This book has an interesting structure and is written so well.
This is largely character driven but I failed to connect with the characters so this spoilt my enjoyment

This book sounded really interesting because of time period. It was ultimately disappointing, and shallow. The author’s obsession with the beauty of the protagonist’s mother, Su Lan, and the supposed ugliness of one of the narrators, Zhu Wen, comes across as mildly ridiculous. The book is meant to be a portrait of an ambitious woman and how her dreams come to nothing, but you don’t get a sense of her personality at all, apart from her beauty ( it bears repeating, for the number of times the author draws your attention to it), and her genius-at absolutely everything she sets her hand to! The events of the book are set into motion by Liya, an American, wants to find out about her distant, mysterious mother, Su Lan, a Chinese woman who migrated to America with her child. Liya lands up in Beijing to get some insights into who her mother was, hopefully from people who knew her. The book held my attention for the most part while I was reading it, entirely because of the narration of Zhu Wen, one of Su Lan’s neighbours in their longtang in Beijing. Her account of how she and her husband made it through the Cultural revolution, and the upheavals that followed, are genuinely well-written ( though again, her constant descriptions of her supposed ugliness are jarring-surely nobody spends so much time of their time pondering how awful they look? ). The other characters are not as well-etched-Liya has no personality at all, and as I’ve noticed in a lot of books written by women over the last 6 years, details about how the characters are able to afford any of their quite expensive-seeming, drifter lifestyle, are completely glossed over. This book could have been about women trying to make it in a patriarchal system where the odds are stacked against them, but it devolves into self-indulgent nonsense a bit too often. There’s particularly a section at the end that’s practically fantasy, when Liya’s passport and documents get stolen and one is supposed to believe that she’ll easily manage the loss of that, in a country with systems as opaquely bureaucratic as China. While I was reading the book, it was a 3 star read, but the more I think about how ultimately shallow it was, it’s a 1 star read. I won’t be reading this author anymore. I’ll stick to Ma Jian for intelligent, profound , moving narratives on regular people trying to make sense of cataclysmic events in China.

I really wanted to enjoy this but struggled to connect with both the storyline and the characters. It took me a few attempts to get through it finally but it just wasn't for me. Nothing wrong with the book itself, just not my cup of tea. Review not posted anywhere else.

It took me a while to get into this book but the more I persevered with it, the more I enjoyed it. I think the narrative distance and the almost dreamy quality of the writing made it hard to really engage with at first. I think I liked the ideas of the books more than the characters themselves because I never really felt like I got them. There were some interesting ideas about identity, education and time. This is a book to read and break down and think about, rather than a pacy page-turner with an interesting plot or character. Overall, I'm glad I finished the book.

little gods is a multi-gen story, focused on su lan & her daughter liya, set in the us & china, before and after Tiananmen square. i really liked this!! a fascinating look at how we present ourselves to different people, including our children. i thought the writing was great, the story was compelling (particularly towards the end) and it made me think, a lot, in a way that was a bit devastating, about how easy it is to disappear from our past and cast off our loved ones.

I'm loving this book so far. I will return to NetGalley and update this review once I have completed it!

A very thought provoking and sensitive novel about the reverberations of historical events on families and cultures. I loved the introspective narratives and the way it was split between the perspectives of those whose lives touched Su Lan's. It was close and yet epic in scale and raised some interesting questions about memory, history, and familial bonds.

My only criticism is that I found it hard to follow in parts but overall really enjoyed it.

Seeing the comparisons to Home Fire by Kamila Shamsie, which I really enjoyed, made me want to pick this up and try it out but to be honest they felt like very different books to me! I was interested by the premise of a daughter's journey back to the place where she originally comes from, and exploring the mother-daughter relationship. However, I don't feel as though we get the full experience of this, as the perspective of the book is not written solely from hers. I also agree with what I've seen from other reviewers that there felt like an emotional distance from the reader and the characters, which may work for some, but I found it to be hard to engage with the book in general because of this. The characters felt stilted and I felt the story could have been much more human and relatable if portrayed differently. It was an interesting concept but I feel as though the execution of it fell flat for me, unfortunately.

I love reading books that expose me to a piece of history or a piece of the world that I am not that familiar with. This book hit both those things, and it was definitely well done. Sometimes it leaned a bit too much to the dramatic side for me personally, but that's a matter of taste.

