Unfortunately, I have not been able to read and review this book.

After losing and replacing my broken Kindle and getting a new phone I was unable to download the title again for review as it was no longer available on Netgalley.

I’m really sorry about this and hope that it won’t affect you allowing me to read and review your titles in the future.

Thank you so much for giving me this opportunity.
Natalie.

This had some good and griping moments but I didn't fully connect with a story. I could say why others would like it but the slow burn i was getting from it was way too slow for me.

I’m a bit torn by this book. On one hand it was really interesting, and actually deeply moving to consider the trials that both Polly and Deming had to go through. We say it’s a free world, but the reality is that it’s only free to some.

On the other hand, I felt a bit disconnected from the characters, particularly Daniel. Maybe it’s because his segments were written in the third person, but I found it hard to connect with him, and kind of found him dislikable. This didn’t ruin the book for me, but I think it made me less invested in the outcome.

Overall, I’d say it is a pretty good novel, and would definitely recommend to fans of Harmless Like You.

This is a quietly powerful book about identity and acceptance. At first, I struggled a bit to get into this. The pace is fairly slow and I was probably not in the right frame of mind to fully appreciate the depth of this book when I started it. I debated with myself whether I should just DNF, but then felt drawn back into the story and I am truly glad I stuck with it until the end.

I can in all honesty say that for most (if not all) the book, I profoundly disliked Deming/Daniel. He is a difficult character to accept, but at the same time he is a difficult character to relate to, in light of his experiences and profound suffering. Moving along with him, it slowly becomes clearer and clearer that Deming is essentially a lost child, suffering the loss of his mother and of his own identity. No matter how many years have passed, he cannot accept his situation, but even more so, he cannot accept this new persona that was imposed on him by his adoptive parents.

Polly's disappearance hangs as a permanent shadow of Deming's life, hurtful as it is incomprehensible. When we readers, are finally made aware of the truth behind it, it is tinted with the quiet pain of those who are used to seeing things go differently from what they had hoped. Through the struggle and long-lasting pain of Polly and Deming, this book provides a striking commentary of modern society, and the human impact of immigration and integration policies.

Extremely delicate in its weaving of the tale and in its social commentary, The Leavers brings to light the reality of what it means to be foreign, to be different in a society that values appearance and homogeneity above all else; it explores the struggle to rebuild your life from scratch without losing sight of where you come from and who you are; and above all else, it doesn't shy away from the pain and suffering of losing those dearest to you and what it means to never lose hope.

Lisa Ko’s sensational debut novel about migration, deportation and contested citizenship, is the story of a boy abandoned in the US by his Chinese mother, and the dark, devastating truth behind it.

Ko's novel seems timely given recent events in the US and also timeless, stories of migration are as old as civilisation. Highly recommended.

Really wanted to be able to review this book but it didn't download properly and then had expired when I tried a couple of days later. Must only have been available briefly. I will be rushing out to buy it when I can as it sounds brilliant and I have read great reviews.

The story moves back and forth in time as we discover how Polly came to leave China, her fight for a place in America when she has no legal status, and how she came to be without her son.

The Leavers was not an easy read. But it is a beautifully written book. Lisa Ko has really given us a story packed with detail, history and personality.

Deming Guo is Eleven years old when his Mother Polly disappears seemingly into thin air. An illegal Chinese immigrant, Polly has been preoccupied for weeks, concerned with trying to find a new job and make a better life for her, Deming and her boyfriend Leon.

It is a day like any other when Polly goes off to her job as a nail technician at a nearby Salon to their home in the New Year Bronx. When she doesn’t return that afternoon, Deming believes that she has gone to Florida to make preparations for their new life there and will send for him and Leon when everything is ready.

As the days turn into weeks, and the weeks turn into months, Deming realised that his Mother isn’t returning. Leon and his sister Vivian face a difficult decision about Deming’s future and he is eventually put up for adoption.

At first he is sent to Peter and Kay Wilkinson as a foster child before becoming their son, Daniel Wilkinson after a lengthy process. Daniel settles into the small town life, after realising that he won’t return to New York anytime soon.

As an adult, although Daniel is grateful for the life and love that his parents have given him, part of him still belongs in New York, and the other part is still a little boy desperate to what happened to his birth Mother and why she abandoned him.

