Beautiful language, the story of a Taiwanese family, their saga, and the ripple effect of their lives. I love an ensemble cast of characters because we get a chance to see their POVs and how they all come together to tell the story.

Bleak yet beautiful in the vein of David Vann’s work: the story of a Taiwanese immigrant family in Alaska and the bad luck and poor choices that nearly destroy them. This debut novel is full of atmosphere and the lowering forces of weather and fate.

Published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux on May 7, 2019

Childhood shapes adulthood in this story of a transplanted family. Torn from his homeland, the young protagonist feels like he does not belong, a condition that will shape his entire life.

In the 1970s, Gavin’s family moved from Taiwan to Minnesota to Alaska, where his father (a former wastewater engineer) drills wells and does some plumbing to make ends meet. The story begins in 1986, near the time of the Challenger disaster, when Gavin comes out of a coma. His youngest sister has died from a meningitis infection that Gavin brought home from school. Gavin feels guilty for surviving.

Gavin’s father is a dreamer; his mother a pragmatist. Gavin’s parents often quarrel over the father’s apparent inability to accept that he will never work as an engineer in his new country, its reputation as a land of opportunity notwithstanding. Their marriage is further strained by a lawsuit accusing the father of causing a child’s death because of a defect in a well he constructed.

Gavin’s brother Natty is slow but artistic. His sister Pei-Pei is getting it on with a neighbor boy. Gavin is too young to get it on with his friend Ada and too shy to explore his budding feelings about the opposite sex. Ada’s brother bullies him, the universal experience of childhood.

The story follows family turmoil from Gavin’s sixth grade perspective. He mistakes an eviction for a vacation, wonders why his father so rarely works, doesn’t quite understand the concept of lawsuits, frets when Natty wanders into the woods, feels distress when his mother bickers with his father, and lives with the guilt of his sister’s death. His unease persists regardless of his circumstances, a condition that will afflict his entire life.

Gavin tells the story in a quiet, subdued voice that reflects his barely controlled fear of events that are beyond his control. Gavin’s language is simple, befitting a child of his age, but Chia-Chia Lin arranges his simple words into elegant sentences. The final chapter is written from Gavin’s adult perspective as he returns to Alaska and Taiwan. He apparently hopes to give context to his present by searching for roots that never took hold. This snapshot of formative moments in a child’s life makes a persuasive case that however well an adult might learn to cope with traumatic events of childhood, their impact on personality is profound and permanent.

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This gorgeously written novel is about, at least partly, the complicated grief of children, magnified as it is by their limited understanding of the social mechanics of death and (all too often) by the failure of adults to help them through the darkness of loss. Adults of course have their own loss to content with. But it's delightful to me to see more and more texts highlight how childhood is not a happy and carefree space, and how the tender, fragile feelings of children need as much or more attention as/than the delicate, fragile feelings of the adults who care for them. Nothing is as easy for kids as we pretend it is.

The first person narrator of this novel is eight when his beloved toddler sister dies. The little girl looms large in the young narrator's memory. She was everyones's joy and light. The three remaining siblings muddle through the aftermath of the child's death, creating ways to cope while the parents also fall apart.

if this is the premise, the novel is immensely more complex (isn't death always more complex than itself?). The narrator's family has recently immigrated from Taiwan and lives in a desultory part of suburban/rural Alaska. The children are fairly integrated with their peers, but the parents struggle with the stark professional demotion that tends to accompany urgent immigration, with displacement, with poverty, and with their inability to function in a country that is not welcoming to them in any way at all.

This is all presented in a very understated, subtle way, so that it takes a bit to figure out what is going on. While the narrator is now an adult, he presents the events of his childhood as seen through his child eyes.

What struck me the most in this book is the brutality of global notions of masculinity. Much is expected from the father in this new land, but the father is not a strong man. Under the weight of the family's expectation and the multiple failures he inevitably encounters, he folds in on himself. There are no second chances for men who let their families massively down. Gentle, fragile masculinity doesn't have much of a place anywhere, but it really won't be forgiven at the harsh frontiers of immigration.

