Central Places by Delia Cai

Publisher: Ballantine Books

On Sale Date: January 31, 2023

Pages: 288

This is a review of a book that I bought

Audrey Zhou is a woman in her thirties, living in New York City with her boyfriend Ben. 

Audrey hasn't seen her Chinese immigrant parents for many years, because she left her  tiny Central Illinois hometown of Hickory Grove right after high school and never went back. She lives a happy New York life with Ben, whose rich parents help them to buy the house of their dreams. But then Audrey's elderly father has to undergo a operation soon, and for the first time she returns with Ben to Hickory Grove.

And this travel turns her life upside down. She sees her parents and her hometown again, and some people from her old high school who have started families there,  and she meets her high school  crush Kyle, which leads to serious relationship struggles with Ben. Audrey stumbles on many things of her old life back home she discovers she never really closed. And she has to choose, stay behind in Hickory Grove and break up with Ben, or move with Ben into the Brooklyn Brownstone he bought as a surprise, and leave her old life behind? 

It seems in the book that Audrey never really knows what she really wants in life, as well in the past as the future. I found her quite a complicated main character that wasn't very likeable, as she never felt really happy with anything good that came upon her path in life. Ben truly has a lot of patience with her, but I felt Audrey never was really happy and he could not change that. The storyline of the book is quite slow paced, and moves many times from the present to the past. Further than Audrey and Ben's travel to Hickory Grove, nothing mind blowing happens in the story, it is more a complicated trip down memory lane for Audrey. The relationship with her Chinese parents is also a struggle, and I expected more about this part of Audrey in this book, somehow the relationship with her parents and their background never truly takes of the ground in the book, which is regretfull, because it truly would have added more dept to the story. This is a book that didn't live up my expectations.