Yang was born in China, moved to the USA as a child and now lives in England. This, her debut novel is a coming of age novel that deals with the immigrant experience and the Chinese American identity. It is the story of Ivy Lin, who like the author was born in China and moved to the US as a child. She is introduced as a thief and a liar, learning these things from her grandmother. In middle school Ivy has a crush on Gideon, whose life in a wealthy family seems to be everything she wants in life. Trying to control her, her family sends her to China for the summer and when she returns they have moved, so she must start again in a new school. Years later she is working as a teacher and once again meets up with Gideon. This time she will stop at nothing to get her dream life. I normally to not like books that have a less than likable main character, but it works in this one and I found the story riveting. I look forward to reading more from this author.

Thanks to NetGalley and Simon and Shuster Canada for an egalley in exchange for an honest review.

Ivy Lin has certainly been on my mind. A thief, a liar, and most definitely a woman who isn't used to anyone saying no. From her early years in China with her grandmother to her reunion with her parents and brother in America, Ivy doesn't feel that she really fits. Her grades at school are abysmal, her mother rules with an iron fist, and her peers don't really seem to want her for anything except to "diversify" their group. As an adult, Ivy once again meets up with the wealthy family she adored and soon a romance begins with their son. But this family has got a tonne of secrets and so does Ivy. How long before this house of cards tumbles to the ground?

White Ivy was a page-turner for me because of Ivy, I felt a lot of compassion for this misfit who just really appeared to want the perfect family and love. I felt it hard to judge her as completely "bad" instead I liked that Susie Yang really gets to all of Ivy's flaws. While it might not be so pretty to always be in her head, it definitely made the character memorable. I suppose where the story loses a star for me is that it wasn't exactly as "obsessive" as I would have liked. Once Ivy has Gideon and has met his family, I felt there was definitely more of a cat and mouse chase between Ivy and two other characters. I feel that the plot was a slow burn towards a sequence of events that turn the story on its axis, but the ending wasn't necessarily explosive. However, I will concede it's an interesting predicament that Yang leaves her female protagonist.

This was a really great read and I hope that other readers sit up and take notice of Susie Yang this fall. Trust me, Ivy is unforgettable.







Expected Publication Date 03/11/20
Goodreads review 12/08/20

Thank you to Netgalley and Simon & Schuster for the ARC. The first half of the book held my interest but I found that as it went on, I found myself somewhat bored by all the characters. While intrigued to see how the story for Ivy ended, I wasn’t overly moved by any of the developments. The ended felt too rushed and abrupt.

White Ivy shows the differences in culture and attitudes for Chinese Americans. Ivy struggles with wanting to fulfill family expectations while living the life she wants. She starts as a shoplifter and part of her still feels like that person even though she has graduated from college and has become a teacher. She never feels like she is good enough and her affair just puts more pressure on her and pushes her to do something unthinkable. Will this haunt her the rest of her life?

I am having a hard time with describing this book, and figuring out how i feel about it! It took me a long time to get into it, and longer than usual to read. The style of writing didn't grab ahold of me, i'm not sure why.
The characters weren't very likable or relatable. They were very selfish and greedy and narcissistic.
I do enjoy a story that portrays a character from childhood, onwards. It was interesting watching how Ivy developed from a young girl, to young adult. As always, it leads me to think how one's childhood shapes one's future. I also enjoy books that explore other culture's than my own.
The ending was a shocker - i wish the big reveals had happened earlier in the book. I was so surprised when i reached the last page, as i thought there should be more! What happened to Ivy?? Perhaps this should be a sequel!!

This was such a compelling novel until the end of part four. Hence, 3.5 stars. I’ve rounded up to four rather than down.

I loved Ivy; she was horrible and real and simple but also complex. Her lack of any real sense of feeling or shame was interesting to read.

The plot was a bit loose; not fast-paced but not slow either. The entire point of the novel was lacking. I still enjoyed reading about Ivy, but there didn’t seem to be much change or discord or reasons for anything happening. The novel starts right at the beginning of Ivy’s life through to her 28th year. The various family members and side characters were nice to read and added to the story.