Meanwhile Polly is in China, wondering what happened to the Son that she had no choice but to leave behind. Their paths will eventually cross, but the journey there is not a smooth one.

The Leavers is a beautifully written account of the struggles of language barriers, immigration laws and ethnic minorities in the community.

This is a beautiful sad story of a young Chinese boy named Deming who’s mother disappears and his world is turned upside down when he is adopted by two wealthy white college professors. They give him a ‘more American name’ in the form of Daniel Wilkinson. The book follows Deming as he attempts to adjust to this new life as well as understand the mother that abandoned him.

This is a really powerful and moving story and one that I think is really important. It’s easy to see why this quiet tale has won so many awards because they are very well deserved. The writing is beautiful and really explores what it means to belong as well as issues around race and identity. I found myself completely absorbed in this book and it is an absolutely stunning debut novel.

This timely book is very character driven, focusing on the relationships between the characters and how you identify yourself based on your family and those around you. It explores different time periods in Deming’s life – his time with his mother before she left, his adjustment to life as the son of Peter and Kay as well as more recently as a struggling student with a gambling problem. It is at times heartbreaking but I definitely think this is a book everyone should take the time to read. If you’re looking for a strong emotional tale, this is definitely the kind of book you’re looking for.

It took me quite a while to get into this book, because I sometimes struggle with stories where nothing's going right for anyone and everything seems very bleak and unfair, and The Leavers is, for much of the book, one of those stories. But I'm so glad I stuck with it, as it ended up being an incredibly satisfying read, and something else I can recommend to my mum (which is a huge compliment, as she's very picky!)!

The stories of Deming (later Daniel) and his mother, Polly (Peilan), are told in tandem. The early chapters of Deming's life are difficult, but he feels loved and safe, living with his mother, her partner, his sister, and her child. But when she fails to come home, he ends up in the care system before being adopted. We don't learn until later in the book what has happened to Polly, but we read about her childhood in rural China, and her life once she moves into the city and tries to find a way to get out to America. The contrast between their childhoods is stark, but there are similarities as well, which are all the more poignant as their adult lives take such different directions.

There's an incredible sense of isolation throughout the book. Even when Deming and Polly are spending time with others, they feel separate, held apart from the world. Part of this is because of their personal experiences, and part is due to the structural impediments they face, both in the US and in China. Particularly in Deming's experience as a person of colour growing up in a largely white area, with well-meaning but ultimately quite harmful adoptive parents, I really felt his isolation, his attempts to first distance himself from his upbringing and then embrace it. As someone who is considering adoption in the future, it certainly brings home the problems that can be present in inter-racial adoption, and what adoptive parents need to be aware of when raising children from different cultures.

The book is brilliantly paced, and each section resolves some questions whilst asking new ones and creating new connections. Much of the book is from the perspective of young Deming and young Polly, and Ko writes wonderfully from that child's point of view. Reading those sections as an adult is sometimes heartbreaking, because you can see that the child has been lied to or that they've misunderstood something key about the world, and you know that the resolution of that issue will inevitably cause more pain. I also found that I was slightly surprised by the ending of the book, but in a good way, as Ko shows how resilient people can be, and how unexpected ways forward can be found even in difficult situations.

The Leavers was not, for me anyway, an easy read. The characters did things that frustrated me, sometimes out of choice and sometimes out of necessity, and their lives were almost never easy. But it is a beautifully written book which tells the kind of story that is often forgotten. I would highly, highly recommend it.

The Leavers is a timely exploration of the lives of immigrants in the US. Lisa Ko uses her debut novel to expose the exploitation of the most desperate people, humanising a group of society which have been ostracised by press and politics consistently in the recent past.

I'm going to avoid giving any spoilers, but what I can tell you is that Ko's writing is elegant, captivating and utterly enjoyable. Despite the tough subject matter at hand, the story is beautiful, and despite its length - and the fact that it's different to anything I've ever read before - I found myself being sucked in, and I read it in just a couple of sittings. 

The Leavers is emotionally absorbing: although I easily predicted what had happened to Polly, I couldn't stop myself from eagerly turning the pages, desperate to find out where Deming/Daniel would end up and whether he would ever be reunited with his mother.

