BOOK REVIEW: The Year She Left Us by Kathryn Ma

Title: The Year She Left Us

Author: Kathryn Ma

Publisher: Harper Collins Publishers

Year published: 2014

ISBN: 978-0-06-227334-5

Genre: contemporary fiction

My Rating: 5/5 -- must read!

Pairs well with a comfortable couch,

long and rainy afternoon, 

and your favorite tea and blanket.

Once again, I fully judged a book by its cover and was not disappointed.

Kathryn Ma’s novel, The Year She Left Us, is a stunning, multi-generational, multi-cultural masterpiece, following a Ari – Ariadne Bettina Yun-li Rose Kong; her mother, Charlie; aunt, Les; and her grandmother. It is a story of a family of women, lost amongst themselves and to themselves, finding each other, finding themselves, and finding what really matters.

Each family member has experience loss in their own ways – some more deeply than others, but all losses. Ari, however, is at the center of the story, pulling the others both apart and together, as she navigates childhood and adolescence until a breakdown drives her away from everything and everyone that matter most in her life. I think she would agree that she disappears, even from herself.

Early in the novel, Ari takes an action that is unbelievably shocking and graphic – you are warned – but that also sets up the entire rest of the novel. The action is so disturbing that I became nauseous reading it. You’ll have to read the book for yourself to find out what she did and about the resulting fallout.

If you’ve read The Joy Luck Club or any other work by Amy Tan, I think you will appreciate The Year She Left Us. Ma masterfully weaves the divide between being both Chinese and American and the pull to both cling to and abandon traditions of both sides. She also carefully treads the pains and joys that come with adoption – the joy that a parent feels at becoming a mother and how it spreads to others in the family, but also the pull of feeling abandoned or thrown away that some adopted children may feel. Through it all, it is clear that the three generations of women need each other and love each other, even if they aren’t always aware of it – sometimes they flat out reject one another.

The terrain of the book physically traverses San Francisco and the surrounding Bay Area in Northern California, including Clement Street (where one of my best friends comes from), up to Alaska and across to Pennsylvania. And, it spreads to the other side of the world to metropolises in China and the countryside. In Ma’s description of Lushan Mountain, I could practically smell the air, feel the breeze, feel the paths around the lake and into the mountains. It felt so close. I wanted to go there.

The Year She Left Us is also unique in that chapters alternate between all four women, but the story is told in the first person by only two – Ari and her grandmother. It did take me a few chapters to get into the rhythm, but by the midpoint of the novel, the structure made perfect sense and even felt necessary. By the last chapter, it was obvious that this was the only format for the story of these four women ranging from 18 years old to 80. At some point, the novel references an assisted living facility called Four Winds. The characters themselves are like the four winds all blowing against and away from each other, only to finally come together in a cohesive manner.

I loved this novel and know I will read it again. I hope you’ll give it a try and won’t be turned off by the grotesque scene I mentioned – that’s really the best word for it, but it is only truly described in detail once.

I’ll leave you to make up your own mind about which of the women the “she” in the title refers to.

I found The Year She Left Us by Kathryn Ma at the library, but you can find it on Amazon HERE.

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