wanted and why she was the way she was, even though that means uncovering painful secrets and learning things about herself in the process …
Emily X. R. Pan’s debut YA novel is a powerful and moving look at what it means to live with a parent with depression that incorporates Chinese spiritual beliefs with a magical realist twist. Leigh is a believable protagonist, forced to navigate grief and first love and Pan does well to show her gift for and love of art. Although a little overwritten in places for my taste (purely a personal thing), I will definitely check out her subsequent work.
In an author’s note at the back of the book Pan says that while she had been working on this book for several years, it was only after the loss of a member of her family to suicide in 2014 that she realised she wanted to explore grief within this book. I think that this is something that really comes through in the text through Leigh’s longing to give closure to her relationship with her mother and try to make sense of what she did and why she did it. This does make for a difficult read at times - probably for me, most powerfully, when Pan alludes to what Leigh’s mother Dory did - but it also gives the book a strong sense of emotional authenticity and one that I think many readers will empathise with, regardless of their age.
The book also does a good job of incorporating its more magical realist elements - although Pan leaves it open to the reader to decide if the red bird and magical incense actually happen or are a by product of Leigh’s grief. Pan has a vivid way of describing colour and setting scenes and a scene where Leigh and her grandmother visit a city of ghosts and Leigh sees spirits moving in the trees is both eerie and wonderful.
I found the movement of the action from the US to Taiwan to be fascinating and Pan sets out how Leigh’s bi-racial status marks her as an outsider in Taiwan both to the inhabitants and her own grandparents and the way in which Pan describes Taiwanese traditions and beliefs with everyday life is evocative and interesting without being alienating. The uncertain relationship between Leigh and her grandparents (most notably her grandmother) works well on the page but while Pan does a sound job of showing the breakdown for the relationship between them and Leigh’s mother, I wanted to see more of how the events she discovers shapes Leigh’s view of them as this is not really explored. Equally, I was not wholly convinced by Leigh’s resentment of and antagonism to Feng and I think that the twist that emerges at the end will be obvious to readers.
The relationship between Leigh and Axel is not something that readers of YA have not seen before but Pan still makes it sweet and credible with the pair’s mutual attraction being obvious to the reader but not to the characters and Pan does a good job of showing Leigh’s fear and longing as she experiences being in love. The introduction of another friend Caro seemed to me to be unnecessary and is really there as a plot device both to make Leigh reflect on what love is and compare Caro’s happy and accepting family with her own. This in turn ties in with my main criticism of the book which is that it was overwritten in places for my tastes in that Pan is heavy handed with the use of similes in some scenes and I just wanted to see it pared back. That said, it is a personal thing and I accept that some readers will find that style of writing more sumptuous.
Clearly this is a book about suicide and what I will say is that it is handled sensitively and there are links at the back for people who want help. Again, being picky I couldn’t help but notice that in my copy most of the assistance is US-based and I wish that the UK publisher had put in more UK resources, but to be clear that is not the author’s fault at all.
Ultimately, I thought that this was a moving, considered read and a very strong debut. My personal style preferences aside I will definitely keep an eye open for Pan’s other work.
The Verdict:
Emily X. R. Pan’s debut YA novel is a powerful and moving look at what it means to live with a parent with depression that incorporates Chinese spiritual beliefs with a magical realist twist. Leigh is a believable protagonist, forced to navigate grief and first love and Pan does well to show her gift for and love of art. Although a little overwritten in places for my taste (purely a personal thing), I will definitely check out her subsequent work.
Thanks to the Amazon Vine Programme for the review copy of this book.