The final, spectacular chapters do tremendous work to bring home the hurt that inevitably follows childhood trauma. This novel is particularly urgent in this time of hatred toward immigrants of all stripes, and in particular about immigrant children. We are creating a generation of traumatized humans who will take way more than their own lifetimes to heal. Let's heed.

Loss, grief, identity and the search for home when you belong nowhere are just some of the themes explored in this bleak but beautifully written story of a Taiwanese family struggling to survive in Alaska. It’s the 1980s and tragedy strikes the family against a background of tragedies in the wider world – Chernobyl, the Challenger explosion – and nearer to home – poisoned drinking water from a well the father of the family builds. We see events unfold from the perspective of 10 year old Gavin who looks back as an adult on this pivotal period in his family’s life. In measured and spare prose, the author describes how the family try to build a life but have to deal with unbearable grief, displacement and failure. It’s a bleak, often heart-breaking tale, thoughtful and insightful, and a haunting and compelling debut novel.

Literary fiction at its best.Set in Alaska a Taiwanese family struggling to live survive in this challenging environment .Told through a child’s eyes point of view an emotional look at death in the family .a book #that will stay with you.
# Netgalley #fsg

10-year-old Gavin comes home from school feeling sick. Days or perhaps weeks later, he wakes up to discover that his youngest sibling, Ruby, has contracted his illness (which turns out to be meningitis) and has died. So begins The Unpassing, which explores in shattering detail the toll this tragedy takes on a family of Taiwanese immigrants living in Alaska in the 1980s in search of a better life. It’s clear early on that there were strains in the family before Ruby’s death—Gavin’s father’s plumbing business is not doing well and his mother longs to go back to her fishing village in Taiwan where her mother and ailing father still live. Layered over these tensions, however, are blame for Ruby’s death, which pits the parents against each other, while narrator Gavin struggles silently with his guilt at bringing the sickness home with him, his older sister Pei Pei tries to move on and regain some semblance of normalcy, and his younger brother Natty searches in vain for Ruby, who he’s been told is merely “lost.”

This is a bleak book—things go from bad to worse and are framed by tragedies in the world at large (the Challenger explosion, the Chernobyl nuclear accident, the Exxon Valdez disaster)—but the writing is always good and often gorgeous, as when Gavin describes his sleepless nights: “As I sank away from consciousness, the overhead glare kept me swaying in the shallowest layer of sleep, a net of two-second dreams.” And author Chia-Chia Lin beautifully and heartbreakingly wrestles with the idea of “home” and what that means to people who don’t really feel they belong anywhere. Ruby’s death is the straw that collapses the fragile idea of home the family has built in Alaska, but Lin seems to suggest that even had she lived, a real sense of home would still prove elusive. “It was a kind of violence, what my father had done,” Gavin says. “He had brought us to a place we didn’t belong, and taken us from a place we did. Now we yearned for all places and found peace in none.” If you like beautiful writing and don’t mind your family sagas on the dark side, The Unpassing is an unflinching look at what it means to be an immigrant and to try to make a home and hold a family together in a strange world. Recommended.

Many thanks to NetGalley and Farrar, Straus and Giroux for providing me with an ARC of this title in exchange for my honest review.

In this quiet tale there is no sweeping plot or character arcs, just a sad journey of a young immigrant who survives tragedy, but just barely. The visceral details of this young Taiwanese boy have us very much in the moment as he plods through the hardships of his family scratching out a life in the Alaska after the death of their youngest member. We experience Gavin the 10-11 year old boy as brave, scared, and yet somehow very strong among all his weaknesses. It was a bitter sweet journey to read this book but, the simple bravery of the main character is a memorable one. .

Death and suffering, poverty and guilt suffuse – to the point of drowning – this unhappy first novel. Every departure from the main narrative thread – whether it’s the Challenger disaster or the Exxon Valdez oil spill – adds another overwhelming layer of mortality and horror to the story. But one crowning loss binds the tale, the death of a child and the suffocating layers of blame and responsibility that lay waste to the surviving family members.