I understand why part four ended the way it did, but I don’t like it. Also, part five was a let down. Considering that’s the ending it was unsatisfying. I didn’t like the ending but it did feel inevitable at least. It didn’t feel forced or unreasonable. The plot twist was a bit obvious but also kind of removed from Ivy’s story. It washed fleshed out enough which is both good and bad. I wouldn’t want to read about it because it’s a sort of tangent. Being a tangent and a source of information that leads to a resolution don’t go too well together.

Still an interesting and easy read that gave me a sense of a very different perspective than my own. Can we get a romance for Andrea next? I liked her.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for the ARC.

What a gorgeous, gorgeous novel about a woman who will go to any length to achieve what the world denies her.

WOW. So this book did NOT go in any of the directions I'd gone in expecting (in fact I have a hard time categorizing this... it reads like literary fiction? For a split second I thought I glimpsed some romance, but then it nosedived into thriller territory.) I seriously couldn't stop reading until I was done.

Susie Yang's writing is compulsively readable in the style of Celeste Ng and Frances Cha—taut pacing, precise language, flawed characters and all—and I really, really loved it. Above all, it's permeated with an alienating and visceral sense of otherness: Ivy's isolation, shame, and humiliation at being a poor Chinese immigrant in America.

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Growing up outside Boston, Ivy Lin is a sly, resourceful child who steals and lies to get where she knows, in her bones, she must go: away from her rigidly disapproving parents; her shithole of a house; the best friend, Roux Roman, she looks down on. Away from them, and toward the moneyed elite of white America.

And to Ivy, her classmate Gideon Speyer—the flaxen-haired son of a senator, benevolent and dignified—is the epitome of her dreams.

Years later, Ivy is shocked to reconnect with the Speyers. She worms her way into their lives, rubbing shoulders with Boston's elite, vacationing in Hawaii and at the Speyers' cottage on the coast. But Gideon (who's just as perfect as always) is distant and aloof. And the reappearance of her former best friend forces Ivy to prove just how far she's willing to go to keep this illusion (dream?) she's always wanted.

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Here's the thing about Ivy: she's a TOTALLY unlikeable narrator... and yet you won't be able to stop yourself from feeling for her.

She's got a lot lot lot of internalized bullshit going on. The whole story revolves around an idea of perfection—what Ivy calls peace—that centres whiteness and wealth. As a woman of colour fighting for this sort of ideal, it's a shitty and painful and degrading experience. It means walking on eggshells and setting your opinions aside for those of rich white people. It necessitates taking verbal beatings and blatant racism with cheer, swallowing their contempt and telling them I liked it!

Ivy's story explores the myriad ways that she both suppresses and empowers herself in this process. She's enterprising and shrewd (just like the other women in her family), and by the end it's clear that Ivy isn't going to let her society-conditioned fear/worship of the Speyers stop her from wringing them for all they're worth. Tables have turned, and she's never going to be their thumb ever again. The only reason this book wasn't a five-star read for me was that I wish this moment of defiance had come earlier in the story.

Here's the thing about White Ivy: I could give a rat's ass about Gideon Speyer. This is a story about family, immigrant families in particular, and the complex love we hold for each other.

"She loves you so much she’d rather hurt you to make you better, even if it means you’ll hate her."

Ivy is the backbone of this story. But the flesh and blood is, well, her flesh and blood, and specifically the complicated relationships she has with her mother and grandmother. Ivy has always clashed with Nan, her mother. From the day she came to join her parents in America as a child, to corporal punishment and screaming matches and a humiliating incident at Gideon's fourteenth birthday—the animosity between them lingers even into Ivy's adulthood. But she grows to understand that she isn't so different from Nan, who is but another woman who wants more and will forsake everything, love and identity and vanity, to achieve it.

The last thing I'll say is that Ivy's grandmother Meifeng is pretty badass. Some of my favourite parts in the whole book are when Meifeng and Ivy are together and scheming or gossiping or telling family stories, one always backing the other up. Meifeng's a thief (and Ivy's mentor), an enterpriser, a woman who carried kilos of rice on her back into her fifties to support her daughters. It was funny and painful and poignant reading about these women in Ivy's family, their stories spanning three generations and two continents.

