Year She Left Us (Ma)

Book Reviews
The foundling may be a familiar figure in the history of the novel, most prominently in Dickens and the Brontës, but Ma gives us a striking 21st-century iteration. In 1992, China passed a law allowing foreign adoptions. Since then, Americans have brought home more than 80,000 Chinese children—most of them girls, because of China’s infamous one-child policy and a cultural prejudice that favors sons....  Like Philip Roth and, more recently, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Ma is unafraid to generalize about her culture and explore its snobberies and social codes.
Mona Simpson - New York Times Book Review


A deft, raw dissection of an American family….With great cleverness, Ma injects her Chinese family with American realism.
Rebecca Liao - San Francisco Chronicle


In telling Ari Kong’s quest, Ma succeeds in creating a deeply intelligent heroine as compelling as Holden Caulfield and Alexander Portnoy….The Year She Left Us is a fresh, compelling look at the ties that bind among all the kinds of families that we create.
May-Lee Chai - Dallas Morning New


There’s much to enjoy in The Year She Left Us….It’s Ari’s voice that sets this novel on fire….The magnetism exerted by Ari’s chapters is all the more impressive because for much of the book, the character’s misery seems to float free of her circumstances.
Laura Miller - Salon


(Starred review.) Ma’s first novel is a sweeping success—a standout from the many novels about Chinese assimilation and the families of Chinese immigrants—with a fascinating protagonist with a troubling past.... This is a family saga of insight, regret, and pathos, and it is not to be missed.
Publishers Weekly


Ma turns conventional wisdom about adoption on its head in this probing novel about a young woman adopted from China as an infant. Ari is the kind of person who is abundant in real life but largely missing from fiction: a prickly, selfish, lost girl.... Ma brings all sorts of relationships.... And she painstakingly conveys that we are never just one thing, and can never be fixed by just one formula. —Lynn Weber
Booklist


A debut novel featuring a simple plot crammed with information—factual and emotional, conflicting and unreliable. The result is complicated, like real life.... The novel questions the meaning of family, background and belonging.Ma is a cagey writer, withholding and misdirecting at nearly every turn, which can be frustrating. Nonetheless, this is an impassioned, unapologetic look at tough, interesting subjects.
Kirkus Reviews