From the New York Times bestselling author of White Ivy, a Read with Jenna pick, comes a woman's fresh start from her troubled past gets interrupted by a sister in crisis, in this sharply observed, deeply felt novel of fate and family.
The main thing you have to understand about me is that I’m the firstborn daughter of a Chinese family. We’re the people-pleasing, bossy, anxious little girls who grow into the Type A, driven, neurotic women who run the world.
Hope’s been a grown-up ever since she was a kid. With a mother who left and an unreliable father, she tried to protect her twin siblings from the pain of their volatile upbringing, a burden she carried well into adulthood. Now, after a lifetime of trying to be a good sister, a good daughter, a good wife, Hope’s had enough. She’s going to leave her husband, move to New York City, and start over in a place where she can be anyone, do anything.
But on the eve of the start of her new life, Hope’s sister, Faye, has a health crisis, calling Hope to her side—yet again. Haunted by the ghosts of their troubled childhood, Hope once more puts her plans on hold and moves Faye into the home she shares with husband Ralph, the home she’d been desperate to escape and which now feels inescapable. Is Hope doomed to forever play the responsible eldest daughter? Or will she finally find a way to outrun her fate and rewrite a future on her own terms?
