A searing debut novel that explores community, identity, and the myth of the American dream through an immigrant family in AlaskaIn Chia-Chia Lin’s debut novel, The Unpassing, we meet a Taiwanese immigrant family of five struggling to make ends meet in rural Alaska. The father, hardworking but beaten down, is employed as a plumber and repairman, while the mother, a loving, strong-willed, and unpredictably emotional matriarch, holds the house together. When eleven-year-old Gavin contracts meningitis at school, he falls into a deep, nearly fatal coma. He wakes up a week later to learn that his little sister Ruby was infected, too. She did not survive.Routine takes over for the grieving family: the siblings care for each other as they befriend a neighboring family and explore the woods; distance grows between the parents as they deal with their loss separately. But things spiral when the father, increasingly guilt-ridden after Ruby’s death, is sued for not properly installing a septic tank, which results in the death of a little girl. In the ensuing chaos, what really happened to Ruby finally emerges.With flowing prose that evokes the terrifying beauty of the Alaskan wilderness, Lin explores the fallout after losing a child and the way in which a family is forced to grieve in a place that doesn’t yet feel like home. Emotionally raw and subtly suspenseful, The Unpassing is a deeply felt family saga that dismisses the American dream for a harsher, but ultimately more profound, reality.
