...[an] achingly insightful, gorgeously redemptive debut ... Although Ko began writing Leavers in 2009, headlines regarding immigrants have hardly changed: round-ups, detention, deportation, separated families – especially tragic are recent international adoptees deported as adults because of legal loopholes to a birth country they left as children . Beyond the desensitizing media coverage, Ko gives faces, (multiple) names, and details to create a riveting story of a remarkable family coming, going, leaving…all in hopes of someday returning to one another.
In focusing on a bewildered young victim, The Leavers follows a convention of the protest novel genre; Ko dramatizes the personal—a family torn apart—in order to draw attention to a structural social problem. And Deming’s utter ignorance of that social problem looks like an inspired way around the sentimentality and thudding moralism that haunt the genre. Deming’s side of the story could easily have been dominated by a heavy-handed sense of despair about the immigration system’s injustices. Instead, in his mind, he’s a child who has lost a parent. Politics aside, Ko implies, that’s all that should matter. Somehow, though, Ko’s choice doesn’t quite rescue her young character from the genre’s signature pitfalls. Her evocations of Deming’s plight frequently swerve into freighted cliché ... Ko’s compelling book is about a woman who has done lots of things wrong, and lots of things right, and has mostly lived as best she could.
Thoroughly researched and ambitious in scope, Ko’s book ably depicts the many worlds Deming’s life encompasses...It is impossible not to root for a boy so foundationally unmoored by circumstance ... Yet rather than mine this richly unsettling territory, Ko contrives things such that not all Polly’s actions — including her effective abandonment of Deming — turn out to be her fault. Is hers a cost-free freedom? And why is her penchant for freedom made so much of, if it is without consequence? Where Deming’s story, too, eventually devolves into a conventional narrative of a young person learning to follow his bliss, it’s hard not to see this book as one that takes risks but then hedges its bets ... It is still heartening to see a novel put a human face on migration, and perhaps in future books, this budding novelist’s true promise will be realized. Meanwhile, Lisa Ko has taken the headlines and reminded us that beyond them lie messy, brave, extraordinary, ordinary lives.
Though her narrative never penetrates the walls of the fictionalized facility that haunts it, Ko illuminates the plunder of immigrant lives at the hands of the prison-industrial complex by describing its attendant outcomes ... What Ko seeks to do with The Leavers is illuminate the consequence of these facilities, and of the deportation machine as a whole, on individual lives ... Ko’s novel is self-consciously political in a manner that, at times, verges on ungainly didacticism. In Polly and Deming, however, she has created two memorable characters with the capacity to spark empathy in audiences inured to a dismaying status quo.
The Leavers is as politically topical as it is sensitive. It is also uneven, but when good, it is excellent: compelling, well-realized, gritty and complicated ... Ko does a good job of contrasting the difference between noisy New York City and the sleepy small town where Deming finds himself in a white house five times larger than the Bronx apartment. But Kay and Peter are cardboard characters, speaking in strained, clichéd dialogue that matches the author’s arm’s-length relationship to them ... The Leavers is a layered story of leaving, by choice and by force, and of returning to a place that one can find only for oneself: home.
Though obviously skillfully written—it’s a winner of the PEN/Bellwether Prize for Socially Engaged Fiction—the book can sometimes be difficult to read, thanks to its bleak subject matter, which, nevertheless, is reflective of today’s reality. Those who are interested in closely observed, character-driven fiction will want to leave room for The Leavers on their shelves.
Ko paints a rich portrait of the indomitable young Polly, ‘the girl who’d defy odds, the girl who could do anything’ ... Ko’s depictions of the nuances of child-parent love in birth and adoptive families, as well as the long-term emotional costs of a family’s rupture, are authentic. She avoids the clichéd happy reunions of adoption narratives in favor of an astute study of the agony of separation and how grief, regret and dreams shape one another.
...heartfelt and timely ... In The Leavers we come to see that the Chinese-American identity is to hold tight to the hyphen that separates these two cultures, these two realities ... while it is a quiet story, it comes at a time when a little breathing room, time to reflect on ourselves as a country, seems urgently necessary.
Ko’s prose is captivating and vivid, but the story begins to sag under the accretion of minutely observed details and overloaded plot twists, many of which seem contrived and not particularly believable. The plot feels over-workshopped, as if the author’s vision became smudged with the fingerprints of too many well-meaning readers naïve about contemporary immigration and adoption procedures … The crescendo to the climax swells too loud and too long, and the story is unable to sustain the suspense. While Polly’s first-person narrative is compelling, Daniel’s story is told in the third-person and is not as vibrant or convincing, resulting in a portrait of a transracial adoptee that is disappointingly clichéd.
If you come away from reading The Leavers with a sense of disconnect, that’s no surprise—disconnectedness is its central theme, its structural and stylistic touchpoint, and the emotional engine driving its main characters. … When the truth is revealed, it comes freighted with a general lack of agency that strains credulity. Polly, previously portrayed as a relentlessly resourceful soul striving her way illegally from Minjian to New York, decides a few forgotten and disconnected phone numbers are enough to conclude ‘my family was lost.’ Other central figures maintain inexplicable silences … For all the challenges of the book, the real takeaway is Ko’s bristling talent. Her characters are constitutionally adverse to action, her scenes overburdened with exposition, yet a sense of engagement pervades, a soulful sincerity that pulls the reader through.
The Leavers, which is based on real events, resonates with particular urgency in the America of 2017. The novel takes us through the harrowing experience of a person disappeared by the United States government, with little to no legal recourse, because of their immigration status. They are punished for even a mild protest of conditions, and then deported after speaking out of turn in a sham court proceeding. We see the repercussions: the cleaving of family, the forced abandonment, the lives derailed and scattered. The book doesn’t so much engage in ‘the immigration debate’ as illustrate its lived consequences … The Leavers offers no easy answers, but at every turn it is skillfully observed and written, sidestepping convenient explanations on the way to nuanced moments of tremendous grace.
The Wilkinsons’ liberal do-good impulses are not openly mocked, but they are critiqued by Ko. Their hope – well meaning but condescending – is to rehabilitate 'Daniel' into middle-class life ... The Leavers has won praise in the US, and its underlying themes of displacement and deportation carry deep and desperately urgent resonances far beyond America, and fiction. Ko movingly captures Polly and Deming’s liminal presence in the immigrant community, on the margins of society in overcrowded apartments, in nail parlours and factories, who are always there yet invisible to the rest of us.
Ko’s stunning tale of love and loyalty—to family, to country—is a fresh and moving look at the immigrant experience in America, and is as timely as ever.
Daniel’s involvement in the alternative music scene is painted in unnecessary detail, but otherwise the specificity of the intertwined stories is the novel’s strength ... This timely novel depicts the heart- and spirit-breaking difficulties faced by illegal immigrants with meticulous specificity.
