Lydia is remarkably imagined, her unhappy teenage life crafted without an ounce of cliché. As the police try to decipher the mystery of Lydia’s death, her family realize that they didn’t know her at all. When Lydia is discovered dead in a nearby lake, the family begins to fall apart.
Then Marilyn abruptly moves out of their suburban Ohio home to go back to school, only to return before long. The two fall in love and marry, over the objections of Marilyn’s mother, whose comment on their interracial relationship is succinct: “It’s not right.” Marilyn gets pregnant and gives up her dream of becoming a doctor, devoting her life instead to raising Lydia and the couple’s other two children, Nathan and Hannah. Marilyn and James meet in 1957, when she is a premed at Radcliffe and he, a graduate student, is teaching one of her classes. Lydia is the middle and favorite child of Marilyn Walker, a white Virginian, and James Lee, a first-generation Chinese-American.
This emotionally involving debut novel explores themes of belonging using the story of the death of a teenage girl, Lydia, from a mixed-race family in 1970s Ohio.
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