Reviews with content warning for Racial slurs - Central Places

Wow, I can’t believe this is a debut novel. This book felt like it really took me on a journey. I want to note that this book isn’t at all what I was expecting. The description, a Chinese American woman taking her white fiancée home to her small hometown to meet her Chinese parents, sounded like something that would be light and funny. This book is certainly not light. It’s very heavy at times. And I didn’t always like Audrey the main character. I usually feel like it’s pretty important for me to like the main character in order to enjoy the book but Audrey isn’t a bad person, she’s just not always likable. She says the wrong things sometimes and makes the wrong choices sometimes too.

Audrey always felt like she stuck out in her hometown and not in a good way. There weren’t many Asian kids at school. That’s weren’t really many kids at school at all who weren’t white. Sometimes kids and adults said the wrong thing by accident and sometimes they did it on purpose.

Audrey feels like her life pretty cleaning splinters into two parts: Audrey In Illinois and Audrey in New York. When Audrey left for college, she basically cut out all of her old friends and her high school crush Kyle.

Now Audrey lives in New York with her fiancée Ben. Her parents invite them home for Christmas and the combination of holiday guilt, her engagement to a man her parents haven’t met, and her father’s upcoming surgery, combine into Audrey and her fiancée Ben going to visit for the holidays.

Because of her father’s surgery, she commits to staying for an entire week. It doesn’t take long before her mom starts picking at her, as Audrey knew she would. It also doesn’t take long before she runs into Kyle and some other old friends.

It’s easy for Audrey to find comfort in Kyle’s company despite their very awkward end to their friendship almost a decade earlier.
Audrey finds herself both comforted by her old town and also embarrassed by it. She has her reasons for not being home since high school.

I thought this was very well written. As I said, I didn’t always appreciate Audrey’s decisions. I can almost understand why she felt the need to cut ties with Kyle years ago because of her painful unrequited love for him, but she also cut off the rest of her friends and her family. Her dad was one of my favorite characters. I found him to be very loving. There was a scene with him cooking dinner that actually made me tear up.

An emotional, enjoyable, rollercoaster ride of a book :)

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challenging emotional hopeful reflective medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.25

A lovely coming-of-age story for a 20-something, Audrey, who finds herself torn between several identities and homes. At first, she is our unassailable protagonist, but as the book goes on, she and Delia Cai's readers learn that she has her faults too and is at fault in certain scenarios in her life. We're able to see Audrey grow on her own terms and by her own standards, rather than in response to standards she felt were being pushed on her. It's wonderful to watch her repair her relationships with family, friends and herself.

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