Narrated from the perspective of boy child Gavin, the novel traces the experiences of a family of Taiwanese immigrants living – if it can be called that – a life of borderline destitution in Alaska. The father was an engineer but now scrapes an income working on occasional building projects, the failure of one of which will tip the family even further into penury. The mother, who still reaches back to life in Taiwan, her family there and a rural idyll of coastal life, is bitter and at times demented. The four children divide into two boys – Gavin and his younger brother Natty – and two girls, eldest Pei-Pei and much younger Ruby.

Early on, Gavin returns from school with a fever and falls unconscious. When he awakes, many days later, Ruby is dead. And gone. All traces of her have been removed, except – it emerges later – for the urn containing her ashes, hidden on a high shelf in a wardrobe. Gavin had imported meningitis from school, but survived it himself. However the entire episode remains a family taboo, leaving all the members isolated in their own grief, most of all Gavin who blames himself for Ruby’s loss.

Atmospheric is scarcely an adequate term to describe the intensity of Lin’s evocation of the fabric of this family’s life. Clothing, terrible food, the flimsy home, its accumulated junk, the detritus in the attic – all of it is conveyed in near-palpable detail, piling on the bleakness of the novel’s mood. Even when rare good moments occur, like an evening spent in the home of a generous neighbor, Gavin is incapable of experiencing enjoyment. Instead, death lurks at every corner – in the attic where animal bones are found, in the forest where trees nearly fall on people, on the beach where a stranded whale almost succumbs.

Lin is undoubtedly a talented writer whose invocation of this group – their individual psychologies and combined tragedy – is achieved with numbing impact. Yet the book is impossibly burdened by its surfeit of bleakness and fixed tone. Fingers crossed that her second will offer more in the way of light and shade.

Beautifully written if spare and grim, this account of a family of Taiwanese immigrants attempting to make a life in Alaska will remain in memory. As it is, memory is the central theme here, as well as search for home: “It was a kind of violence, what my father had done. He had brought us to a place we didn’t belong, and taken us from a place we did. Now we yearned for all places and found peace in none.”

Told from the point of view of Gavin who is remembering the events of 1986 when he was 10. He looks back on that time to make sense of what happened, his contracting meningitis, and his younger sister's succumbing to the disease and the effect that had on the grieving family. Blaming himself for her illness, it is only later he learns the truth, which doesn't soften the memory.

Life in rural Alaska is brutally brought to life, and my only objection was to the resolution which was somehow hurried and felt a little unfinished.

Brilliant! Written from the perspective of a child, dealing with loss, change and life in Alaska, I'm reminded of the magical ways children think in order to make sense of their worlds. Fabulous debut novel!

The Unpassing is an accomplished, character-driven drama following the trials and tribulations of a Taiwanese-American immigrant family residing in 1980s Anchorage, Alaska. Told from the perspective of young Gavin, the ten-year-old son, this gives a very innocent, original point of view that we are not used to seeing in books, so that was most refreshing. The characters are beautifully rendered and come live on the page; they almost feel real with all of their flaws. The vast expansive landscape of Alaska brings an underlying tension to the entire of the narrative. It's poignant, moving and explores family, grief, loss, love, identity and the sense of belonging we all crave.

Lin writes in such a profound manner that touches you and has a subtle emotive authenticity to it. There is often an underrated beauty to simple tales such as these that just works; there's no airs and graces just the stripped back plot exploring the heartbreak and pain of a horrific incident on a family who are rightly devastated. Haunting, evocative and so very believable, this is a debut worth reading and an author worth watching. If you enjoy thought-provoking, slow burn novels with subtle nuances and wonderfully lyrical prose then this is well worth your time. Many thanks to Farrar, Straus & Giroux for an ARC.

A subtle, painful book about the ugly but undeniable truths that make up a family. Told from the point of view of 10 year old Gavin, the reader goes on a slow burn journey through this family’s grief when they lose their younger daughter Ruby to mysterious/maybe not mysterious circumstances surrounding an illness. Lin is a stunning writer who paints Gavin’s world with vivid, childlike appropriateness, and it’s impossible to not want Gavin and his siblings to be ok.

Sometimes the pace of this book is so slow that it feels like reading it is on the same level as watching molasses drip. If you’re in slow building stories, then The Unpassing will certainly appeal to you, but if you prefer something less subtle, then maybe this is a pass.

