This was pretty good but it was also mega weird because things mentioned in this book tied to me in really weird ways.
1. She attends the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Vegas which Ive been to twice.
2. She visits Nashville and mentions Belmont's gazebos and deer statues!
3. She stops in Butte Montana where my friends just moved
4. She ends up in Ithaca which I've visited ( )

This feels like thinly fictionalized memoir (especially as the author is married, has a dog and a cat, and lives in Ithaca). A lot of musings on what to do in your mid-twenties, when working at a job that doesn't seem to be going anywhere, and when you might be the trailing partner for someone going elsewhere for grad school, etc. A thoughtful book. ( )

This is a marvelous 1st novel - excellent writing , creative and interesting plot and characters. It is set up around the questions of how white-male/Asian-(Chinese in this case)female relationships. Well done. ( )

I loved everything about this book—the narrator's voice, the themes, the settings, the prose (esp. the spot-on dialogue). I also was grateful to learn about Yamei Kin, who earned a medical degree in the U.S. in 1885, introduced tofu to the U.S., and lived her life as a New Woman (https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/17/obituaries/yamei-kin-overlooked.html). ( )

There’s a tendency to assign overall representation of a minority group to a single person and I hate that. Like one woman’s experience of a STEM career is the only one. Or a black man’s view of anything is the only view. It’s patently untrue, but we all kind of do it and I did it here; pitying and shaking my head at the protagonist in the story for all of her anxiety. I kept asking myself if all young people are this freaked out all the time or if it’s just her or just the character. But it is constant and exhausting even to read. If she really feels like this or did for a while, it must have been really awful. I mean...just let it go. It’s not worth the energy to fixate over - like a person walking up to your cube in the office...that’s terrifying? Get a grip. I just can’t imagine being that afraid of basically everything all the time. At one point the woman in the story becomes afraid of the dark and needs a blankey. What are you, three? OMG.

The fact that she was so timorous, cranky and touchy made it really difficult to empathize with her although I did try. On page 212 in my copy, she and boyfriend J start a disagreement about her reaction to being offered a job teaching in her field. She is pissed off because it feels like pandering to the diversity quotient at the college she would work at. The boyfriend tells her she’s overreacting and at first I thought so, too. Then she works through why she feels that way and I had to hand it to her in finding a logical reason for her emotional reaction.

Just prior to reading this I had a heated discussion with two women friends about how one of their husbands came over and snow blowed my driveway. He did it because he thought my husband was away. When I told him he was home he was embarrassed. That’s the sticking point for me and the thing my friends couldn’t understand. To them he was only being nice and doing me a favor. When I asked them why he got embarrassed at doing it for my husband but not for me, they couldn’t give me an adequate explanation other than the old male territory thing. When I pushed that it wasn’t embarrassing to do it for me although I’m more than capable with a snow blower, they turned from trying to get me to understand to blaming me that I was taking it wrong. I told them they were now blaming the victim and telling me my reaction was wrong - that it was my fault. Further that he would never do me another favor ever. Fine with me, but they didn’t get it. Same with J in this story.

And although I do get it - receiving some kind of ‘perk’ that can result in being paraded as and example is an awful feeling. Receiving some kind of ‘perk’ so that a white person can do a lot of moral signaling and back-patting is also shitty. But at the same time she (the character and probably the author) complains about lack of representation - that the whole department or college was a sea of white people. Ok, that may be true, but if everyone of color turns down jobs because of anti-tokenism, it will always be a sea of white faces. Change has to come from somewhere. There has to be a first. So you can’t have it both ways.

But overall I didn’t enjoy this very much. It’s written like a blog with a lot of quotes, newspaper articles, references to off the wall incidents that happen during the day and other distractions which I suppose supports the title and if that’s the case, brava. I think I’m too old to connect with her and as an adult have always been too confident to understand the extreme meek and timid personality of the protagonist. Grow. A. Spine. Jeez.

This is good though -
“It is the nature of relationships that they are impossible to fully understand from the outside, their inner workings built both from memories and habits and histories made up from the exterior world, and from those known only between the two involved, that exist only through them and are lost when they are lost to each other.” p 303 ( )