In Gish Jen's autobiographical novel, she dives into her difficult and explosive relationship with her mother, Aggie, whose main communication with her daughter was to call her a bad, bad girl and say that she didn't know how to talk. This was often followed by a blow. Aggie is now dead, but Gish can still hear her voice.

The oldest daughter of a wealthy Shanghai family, Aggie lived in the complete shadow of the "number one son," her brother. Brighter and harder working than him, she found a circle at the Catholic girls' school her parents sent her to, where she was encouraged and recognized for her diligence. Her dream was to attend college in another country and earn a Ph.D. Her mother is behind this idea to get rid of her but her more supportive father sees Aggie as the child who will will achieve her goal.

She makes friends and mows her way through her Master's and into doctorate territory. But news from Shanghai is not good, and her money dwindles. She marries an engineer from Shanghai with plans to continue her coursework, but of course the children come and she is stuck.

The second child, after number one son, is Lillian, who will change her name to Gish. Ignored and abused, she is the whipping girl for her older brother and three younger siblings. Over time she will be torn by the Chinese loyalty to family and her need to grow as an artist and protect her own family.

"Bad Bad Girl" is Gish Jen's attempt to understand her relationship with not only her mother but her father as well. Jen is a master of subtly devastating writing and she is working at the top of her craft. This book is tough but hard to tear yourself away from. I was telling a friend about "Bad Bad Girl," and he asked me whether the book was a downer. Strangely, it's not. That's the sign of Jen's skill, that she can write about such trauma (her mother would laugh at that word) frankly, but with so much soul and humanity that readers will buy in.

Many thanks to Knopf and Netgalley for a digital review copy in exchange for an unbiased review.

Bad Bad Girl is a deeply moving novel about mothers and daughters, cultural displacement, and the weight of expectations passed down through generations. Gish Jen weaves an intimate, multi-layered portrait of Loo Shu-hsin, later known as Aggie, a woman whose journey from privileged Shanghai girlhood to struggling immigrant mother in America is as heartbreaking as it is triumphant.

Born in 1925 to a wealthy but restrictive family, Aggie is constantly told she is "bad bad girl"—a girl who talks too much, wants too much, and dares to dream beyond the narrow life prescribed to her. Unlike most girls of her time, she is allowed an education, first at home and later at a Catholic school, where she embraces learning and is renamed after St. Agnes when baptized. Against the wishes of her family, she pursues a Ph.D. in America in 1947, just as Communist revolution looms in China, severing her ties to home forever.

In Manhattan, lonely and caught between cultures, Aggie marries Chao-Pei, an engineering student from Shanghai, and attempts to build a life in the American suburbs. But marriage proves another constraint rather than a refuge. By the time their daughter, Gish, is born, their relationship is over. And so Aggie, who once fought to claim her own voice, now struggles to understand her headstrong American daughter, repeating the very words that once crushed her: "Bad bad girl! You don’t know how to talk!"

Spanning decades and continents, Bad Bad Girl is a richly drawn, deeply felt novel about the push and pull between love and frustration, tradition and independence, sacrifice and selfhood. Jen’s prose is both spare and lyrical, capturing the intensity of a mother-daughter bond. I was easily drawn into the story and you will be too!

A novel of exile, resilience, and the unspoken conversations that shape a lifetime, Bad Bad Girl resonates long after the final page. Beautifully written, it is a poignant and powerful exploration of what it means to belong—to a country, to a family, and ultimately, to oneself

Bad Bad Girl is a novel about a mother and a daughter forced to reckon with one another across decades of curiosity and ambition, elation and disappointment, intense intimacy and misunderstanding. Spanning continents and generations, this is a rich, heartbreaking portrait of two fierce women locked in a complicated life-long embrace. #knopf #vintage #pantheon #anchor #badbadgirl

Thanks to Netgalley and Knopf for the ebook. A lovely autobiographical fiction, where the author recreates her mother’s life, first as she’s born into a wealthy family from Shanghai and then comes to America for college and ends up stranded once China explores into an all consuming Communist Revolution. Her mother marries, has five kids and never goes back to China and never sees her mother again. And that really is the heart of the novel: Mother and daughter relationships that are loving, but also angry and in this case violent and withholding. There’s a wonderful device that snakes through the whole book where as the daughter is writing the book, she is constantly in conversation with her mother, even though her mother has passed away.

The story flowed well and the characters were well developed. I recommend this book and look forward to more from this author.


****Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for providing an ARC in exchange for my honest review****