Central Places
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- $15.99
Publisher Description
A TIMES BOOK OF THE MONTH AND STYLIST BOOK OF THE WEEK
A BAD FORM REVIEW PAPERBACK BOOK OF THE MONTH
'Sharp, swiftly moving, darkly funny . . . [a] compassion filled delight' The Times
'[A] sharp, assured debut' Daily Mail
'A sensitive, sharp-eyed, slyly funny novel of venturing back into the foreign country that is your past— and discovering that you can never really shake the places and people that shaped you' Celeste Ng, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Our Missing Hearts
'Delia Cai fully renders the uneasy marriage between past and present. Central Places is honest about the strangeness and revelation of returning home' Raven Leilani, New York Times bestselling author of Luster
Audrey Zhou left Hickory Grove, the tiny central Illinois town where she grew up, as soon as high school ended, and she never looked back. She moved to New York City and became the person she always wanted to be, complete with a high-paying, high-pressure job and a seemingly faultless fiancé. But if she and Manhattan-bred Ben are to build a life together, in the dream home his parents will surely pay for, Audrey can no longer hide him, or the person she's become, from those she left behind.
But returning to Hickory Grove is . . . complicated. Over the course of one disastrous week, Audrey's proximity to her family and to Kyle, her unrequited high school crush, forces her to confront the past and reexamine her fraught connection to her roots before she undoes everything she's worked toward and everything she's imagined for herself. But is that life really the one she wants?
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Cai's uneven debut follows a newly engaged 27-year-old Chinese American woman who brings her white fiancé to her suburban Illinois hometown to meet her difficult mother and ailing father. Audrey, who works in sales for a magazine in New York City, reluctantly takes blue-blooded Ben, a photographer, with her to her hated hometown. Ben pushed for the trip, and he wins immediate approval from Audrey's hen-pecked father, while Audrey's stern mother reverts to her old habit of making Audrey feel like a constant disappointment. Ben does his best until a family night out at the Olive Garden, where they run into Audrey's high school crush Kyle Weber, whom Ben talks down to. Making matters worse, Ben cuts the visit short after landing a plum assignment. Reunited with Kyle, Audrey thinks back on how they understood each other at their majority-white high school, as his mother is Mexican. Cai does a good job showing how Audrey was shaped by her mother's disapproval, and there are plenty of engaging insights on race and class. On the other hand, the drawn-out passages on Audrey's rekindled feelings for Kyle, which play a big part in shaping the final act, are a bit wearing. There seem to be two books at play, and one works better than the other.
