A Quitter's Paradise

Product Information

This pattern of lying and hiding started when she was a teenager, telling her parents she won second place in a science fair when in reality the judges were unimpressed with her entry. I struggled to really get invested in this debut that explores the complicated mother-daughter relationship between an Asian American immigrant and her daughter and the grief that comes when she dies unexpectedly.

A QUITTER'S PARADISE is mostly an uneventful novel, with all the messiness and complication of family dynamics.The present-day storyline is told in first person, while the past is told in third person, giving a more omniscient view into Eleanor’s parents’ interiority.

Their relationship seems to have been mildly strained in the beginning, but it becomes increasingly obvious to me that Eleanor is struggling with the impacts of her mother’s death, leading to some of the decision she makes throughout the novel. She ends up pregnant after quitting the program, but their marriage seems to be rocky from the fact he simply gets everything and she struggles.Lito, the story’s dying protagonist, prepares his circuitous yarn by asserting “the best way to fit one story among other stories is, I think, always wise to consider. Her unique story intertwines with others of Chinese immigrants looking for a chance in America, the struggles they had to face during their lives and their choices. In sum, I wouldn’t recommend this novel and would encourage you to check out the titles I linked above, or other higher quality books, instead. It’s truly the perfect inaugural book for SJP Lit and I couldn’t be more honored to be working with the extraordinarily talented Elysha Chang.

A masterful portrayal of grief, depression, and the skeletons of your familial role showing up in adulthood.The author uses the same things I've seen in other books -- the children assume their family debt, parents pressure them to pay as well show respect with dignity while paying these bills; don't complain or bring shame -- not further shame, just shame to the family. A bittersweet family saga about a young woman from a second generation immigrant family coping with her mother’s death.

These works have been published in Center for Fiction Magazine , Fence , GQ , The Rumpus , and others. Now that her mother is gone, Eleanor—who acknowledges how much her mother’s approval and disapproval influenced her choices—must consider how to live her life and make sense of it on her own. An impromptu celebration on the beach at sunset with champagne becomes a weekly touchpoint to their lives as they learn more about each other and themselves. There's some sense of urgency and the story is populated by a paradise full of quitters, of hopeless and disenchanted people.The book alternates between this present timeline and a past timeline focused on Eleanor's parents and her childhood. At the priest’s directive, father and son were ultimately divided again, and the entire experience left Lito scarred. 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. Many described this book "hilarious": I don't agree with this, the main character is quite unique and quirky at times, but I would never say that she is funny or the book hilarious. Instead we get a whole book of Eleanor’s avoidance behaviors with no hope for improvement, and reading it was a bleak and unenjoyable experience.