A Quitter's Paradise
A Novel
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- $13.99
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
A Michelle Obama's Reach Higher Summer Reading List Pick • An NPR Critics Summer Pick • A Good Morning America Pick of the Month • A Good Reads Big Buzz Debut • A Tertulia Staff Pick of the Month
“Compelling . . . Studded with sublime wit.” —New York Times Book Review
“A glorious, pondering, heartbreaking, extremely funny, very special book.” —Sarah Jessica Parker
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.
Eleanor is doing just fine. Yes, she’s keeping secrets from her husband. Sure, she quit her PhD program and is now conducting unauthorized research on illegitimately procured mice. And, true, her mother is dead, and Eleanor has yet to go through her things. But what else is she supposed to do? What shape can grief take when you didn’t understand the person you’ve lost?
Resisting at every turn, Eleanor tumbles blindly down a path toward confronting her present. 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. Meanwhile, glimpses of Eleanor’s childhood and family history in Taiwan unfurl, revealing long-held secrets, and Eleanor starts to realize that she will never be able to escape her grief, or her family, despite her wildest attempts. But will she be brave enough to withstand the reckoning she’s hurtling toward?
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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Chang debuts with the understated and quietly devastating story of a grieving 20-something woman. 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. But, bored and unfulfilled both matrimonially and professionally, Eleanor soon has an affair with a colleague. In the months following her mother's death, Eleanor makes increasingly risky and bizarre choices, such as spending unsanctioned time with a primate from the lab, before decamping for her childhood home in New Jersey, where she goes through Rita's belongings and begins to grasp a greater sense of her life. Eleanor's narration alternates with flashbacks to her childhood and adolescence—notably her relationship with her troubled older sister—and of her parents' emigration from Taipei in the late 1970s. The somewhat pensive tone is broken up by moments of levity, but always returns to questions of family history and the impossibility of understanding someone else's story when one's own memories are so unreliable. Chang is off to a promising start.
Customer Reviews
Ending really left you hanging. Disappointing.
The mother/daughter relationship.