Wow! What a refreshing and fantastic debut novel. I am always looking for more stories about immigrants and familial bonds, and this novel did not disappoint. At times in the beginning the alternating timelines were confusing but they did eventually come together as you adjust to the writing style. Highly recommend!

I enjoyed this funny little rom-com. The characters had some depth and like ability to them. It was a well-paced read so if I needed to pause the audiobook, I wasn’t confused or stuck trying to get back into it. I’m definitely more of a self reader than audiobook listener since I’m not a fan of only one or two people covering the voices of multiple characters. Overall though, I would recommend this fun read as a book to read yourself (the story is great) and only as an audiobook for anyone that typically enjoys them.

✨BOOK REVIEW✨

📚A Quitter’s Paradise - Elysha Chang📚

A Quitter’s Paradise is an eye-opening and inspiring exploration of personal growth and self-discovery. This book takes you on a journey across multiple timelines and is engaging and emotional, touching on topics of loss, love, miscarriage, parental expectations and the lives of undocumented immigrants.

Chang’s writing is refreshingly honest and relatable, infused with vulnerability and authenticity. It is well-paced, appears to be well researched and definitely kept me turning the page. I did really relate with the expectations parents can place on their children and I know others will feel this too.

What you can expect:
🐭 Familial bonds and secrets
🐭 Alternating timelines
🐭 Exploration of grief
🐭 The immigrant experience

I enjoyed this thought-provoking journey through time and I’m definitely intrigued to see what Elysha comes out with next!

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

Thank you so much to @netgalley @zandoprojects @sjplit @dreamscape_media and @elyshoshine for sending me this to review 🙏🏻

This book had so much promise. It could have been a good example of struggles of first generation Asian immigrants. It could have been a good example of struggles of women in STEM. It could have been a good example of how to handle grief. But when you try to be everything all at once, it rarely works.

Eleanor decided to marry a fellow researcher. Was it the right time? We don't know. She was well on her way to get a PhD and be great in her field. But she got married, quit her program, and started working under her husband as a lab assistant. Her "priorities" were all mixed. Now with her mother dead, she didn't know how to handle the grief. She was not ready to face rest of her family. However, she could run away from them only so much.

I wish we could really understand who Eleanor was and what she truly wished to do. We have been introduced to her at the beginning of the book and whole book later we still don't know who she was. Like I said there was so much promise; however, not having a specific focus did not help the author.

This book didn't land for me. While I enjoyed the aspect of reading about a Chinese American family and coping of the death of a parent, it just didn't hook me like I had hoped.

I still look forward to reading more from this author!

Zando released a short video of Sarah Jessica Parker and Elysha Chang discussing A Quitter's Paradise; I highly recommend watching it as an accompaniment to the book. The book was a little bit of a slow-starter for me. I didn't know how I felt about Eleanor or her family. (One thing I did feel strongly about was Eleanor's research. So much of the "research" coming out of academic rodent labs isn't applicable to a rodent in a garbage can, a fact I swear I remember hearing repeated in A Quitter's Paradise.) Watching that interview at the same time the book swerved heavily away from Eleanor and towards her family, it helped the story come alive for me. Instead of wondering why we were talking about Rita, Narisa, et al., I found myself a little sad to switch back to modern Eleanor. I don't know if I ever warmed to her as much as I ended up liking other characters. That's not a bad thing! It just means that Elysha Chang created this messy family that you grow to care deeply about. The book that felt so slow ended too fast! You shouldn't force sequels to works like these, but I would truly enjoy meeting some of these characters again.

I would also like to acknowledge Angela Lin's skilled narration. Not speaking Chinese, I was happy to have an audiobook so that I could hear the names pronounced correctly. She did a lovely job with all of the different voices, bringing each character to life in a way that suggested multiple narrators. I would recommend the audiobook of A Quitter's Paradise over another version because of her. I would like to thank Dreamscape Media, SJP Lit for allowing me to experience this NetGalley audiobook.