If you're hoping to find a new author writing about difficult subjects with ease and sensitivity, look no further. It'll be interesting to see what Lisa Ko writes next: with such a brilliantly received debut novel, it'll be hard to top the success she's achieved with The Leavers.

The leavers by Lisa Ko is ultimately a story of love, loss and finding yourself when you feel that you don’t fit in.

At ten-years-old, Deming Guo has already had an eventful life. His mother Peilan (Polly) Guo was an immigrant from China to the USA, arriving whilst pregnant with Deming. Unable to support him he was sent to live with her father back in China until the age of six when his Grandfather died. He then returned to New York to live with his mum, her boyfriend Leon, Leon’s sister Vivian and her son Michael.

One afternoon Polly goes out to work and never returns home. Soon afterwards Leon takes off to China, leaving Deming in the care of his sister. When that becomes too much for her, she goes to the authorities where Deming is put into care and eventually adopted by white, rich couple Kay and Peter who are both professors.

He is brought up as an American and even his Chinese name is changed from Deming Guo to Daniel Wilkerson. This leaves Deming/Daniel growing up with mixed emotions. He never feels that he fits in anywhere and always feels at a loss. He lost his mum and then he lost his Chinese heritage.

Told from alternative viewpoints, from Peilan/Polly and Deming/Daniel, and back and forth in time. We follow Deming/Daniel as he grows up from a young boy into a man surrounded by mystery, and a hole in his heart that occurred the day his mother left. He has always wanted to know what happened to her, but growing up no-one knew. He also lost his Chinese heritage being brought up by white, rich family who wanted him to be just like other young American boys.

This is a tale of one young man trying to find himself, not only on the inside but the outside too. Who is Deming/Daniel really?

The book is exceptionally thought-provoking and had me interested in the lives of Peilan and Deming. I was intrigued as to where Lisa Ko was going to take her story.

The plot is emotional and all the characters had lots of depth to them. I enjoyed spending time and getting to know them all. I was rooting for Deming, this young lad who had been through so much in his life, I’m not surprised he was mixed up.

The book is touching and so poignant. It is powerful and original too. All the little details are expertly woven together to make this a wonderful novel. It certainly made me stop and think about life.

One word review: Imperative

Rambling review: I have so many feelings about this book. Fundamentally, this is a story about the duality of immigrant life.

It was a welcome and much needed reminder that you should always, continuously, educate yourself about your privilege. Reading this book showed me how naive I was about the immigration, detention and deportation process. I was genuinely confused for the majority of the book as to why Peilan didn’t simply call to say she had been deported. The fact there would be a detention centre didn’t cross my mind. The fact she would be at that detention centre for indefinite number of months certainly didn’t cross my mind. The fact that she wouldn’t have her personal phone directory with her (given the technology of today, we rarely need to memorise a number) didn’t cross my mind. The fact that after Vivian had moved home she wouldn’t have any place in which to start looking didn’t cross my mind. Worse, each of these revelations came in turn. At each point in which Peilan’s story developed, I was surprised and embarrassed by the assumptions I had made. I didn’t simply realise my privilege immediately – my privilege was so deep rooted that I failed to work the story to it’s logical conclusion and needed to have it spelled out to me.

Initially, I found it a little hard to follow. If I can understand the character’s relationships early in a novel, it means I can immerse myself easier and quicker. I think it’s because I understand the character and their position that bit quicker? Whereas it is very difficult to draw the familial ties between these characters. That is purposeful though, as it shows the interconnected and interdependent communities which immigrants build (and are forced to build). Throughout the novel, Ko’s deftly illustrates the precarious position of immigrants and the networks they have to rely upon (e.g. connections, not police) out of necessity.

I found none of the a characters were likeable; Deming especially grated me. At no point did he do anything for himself, he had very little drive and I actually found him a little hypocritical? In the opening pages of Daniel’s first chapter, he says he “wouldn’t quit or disappear”. Is there not a great irony that this is said minutes after he walked off stage during the middle of a set? He wildly swings with his opinions and actions, for example he mentions Michael’s email to Roland not 5 pages after saying he “couldn’t do it to his parents”. Oh, but Peter?! He was the WORST. Fostering is about “trying [parenting] on for size”? Reprimanding young Deming when he speaks anything other than English. Urgh.

