The Leavers

There’s no better time to read a powerful book than when the world feels cold and unfriendly. While using fiction as an escape from reality is incredibly rewarding on its own, what’s even better is when a novel’s lessons lift from the pages and inform our lives with renewed compassion.

On the surface, The Leavers is a novel about a mother and son who are separated by forces more powerful than their blood bond. Deming is a good kid growing up in the Bronx, the child of an undocumented Chinese immigrant. He is devastated when one day his mother disappears, without explanation or a trace. He will spend the next decade carrying the heartache of this abandonment.

But that’s only a piece of Lisa Ko’s provocative story. The Leavers is also about the very concept of ""us" versus "them"" about belonging, and who we are when we lose the people who make us, well, ourselves. It’s about immigration and cultural barriers, the promise of the American dream and the less talked about way it can devolve into an American nightmare.

Deming is adopted by well-meaning but dense parents, renamed 'œDaniel Wilkinson' and moved from his neighborhood to a white suburb upstate, where he stands out as a minority and struggles to fit in. He’ll later return to his roots on the Lower East Side of Manhattan (right near Chinatown) as an angry young man seeking to reconnect with his core identity.

Which brings us to a third theme of the novel: a complex portrait of a woman thrust into motherhood when she isn’t yet ready. Polly adores her son, yet resents the burden he places on her existence. She cannot imagine living without him'”until she has no other choice. So rarely are we allowed to focus on female ambivalence about motherhood. In this incredible novel, we get that'”and so very, very much more.

I read this book over the course of a single weekend, so don’t say I didn’t warn you: Once you pick it up and get through a chapter, you’re probably in it for the long haul. But I can’t think of a better way to wile away the hours at the moment, so here is my recommendation: Turn off the news. Forget about Twitter for a couple days. Steep yourself in a story that’s different from your own. I promise, you’ll learn something. I certainly did '” and what’s more, is that reading The Leavers reminded me of how much listening to narratives of others, both for pleasure and for understanding, I still need to do.