Susie Yang’s wonderful debut novel, White Ivy, is literary fiction rather than category romance, but the author uses romance the way Jonathan Lethem or Ling Ma use science fiction and horror: as inspiration, as a theme ripe for variation, as a counterpart to argue with and as a lover to court. White Ivy's final, bleak wedding isn’t so much a parody of romance as an embrace of its sublimated, hidden darknesses — dappled, as Yang writes, 'like a sunlit path lined with flowers and green things' ... The genius of White Ivy is that each plot point of the romance is fulfilled but also undercut by a traumatic pratfall, described in language as bright and scarring as a wound ... White Ivy is in many ways a cold, clinical book. Yang puts Ivy on the operating table and exposes her weaknesses, her foolishness, her self-loathing and her broken emotional and moral compass. But just as romance has to understand the potential for sadness, the resolutely anti-romantic Yang knows you need a dollop of romance if you want to break your readers’ hearts.
Yang excels at drawing sharp characters, making excruciating observations about class, family, and social norms, and painting the losses of migration and struggles Asians and other immigrants face in America. The plot, at times thriller-paced, makes it an easy page-turner, but the cutting prose movingly portrays many layers of tribulation and traumas, and marks Yang as a voice to watch ... On the surface this book is about Ivy’s drama with men, but its emotional power lies in a more interior struggle, masterly constructed by Yang. Throughout, we inhabit Ivy’s hopes of being successful and yet feel distanced enough to criticize them ... We never know if Ivy becomes the person we sense she was meant to be. The plot, so well-paced for most of the book, ends with sudden developments that feel contrived. But it does hold out a redeeming ember of that promise.
... Ivy’s fall feels lurid, like watching a reality-show train wreck spiral from one bad decision to the next ... The publisher bills White Ivy as a debut that 'turns the immigrant novel on its head,' but it’s unclear how the Lins’s immigration status seeds Ivy’s obsession with the Speyers ... While the title seems to allude to Ivy coveting Whiteness, neither she nor any of the characters seem to register the racial or gendered implications of their actions ... Even in the absence of more incisive social commentary, White Ivy is still a highly entertaining, well-plotted character study about a young woman whose obsession with the shallow signifiers of success gets her in too deep.
... propulsive ... more than plot twists and love triangles. It’s also an astute chronicle of cultures, gender dynamics and the complicated business of self-creation in America ... While the story of immigrant children straddling the two cultures to which they belong is well-trod territory, Yang manages to avoid any cliches with wonderfully precise writing and by creating in Ivy a deeply flawed character we aren’t sure we should root for at all ... Although the book is nearly addictive in its readability from the beginning, it’s in the unfolding of Ivy’s adult life that the story really stretches into something dark and thriller-like ... a rare thing: an insightful and keen observation of our culture and psychology cloaked in a plot that keeps you up past your bedtime.
Yang’s characters seem flawed and unlikeable at first, but she gives each if not redeeming qualities, then at least a raison d’être. The story takes numerous twists and turns along the way. Writers like Philip Roth have written similar stories of Jewish characters trying to fit into old money America. Susie Yang’s casting of an East Asian, warts and all, in this role is yet another illustration of how far America has come. The fact that this story can still be written is an indication of how far it still needs to go.
There's nothing better than a novel with an unpredictable plot. And White Ivy, Susie Yang's debut novel out this week, is exactly that ... keeps readers on their toes the entire way ... Just how far Ivy is willing to go to get what she wants may seem unsavory, but Yang's expert character development leads the reader to grapple with Ivy's choices and morality just as much as she does as Ivy pursues the aspirational life she crafted during adolescence.
The term 'unlikable' has become a catchall in conversations about a certain type of female character. It’s been used as a pejorative, but also as a challenge: Books declare that they’re going to accomplish something complicated and exciting by daring to present a female character who is layered, flawed, sometimes dangerous. Susie Yang’s White Ivy asserts itself early as a novel invested in building its main character in this vein. 'Ivy Lin was a thief but you would never know it to look at her,' the first sentence declares ... This sounds like a thrilling concept, but Ivy’s thievery is largely irrelevant to the story’s first 200 pages ... White Ivy is chock-full of compelling, exciting ideas. What it does not quite do is give the reader access to the experiences that might portray those ideas effectively in the context of a narrative. We’re not given the particular opportunity that fiction can make space for to reconsider them anew.