Putting aside my own experience with my privilege reading this book, there are lots of other red flags (or maybe you’d call them Easter eggs, given the likely audience of this novel?) for white privilege. My favourites were the references to culture – for the adoptive parents, culture is anything which isn’t white culture. White culture, by de facto, is perceived as neutral, a palate cleanser. This is almost laughable, because it is so true for so many you either have to laugh or cry.

Whilst this isn’t my favourite book (nor even my favourite book about immigration – Pachinko holds that spotlight), this is such an important book. Please, read and reflect.

P.S. Excellent, excellent cover!

Star rating: 4.5!

Year published: 2018 (in the UK! It was released earlier in America)

Publishing house: Little Brown

Amazon Summary: One morning, Deming Guo’s mother, an undocumented Chinese immigrant named Polly, goes to her job at the nail salon and never comes home. No one can find any trace of her. With his mother gone, eleven-year-old Deming is left with no one to care for him. He is eventually adopted by two white college professors who move him from the Bronx to a small town upstate. They rename him Daniel Wilkinson in their efforts to make him over into their version of an “all-American boy.” But far away from all he’s ever known, Daniel struggles to reconcile his new life with his mother’s disappearance and the memories of the family and community he left behind. Set in New York and China, The Leavers is a vivid and moving examination of borders and belonging. It’s the story of how one boy comes into his own when everything he’s loved has been taken away and how a mother learns to live with the mistakes of her past.

The Leavers is a book that intricately deals with the topics of identity and belonging. After his mother disappears, Deming Guo is adopted by Kay and Peter, a well-meaning couple of white academics who do all they can to encourage him to assimilate into white, suburban life - they change his name to Daniel Wilkinson, force him to drink the milk that gives him stomach aches and discourage him from speaking the language he shared with his mother.
But Deming is not a clean slate. It is not possible to wipe all that he is away, and replace it with a new version that shares no similarities with the old. He ends up being effectively torn in half by these two warring identities and soon comes to view them as two different people: Daniel, the person who he is now, and Deming, who left with his mother.
It is a deeply emotional tale, with a definite air of quiet sadness to nearly every scene. Deming, and in later scenes his mother Polly, feel human and I suppose that only adds to emotional impact of The Leavers; their tale is not unique and one which is undoubtedly experienced by illegal immigrants and their children every single day.
And I cried. I did not think I was going to, but I did.
I wanted to cuddle little Deming, both as a child and an adult. For a large portion of his life, he'd been fighting a constant war within himself and despite the fact that he had Kay, Peter and a group of friends around him, he seemed to lack a working and effective support-system.
Instead from just focussing on Deming, The Leavers also goes back in time to weave his story in with his mother's. Through Polly, Lisa Ko portrays a realistically heartbreaking picture of the lives of illegal immigrants in America, the ones who leave their homes after hearing stories of better lives and end up being repeatedly taken advantage of and treated so damn cruelly.
As tensions rise in the States thanks to their new arsehole of a President, The Leavers becomes a more relevant novel now than ever. It is important book for people to read that have lost sight of the fact that these people are, in fact, just that. I suppose that it is easy with the constant news stories for people to lose a little bit of perspective and empathy, and for that reason, The Leavers is an incredibly important read that absolutely everyone needs to read.

This book tells the story of 11 year old Deming Guo who lives with his mother, Polly Guo, in New York, in an apartment they share with Polly’s boyfriend Leon, his sister and his nephew, Michael. His life is turned upside down when Polly doesn’t come home from work one day. They wait for days, weeks, hoping she’d return but she doesn’t. No longer having the financial means to raise him, Vivian – Leon’s sister – gives him up for fostering. After being separated from his mother, he is then separated from the only people that came close to being his family.

The story jumps 10 years into the future and we witness Deming – now, Daniel Wilkinson – navigate his young adult life. Peter and Kay, his adoptive parents, are college professors and want him to follow in their footsteps. Daniel struggles with wanting to please them whilst also wanting to make and play his own music. From early on in the novel, we can see his affinity to music, how he correlates music to different feelings and colours. However, he doesn’t trust himself enough to make a choice and constantly goes back and forth between the two. Who should he be? Who does he want to be? We see him wrestle with these questions throughout the book, the theme of identity an ever-present thread binding the novel together.

