MixedLos Angeles Review of Books...complicated but thoughtful ... Lee’s journey is accomplished with uneven levels of literary success ... The divides of language, then, are a center point, and they go hand in hand with the unreliability of memory ... The story is, in a sense, unstable, and puts the reader in a precarious position: who can ultimately be trusted, if anyone, to share this family’s history? ... She dedicates much time in the memoir to incorporating the vast tale of Taiwan — its political landscape, the mapping of its boundaries, and its geography. But she often gets too stuck in the details without drawing parallels back to her own family in a timely enough manner, causing us to lose the reason for the narrative in the first place ... The narrator is a bit more successful when writing of the island’s early mapping and shifting geography rather than its political fluctuations. Though that, too, is aimless at times ... Such elegance of language is ever present in the work; poetic and emotive, unfurling to reveal passages about her family, her pain, and her exploration of Taiwan’s myriad habitats, which arise from its delicate status as an island positioned between two tectonic plates ... It is a troublesome place to be for the reader. But perhaps there is a method to that fragmentation.