Rather than a traditional thriller, White Ivy is a slow-burning, intricate psychological character study and coming-of-age story full of family secrets and foreboding ... Despite the book’s inevitable ending, Yang allows her main character ambiguity. Ivy is strangely, uncomfortably relatable and ultimately unknowable. Her transgressions are mostly minor, yet her sometimes vicious inner monologue shows that she has the capacity for far harsher misdeeds. Perhaps that is the point—that the dividing line between ordinary wrongs and acts of true evil is razor thin. So when signs start to suggest that something very bad is about to happen, the violent act is all the more jarring ... Ivy brings to mind other desperate, liminal characters, such as Patricia Highsmith’s Tom Ripley. Readers will find a lot to appreciate in this sharply observed psychological thriller.
... suspenseful ... How do we feel about detestable protagonists? Such a structure certainly demands tolerance from a reader and some appreciation for its departure from what we’ve been raised on—characters who transition over the course of a novel and in so doing deliver a universal message of hope or possibility ... the jacket copy describes the novel as one that offers 'sharp insights into the immigrant experience.' That statement is pure marketing and potentially exploitive. Ivy Lin is a very complex individual as are the members of her family. One would hate to think that Susie Yang wrote Ivy Lin’s character or the Lin family in general to be representative of Chinese Americans. If that is the case, it paints an extremely negative and troubling picture ... for a story primarily set in Boston and fictitious towns surrounding the city, it fails to offer authentic details. In fact, there are several erroneous details, creating lapses in credibility that trip up the reader and diminish her eagerness to go along with the narrator on a journey that already demands she withhold judgement on Ivy Lin’s character ... While Yang writes well and employs fine use of metaphor, occasional poor grammar and word choice threaten to startle the reader from the fictive dream she is working hard to establish ... The early chapters of this novel are enjoyable...The second half of the novel, however, is where plot twists enter around the superficially and simplistically wrought Speyer family and the story succumbs to a downward spiral of baseness ... entertaining insofar as it is extremely original. The conclusion left this reader without a sense of hope, depressed over an ending that rewards self-centered opportunism.
Susie Yang’s debut White Ivy is focused around issues of identity, belonging, and the inherent anxieties that accompany those who simultaneously seek to conform and hide ... While White Ivy succeeds in making us uncomfortable, Yang is very careful about the political undercurrents of the novel like Ivy’s internalized racism or the kind of stereotypes that are placed on Asian Americans. Careful but not silent—she teases these discussions by placing them in very subtle spaces like when Ivy’s mother—Nan—claims they are different from Roux’s family because 'Baba has a master’s degree'. But the novel never feels instructive or moralistic. It does not seek to console. Its characters do not concern themselves with being good ... Yang takes a character who is a confessed thief from the first page, and etches her with qualities that turn her into a complex, layered, and unpredictable character.
What begins as a story of a young woman's struggles to assimilate quickly becomes a much darker tale of love, lies, and obsession, in which there are no boundaries to finding the fulfillment of one's own dreams. Yang's skill in creating surprising, even shocking plot twists will leave readers breathless.
White Ivy has it all—it’s a coming of age story, a love triangle rich in complications of race and class, and though it offers the pleasures of a literary novel such as complex characters and interesting writing, it also has the attractions of a psychological thriller: jaw-dropping plot twists and an unpredictable ending ... Yang has many more surprises...for both Ivy and the reader in this sharply observed and boldly imagined novel.
In her smart and provocative debut novel, White Ivy, Susie Yang explores the subject of privilege through the character of Ivy Lin, a second-generation Chinese-American desperate to cash in on the great American dream. Desperate is a word that suits the manipulative and enterprising Ivy, whose coming-of-age story in the Boston suburbs proves a multifaceted, riveting read ... If the path of true love never runs smoothly, in White Ivy it is a rickety old bridge with missing steps thousands of feet over a dusty canyon. Yang is excellent at pacing and surprises, which leave the reader guessing and conflicted when it comes to the romantic decision-making. This is Austen mixed with the hyperreal sharpness of Donna Tartt.
White Ivy is an enthralling, thrill of a book. It is fascinating to spend time inside Ivy’s mind, unique and unapologetic in its bold (and often bad) decisions. A story of many cultures both clashing and converging, White Ivy’s many twists and turns will surprise you until the very last page.
Yang’s dark, spellbinding debut gives insight into the immigrant experience and life in the upper class, challenging the stereotypes and perceptions associated with both. The surprising twists, elegant prose, and complex characters in this coming-of-age story make this a captivating read.
The intelligent, yearning, broken, and deeply insecure Ivy will enthrall readers, and Yang’s beautifully written novel ably mines the complexities of class and privilege. A sophisticated and darkly glittering gem of a debut.
... [an] excellent debut ... In Ivy, Yang has created an ambitious and sharp yet believably flawed heroine who will win over any reader, and the accomplished plot is layered and full of revelations. This is a beguiling and shattering coming-of-age story.