Ivy Lin is a rather untalented, but disproportionately ambitious, child of an immigrant family who are collectively pursuing their “American dream”. This isn’t one of those books where you are meant to develop compassion and insight into these others by seeing things from their own point of view.

Ivy is a model of mediocrity and envy. She envies anyone who has more money than she does, and is obsessed with appearances. Her parents are portrayed as rather dull, narrow-minded disciplinarians, with a somewhat harder work ethic. They have the typical high hopes of academic and financial success for their children but not a lick of parental warmth. Ivy’s grandmother is full of cutthroat survival advice in the beginning, but disavows her own teachings as those of a rambling old woman eventually.

Ivy fancies that she has fallen in love with a boy from middle school. Gideon Speyer is the son of a senator who lives in a wealthy part of town and who comes from a line of respectable and prosperous Americans. When her parents find out, they send her away for the summer and move to a different city in the interim, dashing Ivy’s hopes of furthering her crush.

When Ivy runs into Gideon’s sister years later, she seizes the opportunity to rekindle her infatuation with Gideon. As things seem to fall into place for Ivy’s hopes of marrying into an American blue-blood family, she has to come to terms with certain obstacles that remain in her way. Ivy has lied, cheated, and stolen to get the things she wants. Would she be willing to sacrifice a real love or an alternative version of happiness in order to be Mrs. Gideon Speyer?

I would characterize this story as an anti-romance. There is no passion, no chemistry between a Ivy and Gideon. The supporting characters are purposely flat and unempathetic. As they are meant to illustrate the inaneness of Ivy’s life, we never bond with them. They are superficial in Ivy’s eyes and therefore to ours. There is one character who means more to Ivy than all the others. But. This person doesn’t represent the goal that Ivy has set for herself. That’s all. I was left with an overall impression of sadness and futility.

An ARC was received via NetGalley for this review.

I found this story hard to get into at first but once I did I found I thought about it a lot when I wasn’t reading it. All in all an enjoyable read.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publishers for this ARC. I will say the synopsis of this made me click right away to request this one. The first half of the this book made me excited, it grabbed me and I couldn’t wait to see the way things worked out for Ivy. The second half unfortunately didn't have the feeling for me. While I did want to finish, and it was fairly exciting I just feel nothing for any of the characters. Each with their flaws, I couldn’t “root” for anyone, I felt like I didn’t care how it ended because each character deserved whatever fate they had coming. I did like the stories about the history of Ivy’s family and would have loved more about her grandmother and the things she taught her. Overall it was a fairly fast read, I would be tempted to read more from this author because the flow of the book was good.

White Ivy was a fascinating, thought-provoking tale about a completely dislikable character who somehow manages to enrapture, enthrall, and capture my attention throughout the entirety of the novel.

What I originally thought would be a story about a young girl who moves to America and rejects her culture, family, and heritage, turned out to be about a Chinese-American woman who desires white privilege, and will do anything to obtain it.

I found this novel to be compelling, despite the amount of flawed and incredibly distasteful characters because Ivy, and the life she chooses to live, is extremely complex and wrought with underlying tension between her culture and the future she desires. Rather than a clear and fixated plot, the author Susie Yang has chosen to fixate on the development and psychosis of the main character, Ivy, creating beautifully rich and detailed prose of an immensely driven woman who becomes dangerous and malicious in her pursuit to be "white."

The story follows Ivy as a child who has a fascination with the American way of living, despite her family's clear disapproval of the fashion and upbringing of American children. Their dislike of the culture only influences Ivy to mold herself into the American lifestyle, creating tension between her and her family. The difference of opinion on how Ivy's future should shape out follows her into adulthood and further estranges Ivy from her family, making them a place of shame and embarrassment. To eradicate this feeling, Ivy pushes herself into the life of an old childhood crush who is of the wealthy and elitist class Ivy desires to be a part of. When a male companion from her past reappears, Ivy is forced to grapple with the conflicting emotions she feels toward both men that send her spiraling down a dangerous and destructive path.