I'm reviewing A Quitter's Paradise late (past pub date) because I affirmatively did not enjoy the audiobook narration and picked up a printed copy after publication. The narrator here speaks slowly and dramatically, which is not unusual, but is not enjoyable for me. I couldn't find an increased speed that helped the lag that kept a good cadence.

The novel itself is well-written and builds scenes and characters well. That said, the plot here just didn't seem to correspond with the character (she makes some obviously terrible decisions as a result of her grief) which didn't endear her to me in spite of the underlying "justification". Overall, liked but didn't love the book. Didn't like the audiobook.

Just an okay read for me. I struggled to really get invested in this debut that explores the complicated mother-daughter relationship between an Asian American immigrant and her daughter and the grief that comes when she dies unexpectedly. Recommended for fans of books like The light of eternal spring by Angel Di Zhang and Banyan moon by Thao Thai. Many thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for an early audio copy in exchange for my honest review!

Thank you to the publisher for the ALC. As someone also ignoring her mothers death I felt this book on so many levels.

Thank you to netgalley and the publisher for the ALC. I talked enjoyed listening to this book. The characters are deeply flawed and human, and also it was interesting to get Eleanor's perspective and then, when the other parts came in, learn a lot more about her family and their past that she didn't really know. I thought the writing was very good. It is a sign for me that the writing is great when I'm fully invested in the book even with characters who are struggling and making dubious decisions in life. The book is not for everyone but if you like books with less of a plot and more of a family issues deep dive, you'll probably like it.

Thank you to NetGalley, Dreamscape Media and SJP Lit for gifting me with an ALC of Quitter’s Paradise by Elise Chang. In exchange I offer my unbiased opinion.

This debut novel reminded me of Weike Wang’s novels Chemistry and Joan is Okay. Eleanor is a struggling PHD student, dealing with the death of her complicated mother as well as the messy relationship between herself and her husband. Written in multiple points of view, we come to learn about Eleanor’s family background, her parent’s struggles, the tense relationship her sister experienced growing up in a household of discourse and the plight of the Taiwanese immigrants.

I think this book took on too many topics and was presented in too many time jumps and points of view. I struggled at times to follow the plot line and never developed a strong enough grasp to appreciate the characters and their stories.

This novel really didn’t work for me.
Thank you for the opportunity to read, explore and review Elysian Chang’s debut novel.

I hate talking about books that I didn't love, because it makes me feel a bit guilty. Why? Someone poured themselves out into this story and worked really hard for it and this one singular person is not in love with it. So, as with any other review by me or some other person take it with a grain of salt because maybe it will be the book you fall in love with or maybe the person reading wasn't in the right mood for that story.

We have this story about Eleanor who's life is seemingly falling apart since the death of her mother, but really it was well before that. I wouldn't say that this story is necessarily about Eleanor as we jump between Eleanor's story and Rita's (Eleanor's mother). I think that we are trying to connect the two or have the reader understand why Rita was the way she was, even though her daughter never knows any of the flashback scenes. We even have a few flashbacks with Eleanor's father once he immigrated to America and see the struggle that he had. I think the flashbacks had more of an interesting story than Eleanor. Rita seemed to have an interesting life and really pushed to get the life that she was hoping for, but showed that what you think is going to occur doesn't always happen the way you want it. Eleanor and her sister were broken and if we explored more into the relationships with each other, parents, etc, the story would have clicked more with me. The way the flashbacks and present story felt, was like the author wrote two stories and spliced one into another. They were related but didn't really mesh well. It was very disjointed.

As the story was disjointed and there didn't seem to be any character growth or gaining of knowledge, the whole thing didn't hold my interest. It felt like we were moving through these timelines but standing still because there was no real connection or meaning. Eleanor was not a great person, her parents were not great people and the whole family just seems to hurt everyone around them. I don't know, it just wasn't for me.

The narrator did a fine job with the material she had. She did feel a little flat as Eleanor, but Eleanor was a pretty flat character. Angela Lin was able to do amazing voice work and did a good job with the emotions in the scenes. I would listen to her other work.

