Silver Repetition

A young Asian immigrant mends her fractured sense of self in this exquisite coming-of-age debut novel about family, grief, and identity.

Having left China for Canada with her parents as a child, Yuè Yuè yearns to discover who she is as she nears the end of her undergraduate degree and starts a new relationship. In urgent poetic fragments, she seeks common ground with her Canadian-born younger sister and grieves the beloved cousin she lost touch with back home. After Yuè Yuè receives a call from a girl making accusations, her date ghosts her. Meanwhile, her mother’s illness advances like snow. On a walk in the woods, Yuè Yuè sees a little girl digging in the mud, but when she peeks behind the curtain of black hair, her own face haunts her.

In endless perfect loops of memory and dream, loss and return, Silver Repetition tenderly illuminates the fullness of identity despite fractures in language, culture, and relationships. In a moving reunion, Yuè Yuè’s cousin comes to visit and everyone is caught, laughing, in the rain. Despite the weight of grief, isolation, and difference, even the most delicate family bonds can knit together tightly enough for the future to overcome the past.