By – Susie Yang
White Ivy is an amazing debut, and I liked it despite the fact that it isn’t the sort of book I regularly read. I don’t in general incline toward dramatic contemporary books including unlikeable characters who end up making awful decisions. but, here, Susie Yang takes that story and gazes at you from the pages while she’s telling it, never looking away even when you break eye contact. She finds the squirmiest snapshots of accepted practices and desires and says them bluntly, which is by one way or another both reviving and much more squirmy. It was fascinating.
This story is about a girl named Ivy, a daughter of Chinese immigrants who just urgently needs to split away from them. After a fairly rebellious childhood, she’s reconnected with her rich grade school crush years after the fact, and they begin dating. It’s everything she’s always needed. Or is it? Would she be able to live life the two different ways? Ivy will do, say, and turn into whatever it takes to get what she needs, regardless of the fact that she doesn’t generally have an idea what that is. The book is about class and want and family and accepted practices, and the concurrent adherence to and defiance to every one of those things.
I won’t state that I didn’t falter a couple of times in the center, thinking whether this book was for me, given how kind of horrible Ivy and a portion of the side characters are. Yet, I’m truly happy I pushed all the way to the finish, since THAT ENDING. There was one section I certainly couldn’t have seen coming that dropped my jaw, quickly followed by something that I can’t BELIEVE I didn’t see coming.
if you read for enjoyment/plot alone and don’t prefer to find out about unlikeable characters, at that point I don’t know if this one is for you. However, if you search out books that do truly fascinating things from a character and narrating viewpoint, and you’re willing to hold tight to encounter it and see it pay off, then I suggest it.
