Author: Jamie Ford
Series: None
Publication Date: August 2, 2022
Publisher: Atria Books
Pages: 384
Obtained: publisher via NetGalley, BOTM
Genre: Literary Fiction
Rating: 5/5
Bottom Line: Complex story about what we carry with us through generations
Grab, Just get it at the library, or Remove from your TBR list? Grab
Summary: Dorothy Moy breaks her own heart for a living. As Washington’s former poet laureate, that’s how she describes channeling her dissociative episodes and mental health struggles into her art. But when her five-year-old daughter exhibits similar behavior and begins remembering things from the lives of their ancestors, Dorothy believes the past has truly come to haunt her. Fearing that her child is predestined to endure the same debilitating depression that has marked her own life, Dorothy seeks radical help. Through an experimental treatment designed to mitigate inherited trauma, Dorothy intimately connects with past generations of women in her family: Faye Moy, a nurse in China serving with the Flying Tigers; Zoe Moy, a student in England at a famous school with no rules; Lai King Moy, a girl quarantined in San Francisco during a plague epidemic; Greta Moy, a tech executive with a unique dating app; and Afong Moy, the first Chinese woman to set foot in America. As painful recollections affect her present life, Dorothy discovers that trauma isn’t the only thing she’s inherited. A stranger is searching for her in each time period. A stranger who’s loved her through all of her genetic memories. Dorothy endeavors to break the cycle of pain and abandonment, to finally find peace for her daughter, and gain the love that has long been waiting, knowing she may pay the ultimate price. ~amazon.com
Review: I have been a fan of Jamie Ford and his books since Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet but the complexity of this one knocks all his others off the shelf. I can’t imagine the research that went into understanding the historical parts, writing the future and epigenetics.
Mr. Ford tells the story of the Moy women through various trials over decades and centuries. How each of them inherited the history of the person before them in their present. Afong Moy, the first of the Moy women is a spectacle in the late 1800s as she's paraded around from city to city as being "The First Chinese Woman in America." Her heartache and pain transfer to the next generation and so forth and so on, until we get to Dorothy Moy. Dorothy is not a happy women, other than her daughter Annabelle, nothing much brings her joy. She has struggled with her mental health all her life and a new treatment looks promising to help her finally work through her issues.
We get flashbacks to the other Moy women: Lai-King, Faye, Zoe, Greta and a flashforward to Annabelle. Mr. Ford provides us with enough of their stories that make you want more but doesn't flush them all out because they would each be their own novella. What he did so well was visit each of them through Dorothy at the end of the book which I thought was brilliant.
The story of the Moy women is one of survival, loss, love and hope. It is how we carry the pain of the past into the present but hope for better in the future. There is a lot to unpack in this novel and it'll be a bit before I let these characters go. It would make a fantastic book club choice, so much to discuss.
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