I found this book so heartbreaking and yet such a good read. Before reading this book I sadly had never heard of this massacre other than that picture that everyone seems to know of the man standing in front of the tank and this book has inspired me to look deeper into this massacre and period in general.
A very poignant novel with poweful storytelling and images that will stay with me for a long time

The book begins with deaths, fragments, and a birth. Su Lan gave birth to Liya on the night of June 4, 1989 when the infamous political crackdown happened and countless were hurt or killed in the streets of Beijing. Since then, a deafening silence has been shrouded around Liya's provenance. It is not until Su Lan’s passing that the daughter realises the urge to break the silence by embarking on a journey from America to China with her late mother’s ashes so as to locate the whereabouts of her long-absent father as well as to learn more about her enigmatic mother’s past. Little does she know that what awaits her is a cruel, unavoidable revelation that forever changes her life.
***
Told through multiple points of view, Little Gods explores various universal yet culturally grounded subject matters. On estrangement and displacement. In the face of poverty, parental and societal expectations, characters often fail to realise their individuality, freedom, desires, as well as to search for meaning and purpose in life. Such a phenomenon not only leads to tension and conflicts in their daily lives, but also contributes to a deep, suffocating sense of helplessness, urgency to rebel or even act recklessly and/or cruelly, numerous doubts about how and why to love, and arduous reflections on ambition and choice. What comes after that is a series of estrangements between friends, lovers, family members, as well as self-displacement.
***
On playing God and its hopeless futility. In 1989, the Communist state was confronted by the greatest threat it has ever had since its formation. Everywhere across the country, citizens, who believed in the reformation of their nation, attempted a political movement. They were the “Little Gods” who saw the possibility of a new era. However, it proved to be beyond their control. As suggested in the story and other achieval resources, the movement has led to scarred bodies and souls who has been living with trauma experiences since then, not to mention the undocumented casualties and exiles of many. The result is a wounded nation that has lost its consciousness and never fails to sweep things under the carpet due to censorship and fear of authority. Crushing of one’s spirit, passion, and belief makes attempts to leave the dark past behind more difficult than ever, for to make sense of traumatic memories is simply out of question. That explains Su Lan’s indifference towards politics and fixation on physics, which she perceives to be the key to understanding the working and meaning of time and space. She seems to believe that, as long as she manages to get to the bottom of it, she gets to find the truth of existence.
***
On identity and belonging. Little Gods is essentially a story about identity crisis and how to resolve it through science - which is believed to be the tool to open by and dismantle the Pandora’s box of human conditions - and language, which not only facilitates personal attainment, but also to connect and find coherence in inexplicability of life, i.e. relationship btw personal and politics, life and death, and most of all, love. It makes the book a unbelievably convincing meditation on the intersectionality of language, identity, knowledge, and love.
***
On intergenerational trauma, time, and space. Time and space as depicted in the story plays a vital literary role in exploring and dissecting various intergenerational impacts of trauma and hardships, which appear to be the implications of tumultuous history and poverty. In this transatlantic narrative that sets in past and present-day America and China, traumatic memories come back to haunt. Liya’s relationship with Su Lan appears to be fraught with silence, secrecy, and regrets; Liya’s inadequate comprehension of her mother culture and language. All this seems to pose a question that I believe to be the core to understanding the story: Would things have been different if different choices had been made? Or is it 冥冥之中 (written in the stars)? What if… What if...
***
Written in an effortless, crystal-clear, and undoubtedly atmospheric style, Meng Jin has created a hauntingly beautiful, erudite, and hopeful work that expounds a series of mind-boggling philosophical ideas that not only contributes to vivid characterisation along with a gamut of human emotion, but also destabilise, redefine immigrant literature, that is deemed an established, unchallenged canonical genre. The homecoming story seems to suggest that, instead of abandoning one's roots, one reclaims and embraces them, for it is where home is. Despite one’s complicated, reinvented identity, as well as tumultuous history and draconian measures of the authoritarian state, root never leaves. After all, home is there to stay.

This is a book that is expansive and at the same time intimate. It's an in depth look at the intricacies of relationships and mind against the backdrop of history.

Working in STEM myself, I absolutely love it when I read stories about fellow women in STEM as it's lovely to see that part of myself in a character. This was an incredibly ambitious debut that was interesting but may have tripped itself up with its uniqueness.

At the heart of little gods is Su Lan, a brilliant physicist who sadly dies, leaving her 17-year-old daughter Liya behind. Liya take Su Lan's ashes to China where she begins to learn about her mother's past and the secret that she had fought so hard to keep.

