Book list
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In their own ways, wealthy landlord Lu Fang and high-schooler Alva are prisoners of their circumstances. With his college education cut short by China’s violent Cultural Revolution, he is trapped in a lackluster marriage and plods away at a middling job in northern China until his encounter with an American woman disrupts his worldview. That expat is Sloan, Alva’s mother, who herself has escaped a mediocre life in the U.S. and is keen on reinventing herself in China. With a teaching job in Shanghai, Sloan has cobbled together a precarious life for herself and her daughter, who has never met her Chinese father. Rey Lescure’s brilliant debut alternates between the lives of Lu Fang and Alva, placing their desires and evolving story lines in a vibrant social context. While Alva is exploring the boundaries of her life in a new high school, she brushes up against the harsh realities of being seen as a nonentity among the moneyed set. “Forcing you to stay where you have no desire to be . . . it’ll corrode you, make you compromise yourself until you are nothing but a cutout of regrets,” Lu Fang tells Alva. With an assured hand, Rey Lescure illuminates how even someone who feels trapped and diminished can still make a life.

Publishers Weekly
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Rey Lescure’s captivating and sharp debut explores the dreams of an angsty mixed-race Chinese teen in Shanghai and her new stepfather, an older Chinese businessman. The story opens in 2007 with 14-year-old Alva fuming at the lavish wedding of her 40-something American mother, Sloan, upset that the nearly 60-year-old Lu Fang has “stole” Sloan from her. In Alva’s eyes, Lu Fang is just the latest in a line of men who have financed Alva’s and Sloan’s lives in China, though he’s the first one to marry Sloan. Alva has never known her Chinese father, and has only ever wanted to move to America, but Sloan, a former Hollywood movie star, sees no point in returning, prompting Alva to act out by drinking and sending hentai porn to her classmates. Alva’s story is seamlessly interspersed with Lu Fang’s perspective, beginning in 1985 in the northern Chinese city of Qingdao, where he first met Sloan. At 36, he swims in the ocean each day to dull the sorrows of having been denied college graduation years earlier and his impending fatherhood with a wife he does not love. When he is approached by the beautiful blonde Sloan, who asks him to teach her to swim, he falls deeply for the confident and forthcoming young woman. They begin a passionate, risky affair. This glimpse into Lu Fang’s early life adds depth to a character who, in 2007, Alva only sees as an ATM. Rey Lescure provides immersive depictions of Shanghai and Qingdao along with delicate character work. This is a remarkable story of a family caught between cultures. Agent: Hillary Jacobson, CAA. (Jan.)

Kirkus
Copyright © Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

In this debut novel set in China, two generations struggle with the consequences of ambition and the difficult search for belonging. In 2007, Alva is 14 and living in Shanghai, the daughter of a white American mother and a Chinese father she never knew. In 1985, Lu Fang is a young adult in the port city of Qingdao. Weaving between the perspectives of these two characters, the novel is a complex and moving exploration of race, class, gender, and family. Alva struggles to find her way in the world after her mother marries Lu Fang, now their rich landlord. She occupies herself with “wimpy mutinies” both at home and at school while scheming to enter the Shanghai American School, whose glossy advertisements are filled with smiling multiracial children and tidy grounds. When she meets Zoey, a “proper American teenager,” she feels irresistibly drawn to her new friend's family, with their live-in maid and summers in the Hamptons. They seem like the family she’s always wanted, but her relationship with them risks exposing the shadows of their life—and perhaps of the American Dream itself. Back in the '80s, Lu Fang is struggling to make sense of his own life as a shipyard clerk with a pregnant wife, having suffered the loss of his boyhood dream of becoming an international businessman. One day while swimming, he meets a golden-haired American woman who inspires him to reevaluate his life—the consequences of which will reverberate for years to come. Following the economic and cultural undulations of 1980s China and the precursors of what will eventually become the Great Recession, this novel examines the price people must pay when financial—and personal—debts come due. An ambitious, innovative take on both the immigrant and coming-of-age novel. Copyright © Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.