A masterpiece that wrangles several lifetimes of wisdom, loss and heartbreak into a slim novel you can clutch to your chest, pass on to your sharpest, most mercurial friends and say: read this, feel this! These works have been published in Center for Fiction Magazine , Fence , GQ , The Rumpus , and others. Eleanor’s narration alternates with flashbacks to her childhood and adolescence—notably her relationship with her troubled older sister—and of her parents’ emigration from Taipei in the late 1970s. He may not find the precise answer, but his quest for it, in Go’s elegant and incisive prose, is perpetually captivating.

It’s truly the perfect inaugural book for SJP Lit and I couldn’t be more honored to be working with the extraordinarily talented Elysha Chang. At once disarmingly provocative and compulsively readable, A Quitter's Paradise is an unexpectedly funny study of the beauty and contradictions of grief, family bonds, and self-knowledge, exploring the ways we unwittingly guard the secrets of our loved ones, even from ourselves.Eleanor Liu is the daughter of Taiwanese immigrants who secretly married her boyfriend of eight months. Yet readers also see the yearning for love and wells of compassion hidden beneath his self-protective exterior.

On one hand, I can see the merits of A Quitter’s Paradise’s concept: a Chinese American woman struggling to cope with the grief over her mother’s recent death as well as estrangement from her other family members. I had serious mixed feelings toward this book, with regard to both the story arc and the characters. An impromptu celebration on the beach at sunset with champagne becomes a weekly touchpoint to their lives as they learn more about each other and themselves. The present time storyline was definitely more engaging, and I wished the book had focused more on that (Eleanor's relationship with her husband, her affair with their co-worker Samir, and the rodent she stole from the lab).Finally, Eleanor is in a dissatisfying relationship with a white man – who she herself describes as condescending – and then this dissatisfying relationship is never addressed, she just persists in it?

In sum, I wouldn’t recommend this novel and would encourage you to check out the titles I linked above, or other higher quality books, instead. But I still think it’s a really valuable perspective on grief, paralysis, and the weight of history.

Let me start by saying that this book is so beautifully written and charming, that I'm already a fan of Elysha Chang. A funny and endearing story made up of vivid characters, A Quitters Paradise tackles grief and complicated family dynamics.

Eleanor Liu is a “chronic avoider”—she runs from every difficulty life presents, but how long can she outrun grief? Overall, I did enjoy this one, even though I felt parts of the story were uneven and the characters could’ve been better developed. Their relationship seems to have been mildly strained in the beginning, but it becomes increasingly obvious to me that Eleanor is struggling with the impacts of her mother’s death, leading to some of the decision she makes throughout the novel. While the first part of the novel is written tightly, it starts to unspool more and more in ever widening circles as it progresses. Eleanor was the most interesting character in all of this, as the background noise of her family’s immigration only makes what is happening to her—and the family—as a whole even sadder.Likewise some of the secrets the family kept close were culturally different perhaps from the secrets more common in Western literature, but all of this is why it is so good to read well-written novels by people from cultures not our own. Things really begin to hit the fan when Eleanor begins to go off the rails and ends up doing something she really should not have done, leading to irreversible consequences.