This book was brilliant. Each character flawed yet knowable. It asks what it means to be a parent. Does it hinge on an ability to provide for your child? Is it contingent on an unceasing desire to be a parent to your specific child? Does biology create an indissoluble bond or is it love? Do mistakes impact your right to parent your child? The parent-child relationship is fraught with unparalleled complexity. As in life, Ng offers no easy answers.

From my first encounter with Peter Pan as a child, the idea of a boy who never grows up always struck me as somewhat sinister. Henry‘s reimagining delves into this shadow lurking within the fantasy of a land where children cease to age or grow. While a life lived purely for adventure and enjoyment surely holds a certain magic and appeal, it comes at a high cost. This was dark, creepy, and both introspective and action-packed.

This book left me thinking about the intersection of capitalism and healthcare. Capitalism takes for granted that money is the primary motivating force of society. Thus, without the promise of monetary gain, progress/scientific discovery would cease. This is one assumption underlying the debate about patient rights in human tissue research. I find the idea of money dictating our willingness to care for each other extremely problematic. Thoughts?

This book invites us to consider the paradoxes inherent within our daily experience of the world. While the simplicity of duality is attractive and integral to our survival, truths are never as cut and dry as our brains would like them to be. Contradictions exist as a natural part of the fabric of our universe. If we can learn to hold the messiness and complexity of it all, can we then unlearn hate as a way to cope with our own confusion?

How much of our lives are informed by stories we‘ve created or have been told about our past? What about those stories that live within us but are hidden from view? How can these two be reconciled while also leaving space for us to imagine new, ever-unfolding narratives for ourselves? This book was a dark and whimsical look into these questions of self-identity, putting me in touch with my own inner dark-fairy-tale-girl. She was very pleased. 💕

I really wanted to like this and found many passages thought-provoking and beautifully, if brutally, written. But taken as a whole, I thought the book ultimately took itself too seriously, coming across as pompous and hard to connect with on anything other than an ultra-heady, superficial level. My heart felt left out which surprised and disappointed me for a book tackling topics such as bodily autonomy and the power of narrative.

This may be the most human book I‘ve ever read. Complex and heartbreaking and beautiful. These characters, they are all of us, muddling through life and doing the best we can. 💕

A little over the halfway point and I'm equal parts disturbed and delighted at the flashes of Catch-22 absurdity that emerge when Leovy details the inner workings of murder investigations within one of America's most violent enclaves. Problematic to say the least.

If Jane Eyre and Sweeney Todd had a love child...😍😍😍