The book also tells us how Polly hadn’t always been Polly. Growing up in China, she had once been Peilan Guo. Propelled by wanting much more for herself than what her father could provide her, and needing to hide her unexpected pregnancy, she migrated to US as an undocumented immigrant. Not being able to afford to put her child in care, she was forced to take him with her everyday to work for long hours to pay off thousands of dollar of debt that allowed her to make the journey to America. We learn about Polly’s upbringing in rural China all the way up to the events of the day she was ripped apart from her son. It isn’t difficult to predict what happened, however, the unravelling of it, the experience being told by her addressing her son directly in second person, made it that much more heart-wrenching to read.

There is a quiet sadness that runs throughout the novel, and I appreciate that Ko kept the feeling of the story authentic and didn’t put the characters through any unrealistic scenarios to gain the reader’s pity; we see them navigate their suffering as it is, which made it real and hard-hitting. Both Polly and Daniel were extremely well-developed characters, and following their story since childhood helped with understanding the people they became later on in the story.

The novel does so much to educate on the immigrant experience, especially that of an illegal one in America. It is an eye-opening story that sheds light on the unfair treatment of illegal immigrants and how they are robbed of their rights if caught. Nowadays, they have become nothing more than statistics to most people. The Leavers turns those numbers into names, into real people with real lives and dreams that are no less important than anyone else’s. It shows the courage it takes to leave a familiar place behind in search for something better. It shows the resilience it takes to build a new life somewhere else.

Aside from immigration being a prominent theme, it is a deeply moving story of love and family and belonging. We’re shown how strong the love between a mother and her child is, and what being separated can do to them. That is something I believe everyone will be able to empathise with.

I can’t imagine reading this book and not being affected by it. It is an important and timely debut that I think everyone needs to read.

Thanks to Little Brown UK for providing me an ARC copy of this book and for inviting me to participate in the blog tour on the occasion of the UK book’s launch.
The Leavers comes highly recommended (winner of the PEN/Bellwether Prize for Socially Engaged Fiction) and it feels particularly relevant to the historical times we live in. The plight of emigrants, issues of ethnic and national identity, transnational adoptions, alternative family structures and mother and son relationships. There is plenty of talk and official discourses about laws, building walls, and placing the blame on Others for the problems of a country these days, but this is nothing new. As I read the book, I could not help but think that the situation is a cyclical one, and perhaps the countries the immigrants come from, go to, or their circumstances change over time, but people keep moving. Sometimes they are met with open arms and others, not so much.
This novel is divided into four parts, and it is narrated by two characters. Peilan (Polly) is a young Chinese woman who initially leaves her fishing village for the city (to have access to better opportunities) and eventually takes on huge debt to move to America, already pregnant. She narrates her story in different time-frames (she recalls past events back in China, the difficult time when she had the baby and could not work in New York, her hard decision to send her child to live with her father in China, and the boy’s return after her father’s death), in the first person, first in America, and later, in present-day China. Deming (Daniel), her son, is born in America, shipped back to China, then back to America, and eventually ends up being adopted by a white American family. His story is told in the third person, and we follow him from age 11 (and some earlier memories) all the way to his early twenties. This is the story of two character’s growth, their struggle to discover (or rediscover) who they are and to make sense of their complex history.
The book is beautifully written, with enthralling descriptions of places, sounds, and emotions. If water and nature are particularly significant for Peilan, music makes life meaningful for Daniel and gives him an identity beyond nation and ethnic origin. Like our memories, the book is contemplative and meandering, and the thoughts of both characters reflect well how our minds work, as a smell, a sound, or a glimpsed figure can conjure up an image or a flood of emotions linked to a particular moment in time.
There is a mystery at the centre of the story. Polly leaves her son and nobody knows why. The alternating points of view put the readers in both roles and make us feel lost and abandoned on the one side, and on the other feel puzzled, as we clearly see that Polly loves her son, although she might have felt desperate and done extreme things at times. The explanation, when it eventually comes, is heart-wrenching and particularly poignant in view of some of the policies being enforced and implemented by some countries. Although it is not a traditional mystery novel, and it does not lose its power even if the readers get a clear idea of what had happened, I will try and avoid spoilers.
Both characters feel real, understandable and easy to empathise with, although not necessarily always likeable or immediately sympathetic. Deming is no star pupil, studious and well-behaved, and he makes many mistakes and has a talent for doing the wrong thing and upsetting almost everybody around him. Polly keeps her emotions under wraps; she works hard and puts up with incredibly hard situations until she suddenly does something that comes as a big surprise to everyone who knows her. They are not the perfect Norman Rockwell family by any stretch of the imagination, but that is what makes them more poignant and gives the novels its strength. It is easy to accept and sympathise with those we like and we feel are exceptional cases, but every case is unique and exceptional. The secondary characters are well-drawn and not simple fillers for the main story, their circumstances and personalities are interesting and believable, and the subject of the Deming’s adoption is afforded the nuance and complexity it deserves. The book deals with those issues from a personal perspective, but it is impossible to read it and not think about the effect that policies and politics have on the lives of so many people.
I highlighted many fragments of the book and it is difficult to select some that don’t reveal much of the plot, but I will try.
Instead of friends, Kay and Peter had books they read in bed at night. (Kay and Peter are Daniel’s adoptive parents).
He counted the heartbeats during that little catch between songs, savoring the delicious itch as the needle dropped and the melody snuck its toe out from behind a curtain.
A record was to be treasured, its circle scratches a mysterious language, a furtive tattoo.
“And that is it?” you said. “You forgot me?” “I didn’t forget. I just survived.”
Everyone had stories they told themselves to get through the days.
This novel reminded me of two of the books nominated for the Booker Prize I read last year, one of the finalists, Exist West by Mohsin Hamid (which explores emigration in a very novel way), and the other one Home Fire by Kamila Shamsie (which also deals with identity and displacement, but it was the character of the brother and his descriptions of music that brought the book to my mind). I recommend it to readers who enjoyed those two books, and also readers interested in memory, identity, emigration, adoption (especially across ethnic and national boundaries) or anybody keen to discover a new writer who can paint images, emotions, and sounds with her words.