What was so interesting about this book was the writing style. Whilst, Su Lan is the main character, we never actually get her POV. Instead, her story and character are told through the words of others, which was such a unique way to tell a story. As different as it was, it did mean that we aren't truly able to form a connection with Su Lan and you feel quite distant from the story. Some people commented on the lack of quotation marks, but I must admit that this doesn't bother me massively. Unfortunately, the story didn't feel fully cohesive. Some parts worked and some fell apart at the seams a tad. I'd put this down to the inability to fully connect with the characters and their story. I ADORED the female STEM rep. The passages about how Su Lan had to battle against her male counterparts and had to adapt her work clothes in order to put herself on the same level as them really resonated with me. Fantastic rep – especially as she is in physics!

This may have not been everything that I was anticipating, but it was an exceptionally ambitious debut. An enjoyable read that the writing style won't be for everyone.

Many thanks to the author, publisher, and Netgalley for sending me a copy of this book in return for an honest review.

This novel begins the night of the Tianamen Square massacre, it follows a midwife's experience as a woman gives birth in a hospital in Beijing, amid rising chaos. The book then moves to the new mother's daughter, who returns years later, trying to understand her history and journey from that time. Tracing migrations and exploring time and space through the metaphor of physics, this book has haunting passages and poetic lines which stayed with me long after reading. It is a beautifully written, thought-provoking novel which I loved. Content warning for mention of thoughts of and attempted child sexual abuse from the perpetrator's point of view and unidentified mental health issues.

I sadly had to dnf this book as I honestly could not get into the story or find any attachment to the characters. I really wanted to like this one and I tried on numerous attempts to read it but ended up just feeling confused.

I have to admit that it is a slow starter but once I got into the story, it really became a page turner.

It’s a very moving story set between America and China, where a woman goes after the traces of her mother’s past life she knows next to nothing about. As much as it is her mother’s past, it is mainly her present and she needs answers.
This is a story about love, loss, migration and sense of belonging. Told from a few different perspectives, you really get a sense of the power of different narratives and the danger of a single story (as the great Nigerian writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie demonstrates in her TED talk).

I would recommend this book to other people because I believe it would resonate with many of us that belongs everywhere and nowhere at the same time.

Thanks to NetGalley for letting me read an advance copy in exchange for an honest review.

I liked Little Gods from the first page. Trying to explain it to a friend: a woman (a brilliant physicist, a mother) has died and you see her life through three narrators who knew her, or parts of her. There are other characters who met her and you see their perspective too. My friend asked: So this is the main character? I replied: she’s the subject of the novel.

If you have lost someone, grief is very strange. If you try to find out about them you will invariably find everyone around you knew a different person to the one you think you knew based on when/how they knew that person. Trying to understand Su Lan is like that and the journey is not a driving force despite the underlying pressure.

The story begins on the day Su Lan becomes a mother, it is also the day her husband walks out of the hospital, and the day a major protest is going on in Beijing. A nurse is also doing her job, on the maternity ward. This is characteristic of Little Gods and brilliant storytelling in the living of other lives in which Su Lan appears.

Meng Jin manages to make someone unknowable present in the same way the dislocation between rural and urban China/emigration to America and the attempt to build a life is harder to explain than mere facts, one after the other. This is a more literary novel, although the brutality of the past mentioned in the first section haunts the future it is never as stark.

The end? It reaches a conclusion in its own way having told the story it set out to tell. I was satisfied with this and I’m not sure how else it could have ended given the choices characters made and the reality both of themselves and the world they inhabited.

While I was reading I didn’t want to stop but I didn’t mind not picking it up for a day or two which is probably why it is a mid-4. Many thanks to NetGalley for the advance copy in exchange for an honest review.

This book was a DNF for me. I restarted the book 3 times. I really enjoyed the main concept of the book. But I did not like the writing style. I was confused a lot throughout what I read. I feel this book would have been better if it was written as a story instead of a letter format.

Fabulous story of a mother and daughter that travels across the worlds and how we survive in places we never really find us to belong in. That sense of displacement is apparent on every page.

Thank you to the author, Pushkin Press and NetGalley for an ARC in exchange for an honest review.

This book reveals, little by little, the story of Su Lan through the thoughts, musings and retellings of people who knew her: her daughter, her neighbour, her husband, and an old friend. The idea is wonderful, but I really struggled with how it was executed. I found the experimental style of writing immensely distracting. I was never really sure what was being communicated from each individual perspective, and the non-linear timeline didn't make this any easier. Some of the characters were very evocative, e.g. the neighbor, others much less so. The parts to do with quantum physics and theoretical physics went way over my head.