I have serious mixed feelings after reading this book. At first, I thought this would be a book right up my alley, with its Chinese American protagonist and spot-on (in the first few chapters at least) depiction of the struggles with identity and belonging that children from immigrant families encounter. Indeed, I found the opening chapters especially resonant, as the protagonist, Elizabeth Zhang, talks about her singular obsession of getting into Harvard Law School and why this is so important to her – a perspective shaped by her experiences growing up amongst two disparate and constantly clashing cultures. For the first four chapters, I was able to relate to Elizabeth’s struggles and actually felt that we had some things in common, which led me to empathize with her when she finds out about her rejection from the school of her dreams. But then, starting at the end of chapter five, the story starts to spiral downward into extreme dark academia territory and Elizabeth, instead of being a protagonist I could root for, instead becomes a character that I absolutely could not stand. Actually, to be blunt, I hated Elizabeth with a passion – not only because of her extreme, over-the-top, verging on batsxxt crazy behavior and actions, but mostly because of her constant efforts to justify and rationalize her every horrible thought / action / behavior.
There are two types of tropes in stories that absolutely frustrate me (and I try to avoid reading as much as possible): one is “rich people behaving badly (and feeling entitled to it)” and the other is “delusional people acting stupidly (and constantly trying to justify it).” The protagonist in this story was the perfect manifestation of the second category, which put her in “annoying as hell” territory for me – though to be honest, to say that I could not stand Elizabeth is actually putting it mildly. Starting from chapter 5 on, the entire time I was reading, the main thought running through my mind was that, at the end of this story, Elizabeth better get comeuppance for her bad behavior – in fact, finding out what the consequences would be for her was the only reason why I resisted the urge to DNF this book early on and instead, pushed myself to read through to the end (though yes, I did skim some parts, though mostly because I was starting to get a headache from reading sentence after sentence about Elizabeth’s horrid behavior and warped justifications, to the point that I honestly wanted to jump out the window). Whether she gets comeuppance or not, of course I’m not going to mention, but I will say this – I hated the ending so much that I lowered my rating by one full star because of it.
With all that said, I am definitely an outlier with this book, as majority of the reviews I’ve seen so far have been fairly positive. In this light, maybe this is one of those situations where I’m just not the right reader for this book in the sense that I’m probably taking the story too seriously rather than appreciating what the author was likely trying to do (satirical takedown of academia and the Ivy League admissions process, perhaps?). Speaking of “takedown,” this book actually reminded me of another book written by a Chinese American female author that was also “satirical takedown” but of the publishing industry: R.F. Kuang’s Yellowface, which also featured a much-loathed (and, yes, delusional) protagonist engaging in the most god-awful behavior and justifying it up the wazoo (though by all accounts, that book was much better written, in my humble opinion).
Given that I had such an unpleasant reading experience with this one, I am going to refrain from giving an opinion in terms of whether to recommend this or not, since each reader’s taste will be different. I’m personally not a fan of dark academia, which probably played a role in why I couldn’t really stomach this one, but that doesn’t mean others won’t enjoy it. So I would say before deciding whether to pick this one up, read other reviews to get a more well-rounded picture first.
Received ARC from Berkley via NetGalley.