Driven more by characters than plot, The Unpassing by Chia-Chia Lin is an absolute stunning debut novel. Setting in Alaska in the late 1980's a Taiwanese-American family struggles to cope after the death of their youngest daughter. 10-year-old Gavin wakes up from a meningitis-induced coma, to find his sister Ruby didn’t survive. Over time we see the family begin to deteriorate. Beautiful prose and exploring the fragility of identity and sense of placelessness, this novel was amazing!

Thank you NetGalley and Farrar, Straus and Giroux for an Advanced Reader's Copy of this book. This book has a very auspicious start. In the very first scene of this book kind of tells the whole story. Gavin and his sibling are in their den in their home when their mom comes in carrying a bowl of grapes and she drops to the ground and the grapes fall all over. She does not move and her kids are stunned and do nothing. A few minutes later the mom gets up and she tells them they failed the test by not calling for an ambulance. I knew this book was going to be a wild ride after that.

This is about an immigrant family from Korea leaving in Alaska.during the 80's. The Challenger incident is at the forefront of this book along with Chernobyl incident. The book is narrated by Gavin the oldest son of the this family of son. He takes the blame or maybe I should say feels he is too blame of some of things that happens. He has the weight of life on his shoulders. This is a very moving family story. At first I felt this was a story of vignettes, but the end this culminated into a lovely story that tied everything together. Wonderful book.

This debut novel is the story of an immigrant family from Taiwan living in Alaska. Focused on the aftermath of the unexpected death of the youngest daughter, this is a tale that meditates on themes of life and the weight of loss, identity and finding one’s “place,” family and culture.

Lin’s prose is spare, beautiful, and haunting. Losing a child is the worst pain that I can imagine and she convincingly weaves a depth of emotion throughout each chapter. The lush landscape of the Alaskan wilderness also works as a sharp contrast to the emptiness that the family feels. This novel drew to mind for me We Were the Mulvaneys by Joyce Carol Oates, as both examine the everyday reality and aftermath of a horrific event, the effects on a family, and how it irreparably changes them. The story feels so real, narrating every-day moments, and this simplicity causes the events to carry an added weight.

This isn’t a book for everyone, in my opinion. It is strongly character-driven and if you are looking for a story with a quick plot, you will not find it here. However, I was immersed in the pain of this family from the start and my heart ached for them through the entire novel. There may also be a temptation to speed through this book, as it is, on the surface, an easy read. I strongly recommend against this. Take your time, absorb the simple and beautiful language, give yourself ample opportunity to feel the underlying emotion. The writing is worth it.

Sincere thanks to NetGalley and FSG Books for the free e-arc in exchange for an honest review. All thoughts and opinions expressed here are mine. The Unpassing will be released on May 7th.

A great debut novel about the immigrant experience. This novel has a quiet eeriness that seems to echo its setting in Alaska. The author does an especially good job of giving the feeling of a child’s point of view in that the story unravels ascit would for a child, seemingly different stories coelese in the end, and as understanding grows, so does the complexity of the truth.

This review is based on an ARC of The Unpassing which I received courtesy of NetGalley and the publisher (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux).

Three star reviews are always so hard to start. I didn't love The Unpassing, but I can concede that it was a well written and fairly entertaining novel. Maybe I wasn't enraptured the whole time, but I was never annoyed at this novel, which is always a good thing. I can say that I really liked the characters and how incredibly well-developed and believable they are, especially in the showing rather than the telling. Serious props to Chia-Chia Lin on this level of talent and voice in a debut novel.

On the downside, I felt that the ending was abrupt and maybe not as well thought out as the bulk of the story. Also, the climax was set [during a storm. How cliché!

Overall I enjoyed this book. It presented a new perspective that I don't typically see in the books that I read, which I loved, honestly. If you like coming-of-age, family novels, or this new-age kind of general fiction, I definitely recommend The Unpassing!

This book had great potential. It missed the mark as didn't get into the dynamics of the parents and the family's integration into the community. Just seemed reading only the point of view of the boy....which didn't give a feel - more just chatter.