I'm incredibly grateful to have been given the opportunity to read this novel through NetGalley and the approval of Simon & Schuster. White Ivy gave me further insight into white privilege and the way it's abused by those who are guaranteed to have it and those who will do anything to have even a fraction of the power and opportunity that comes with it. Even the intimate moments Ivy has with her family later in the story is a very touching attempt at reconnecting and understanding their past and history that have impacted Ivy's own behavior and, ultimately, the future she has chosen for herself.

Yang is a beautiful writer with a gift for creating believable, highly realistic, and vivid characters that grabbed ahold of this story and turned it into a powerful tale that readers will be unable to turn away from.

This was a really different read. It took me a while to get into and I feel like I was held at arm's length to the characters but it was an enjoyable read that had me thinking about it when I wasn't reading. None of the characters are particularly likeable but that was (I assume) intentional.

I found White Ivy by Susie Yang a bit of a slog to get through. I found the book quite long and, although it’s not, it feels repetitious. Ivy Lin is not a person with high morals. She will lie and cheat and go to great extremes to get what she wants. While we don’t have to like a character to enjoy a book, in this case I not only didn’t like her, I just didn’t care about her character at all. Gideon was polite and well mannered to a fault. There didn’t seem to be many sparks between he and Ivy at all although that didn’t stop Ivy’s determination to get her American dream of social standing.
Ivy’s family did add some spice and fun and they shared some stories of growing up in China.
The premise of the story is good and Ms Yang is definitely a good writer. I would try her next book.
Thanks to NetGalley for this ARC in exchange for an honest review

White Ivy, the debut novel from Susie Yang, is a compelling read. It sketches universally-felt themes of loneliness, a need to belong, a fear of abandonment. The story takes us through the first twenty-eight years of Ivy Lin's life told from her perspective. Ivy is unabashedly chaotic in her quest for what she feels is a better life. She does not apologise for her methods, instead, she merely states the steps has taken to procure what she sees as the pinnacle of success - marriage into a wealthy family.

While this is a novel about Ivy, she does reveal an abundance of information touching on the lives of the people around her. Every side character is carefully examined and almost dissected as Ivy pieces them into her tapestry. This is Ivy's story and there is a bias to how she views each person.

I cannot honestly say that I like Ivy as a person. She employs a single-minded approach to life, like a child grasping for the golden ring on a carousel. Her solutions to problems are, one would hope, well outside the realm of the average person and her shameless selfishness paints her as a definite anti-hero. All of the characters in the book as unlikeable but it is impossible not to cheer solely for Ivy with her unswerving devotion to her goals.

For myself, I tried to ration my reading time of this book in to obtain all the essence of the story. Alas, that came to an end last night when I read the last one-third in a greedy gulp so invested was I in Ivy's life. I recommend this novel with a caution that there are strong, graphic scenes which may offend.

Thank you to Simon & Schuster and NetGalley to the opportunity to read this advanced copy. My views, as always, are my own.

I enjoyed this story so much I read it in 2 days!! Such an interesting story showing the upbringing and insecurities of Ivy. a young Chinese girl as she grows up and fights to be accepted and tries to be beautiful like the popular white girls. When her high school crush finally pays her a little attention and invites her to a party, her parents find out that she snuck over there for the night and they show up yelling in Chinese and embarrassing her. She is so furious she runs to Roux, a rough, poor boy who is her neighbour. She has sex with him and starts smoking in rebellion.

Years later she again crosses paths with Gideon, the handsome man she always wanted because of his good looks, wealthy perfect family and his popularity. His sister encourages the relationship and another couple, Tom and his girlfriend also start spending a lot of time together as couples. Although they are dating, she always feels that something is missing and he seems cold and detached at times.

On a weekend away, Gideon's sister shows up with a boyfriend. Ivy's old neighbour Roux. Ivy falls into bed with him and can't ignore the passion that has been missing from her current relationship. The next day as she is going to break u with Gideon, he proposes and she accepts and chooses the safe, protected secure future. However, she can't stay away or deny her passion for Roux.

This book is such a great examination of the pressures and conflicts of making life decisions about work and relationship choices. Pressure, stress and ultimatums lead Ivy down a destructive path. Does she end up with her passionate lover or does she settle for the safe husband and perfect life her family always pressured her to have?