An endearing story tackling grief and complicated family dynamics. Excited to listen and read future novels by Sarah Jessica Parker's imprint SJP Lit. Thank you to Dreamscape Media and NetGalley for the opportunity to listen to an advanced copy.

I loved the writing style and the flow of the book. The main character, Eleanor, struggles with her life post-quitting her PhD. Her life gets chaotic after that. This book is really about her trying to figure out her life with a little bit of how she got to where she is now. The plot was just okay for me and I don’t think I really connected with the character and novel.

Paradise? More like paralysis. I felt extremely frustrated while reading this book. Eleanor, the main character, avoids doing anything that is in any way uncomfortable. She drops out of her graduate school program but tells her mother she’s still in it. She dates and then marries Ellis, and hides that from her mother for several months too.

This pattern of lying and hiding started when she was a teenager, telling her parents she won second place in a science fair when in reality the judges were unimpressed with her entry. It’s understandable that a teen would lie to gain her parents approval but why is Eleanor behaving the same way at 25 years old?

Throughout the book, we readers watch Eleanor make impulsive decisions that she can’t even understand or explain to herself. She’s a very traumatized woman who comes from an abusive family, and she isn’t making any attempts to recover or get help. I kept hoping and expecting that the novel would show Eleanor going to therapy and follow her on a journey of healing (I was remembering the excellent novel I Know This Much is True by Wally Lamb) but that never happens.

Instead we get a whole book of Eleanor’s avoidance behaviors with no hope for improvement, and reading it was a bleak and unenjoyable experience. This isn’t the worst book I have ever read—the author does have talent at writing—but it’s down there in the bottom fifteen percent.

Thank you NetGalley for the free audiobook in exchange for my honest feedback. I will not be recommending this novel to anyone.

I could not stand Eleanor’s mother, which I imagine was the whole point of writing her character, but it was incredible how annoying she was. I found that she wasn’t so dissimilar to my own mom who cannot let go of things or let my business be my business, which I suppose is a cornerstone of Chinese/Asian moms.

I don’t entirely know how to feel about this book. I found Eleanor to be a bit bizarre, and her behavior was definitely concerning at times. It’s clear that she needed to seek help for her mental and emotional health because she does not know how to process trauma. I felt that this was a missed opportunity to either discuss the Asian outlook of mental health or encourage it.

I also wasn’t a fan of the frequent time jumps. I didn’t feel they always made the most logical sense or flowed very well into the next time period. This would often cause me to become lost because the characters would change and new ones would get introduced. I never felt like I truly knew what was going on. It seemed like the author was trying to write a story like “Pachinko” where the story spans multiple generations, but didn’t do it in a way that worked well.

I actually found that the narrator sounded like Constance Wu, which was a bit of a distraction at times because that’s what I would randomly think about as I was listening to the audiobook. This is of course, no fault of the author, but it did inadvertently diminish my listening/reading pleasure to some extent.

As a quitter, I found parts of this book really relatable! I definitely felt more attached to some POVs more than the others though. The writing really was great and the narration worked well!

I enjoyed this story and message, but it was difficult switching between the three point of views. However, the writing was beautiful and I look forward to reading what Elysha Chang writes next.

This was an okay read with a an interesting promise although this isn't really plot driven. Normally I love an unreliable narrator but Eleanor was almost too extreme and I felt I didn't know what was happening so I was confused and found it hard to get into the plot and relate to the characters. However saying this I did like the writing style I just think it could maybe do with some more editing.

This book didn’t fully grab my attention. When I read the summary, I was interested in the premise. However, I was very slow moving through this book. I listened to this book via audio, and often rewinded parts because I’d lose focus. I didn’t mind reading through Eleanor’s perspective as she navigated her different life events, however, I felt I never fully understood what the plot of the book was getting at. There seemed to be quite a lot of character development, with less of an actual plot. The nonlinear timelines were confusing at times, but overall, I could keep up for the most part.