In the last months of the year 1999, Lily Chen is a twenty-two year old woman who lives in New York City, where she works as an unpaid intern at a media company. At a party, she meets Matthew and they start dating. The two are from two entirely different backgrounds, two backgrounds that, without knowing it, are connected to each other and that form a red line in the story. Lily's parents are scientists that fled China during Mao's cultural revolution. Matthew is an heir to a high profile pharmaceutical empire. Lily and Matthew's dating continues and they become the parents of Nick. But soon after Nick is born, Matthew leaves and Lily moves to Washington Island where she starts a new life.
We fast forward to the year 2021, in the middle of the corona pandemic. Nick grows up and when he is in the age of starting college, he gets curious of his own background, which he starts researching without Lily's knowledge, as she doesn't have any contact with Matthew or her parents anymore. Nick feels Lily is hiding something about her own and her parent's past. Digging up his past raises even more questions than answers, but later on, from his grandmother, he learns more about her past that is strongly interwoven with his own in the present time.
This is a book I have mixed feelings about. What I liked most of it was the first parts of the book, in Lily's POV. That clearly is the part with the strongest storyline that is easy to follow. When it changes to Nick's pov, the story still is good, but it gets lost in too much unnecessary details and things that don't help the story any further and that make the story at some parts uninteresting and the reading of it, very slow. In this part, for example, it get's stuck in too much college details, and too little real action in the story. For anyone not familiar with biomedical science, the story can also be somewhat confusing, as it at some point wasn't clear to me if the biomedical science in the book was based on reality or fantasy. The last part was also somewhat slow and confusing, this point was mostly about the history of Lily's parents in China before they fled, and what the connection with them is to Matthew's parents. I found the overall storyline good, as I love Chinese-American books, and I also love the multigenerational part, but the story get's lost, as I mentioned earlier, in too much unnecessary dialogues and details that don't help the story any further and which makes it a slow read that doesn't hold the interest of the reader for long. I truly wanted to like this book more that I did, as my expectations of it where high, but it didn't live up my expectations.
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