This was a great read, really insightful, I imagine unbelievably well researched and felt very real.

The story of Polly and Deming. Polly, a teenager from China is desperate to escape the life of poverty she knows with her widowed father in a poor Chinese province. As women are increasingly able to earn for their families she leaves for the city and a job in a factory. Unexpectedly pregnant she makes the huge move of travelling to America to earn enough money to send money to her father and better her own life. But life in America for an illegal immigrant is not that straight forward and she and Dening are separated. One day she just doesn’t come home. This is the story of how Deming grows up wi5out her, not knowing what happened to her and the impact it has on his life.

I absolutely adored this book. I had been wanting to read The Leavers for some time now and had fallen in love with how beautiful this book was. My poor heart went out to Deming - his struggles, readjusting to life, struggling to understand where he fits in. It was heartbreaking but also the type of book the world needs right now given the hostility around immigration.

This novel follows Deming Guo, a young Chinese-American boy who is abandoned by his mother when he's very young and is subsequently adopted by a more affluent white family. It discusses family, grief, diaspora and the strange purgatory between being a teenager and being an adult. But, unfortunately, the writing just fell sort of flat for me. I wasn't interested in the story, purely because the central event- Deming's mother disappearing- happens within the first 20 pages. The rest of the novel flits between his childhood to his reinvention of himself as 'Daniel'. There was nothing hooking me into the narrative. Perhaps it is one of those books where nothing happens but the writing is just enough that we want to cling onto it and keep reading. Unfortunately, those aren't really the novels that I enjoy. Sometimes there are just books that you can't gel with, for whatever reason, and that is this one. Perhaps someone with alternative tastes would enjoy it. The writing was definitely interesting and in some cases, very beautiful, but it wasn't enough to keep me connected.

I really enjoyed this - when I first began, I was doubtful that it’s length could keep me interested, but the story was so gradually developed and engaging that I was hooked. The book follows the life of protagonist Delong/Daniel from childhood through to adulthood, entwining his mother’s story throughout, exploring the issues surrounding immigration and clashes when two cultures meet. Definitely worth a read.