After suffering her first big heartbreak two years earlier, Penelope Lin has built a quiet life with no romantic entanglements. She spends her days cataloging a museum's vast collection of Qing Dynasty bound-foot shoes and in the comfortable company of close friends. One day, she happens to meet Hoang, who confesses to releasing mice from the cancer research lab where he works. Hoang's openness catches Penelope off guard; from then on, she finds her carefully constructed life slowly start to unravel.
Superb ... Gingko Season is as much a love story as it is a subtle experiment in the ways language can be manipulated either to reveal or conceal its speaker ... Some novels announce themselves with virtuosic plotting or language, headline-worthy conceits, Big Ideas. This is not one of them, and it’s better for it.
With observant and conscientious prose, Xu Elegant’s debut novel follows museum worker Penelope Lin’s coming-to-terms with heartbreak, while navigating new friendships, challenging work, and difficult memories of her mother ... Penelope’s introspective first-person voice exposes how people, places, objects, and even ideas form a labyrinth of complex interconnectedness ... Far from melodramatic, Gingko Season powerfully explores love’s different facets while retaining a type of vulnerability that inspires intellectual reflection. The novel is also notable for its depiction of diversity, both in its setting and characters, bringing Philadelphia to life with multiple layers. From a Buddhist monastery to Chinatown, Xu Elegant’s story embraces diasporas and their shaping of identity with the same sophisticated, careful touch.
This feels like a beautifully wrought short story extended into novel form ... The story is narrated by Penelope, and debut author Elegant writes long, rhythmic, fluid sentences. She and her protagonist are tuned into the five senses, making the book’s descriptive paragraphs a pleasure to read.
