White Ivy by Susie Yang

 

Title:  White Ivy

Author: Susie Yang

Read by:  Emily Woo Zeller

Publisher: Simon & Shuster Audio

Length: Approximately 12 hours and 51 minutes

Source: Review Copy from Simon & Shuster Audio.  Thank-you! 

 White Ivy is an epic American story of one woman’s quest to live the American dream.  Ivy Lin appears to be a sweet and quiet young Chinese girl.  She has a special something that draws people to her.  Her grandmother uses her as a cover to steal things at yard sales and thrift stores.  Ivy learns from her how to become a great thief herself.  She has one best friend, Roux Roman, who has a complicated home life as well.  In middle school, she develops a crush on Gideon Speyer.  Gideon is the son of a senator and lives a gilded blue-blooded life that Ivy envies. After she lies to her parents to attend a party at Gideon’s, they send her to visit relatives in China for the summer.  When she returns, she discovers her parents have bought a house in another state.  Her relationship with both Gideon and Roux is gone.

 As an adult, Ivy returns to Boston as a teacher.  She runs into Sylvia Speyer, Gideon’s sister, and soon is dating Gideon.  As their relationship progresses, Ivy wonders, what does she want out of life?  Can she achieve her American dream?  What lengths will she take to ensure this?

 Ivy is a complicated anti-hero that reminded me strongly of Scarlett O’Hara from Gone with the Wind or Becky Sharpe from Vanity Fair.  I wanted to like her as she is the heroine and root for her story, but she is an unlikeable person.  I did admire her determination. 

 I really liked the overall story and was surprised by how things went in the story.  It really drew me in.  It reminded me of a modern day An American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser or The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton.  These are two of my favorite novels.  I really like the story of a person going to any length to achieve the American Dream and pull themselves up into a higher class.  I will be reading more works by author Susie Yang.

 Besides Ivy’s social climbing, this book was a great coming of age novel.  Ivy’s relationship with her mother and her grandmother is complicated.  I really enjoyed the growth of these relationships throughout the novel.

 SPOILER ALERT

For any that read this book – what did you think about this ending?   I thought it was interesting that Ivy had her “happy” ending unlike the endings for Clyde Griffiths of An American Tragedy or Lily Bart of The House of Mirth.  Is Ivy’s ending really happy though?

SPOILER END

 I read this book in May for Asian Pacific American Heritage Month with the #diversiteareadingchallenge hosted by @booksnparchment on Instagram.   White Ivy was also a Read with Jenna selection.

 Emily Woo Zellner was a wonderful narrator and I thought of her as the voice of Ivy.  It was a compelling audiobook to listen to and I couldn’t stop listening to it!

 Favorite Quote:

"All her life, she had sought something she couldn't name. Love? Wealth? Beauty? But none of those things were exactly right. What she sought was peace. The peace of having something no one could take away from you."

 “That was the thing about getting too much happiness at once. Without time to adjust, the pain of not having it suddenly became unbearable.”

 “In the same way water trickles into even the tiniest cracks between boulders, her personality had formed into crooked shapes around the hard structure of her Chinese upbringing.”

 Overall, White Ivy is a compelling story with a complicated heroine trying to live the American Dream.