I am really closing out this year of reading with a bang - I have read so many amazing five-star books in the last couple months, and this was one of the best books I've read this year.

This is a sprawling story that alternates timelines and perspectives between Haiwen and Suchi, two teenagers in Shanghai in the 1940s whose lives are continuously ravaged and upended by civil war, dictatorships, and surveillance states. This novel covers truly staggering amounts of history and conflict, but Chen grounds us on every single page in Haiwen and/or Suchi's interior lives and struggles. 

At its core, this is a love story, both between Haiwen and Suchi and between each of them and their families. It is almost unbearably sad to imagine the sacrifices everyone at the time had to make for safety - the descriptions of how decades passed without family members being able to see each other, talk to each other, or even know if their loved ones are still alive are absolutely heart wrenching, and Chen writes so powerfully about what it means to be unable to return to the place you call home. Each character has to make traumatic and impossible decisions that haunt them forever, but they also figure out how to create lives they can be happy with despite the turmoil. From this review it might sound like this book is depressing and a hard read, and at times it's definitely incredibly sad, but my overall feeling when I was reading this book was hopefulness. Haiwen and Suchi are earnest and incredibly compassionate, and the way the narrative switches through time and between Shanghai, Taiwan, Hong Kong, New York, and LA is really masterful and evocative. This one will stay with me for a long time.

Thank you to NetGalley and Penguin Group Putnam for an advanced reader's copy in exchange for an honest review!