Eleanor Liu is a thirty-something Taiwanese-American woman who lives in New York City with her husband Ellis. Both are scientists who work in a lab on their PhD's. Eleanor's mother recently passed away, and she is trying to avoid her grief. She quits her chemistry study and starts working for Ellis. The story moves to the present time in Eleanor and Ellis' lives to the past. Where we learn more about the background of Eleanor's family, whose parents immigrated to the United States from Taiwan. Her father imported lots of different salesware from Taiwan to hopefully sell in the USA. You learn about his background in Taiwan, and how he met his wife, and the struggles they had with their two daughters and making a life in America.
In the present time, Eleanor struggles with a lot of things and she never seems like a person who is happy with her life, as she makes some sketchy choices also with stealing a lab rat and going on an affair with a coworker and gets pregnant. As a reader, you never really get to the bottom of who Eleanor really is and what makes her make certain (bad) choices.
Overall I liked the writing and the overall storyline. The story moves many times in past and present and from point of view, which made it a bit chaotic, but on the other hand it gave good view of her parent's background and it explained a lot, but Eleanor stayed a bit of a strange main character.
I liked the overal idea of the story, and Elysha Chang truly knows how to write a story fit for a book, but at some points I found the story and the characters lacking any kind of depth, which made it less interesting to read and not really characters that keep you caring to read about them. I truly had higher expectations of this book.
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