This is not a book that I would have found on my own but how we come to read a book is often an important element of our understanding and appreciation of the book itself. I will go into that circumstance further on near the end of this review.
As an American, and as I work in the construction industry in New York City where in a single day I encounter one-on-one a wide range of national identities, I am interested in the process of immigrant and cultural assimilation. As a writer I am interested in how an immigrant population that arrives in America, with the isolating aspect of different language, will eventually work its way, often through generations, to a point where individuals begin to contribute to the arts and literary culture of the American experience, in ‘mainstream’ American English, and to describe the history of the process of this ‘coming to America.’ 
And, though many consider America a destination, the path through America is not always the end of a cultural migration as much as a beginning. This book takes place in Indonesia and ends at the airport in Jakarta as the young protagonist leaves for America.
The author’s native language is Dutch. The book begins when Indonesia was the Dutch colony of the Netherlands East Indies. There is a whole lot to deal with the cultural and real politics of language in this book. In seeking out information online about the author I found a video interview where Lian Gouw describes how she had to learn to write her story in English. It does seem very much to be ‘her’ story; the book feels autobiographical. It is presented as a novel. As an object within a cultural vortex it says a whole lot about family, and feminist structures within the context of a politically volatile geographic place, growing up in Indonesia through WWII, a sort of growing up very modestly presented, with hopes, and fears, love, and pain that eventually necessitate departure.
This is not a prose to inflame the new-literati of the Internet. The technical and stylistic elements of the storytelling are not flashes. It all moves slowly in a relatively safe and traditional manner of telling it fairly plain without gew-gaws. This lack of flair I mean as a solid compliment to the tenacity and strength of the author, the courage to simply get on with it as best as possible. When I first started to read the book I thought it was outright boring. By page six I was captured. Toward the end of the book the young protagonist is essentially raped. At first I was like, “Oh, great, the obligatory sex scene,” the sensational steamy bit that all romantic readers have been waiting for, but it was actually handled quite well and did not advertise itself as a deus ex machina. I would be curious if the author were to venture to explore this volatile element in depth, to provide a more dynamic emotional context to the incident and her feelings about it in a short story form. In fact, for reasons of visibility and access that I will get into further on here, I would suggest that the author move into writing and distributing online shorter, more densely focused texts to explore a whole lot of the panorama of issues and emotions that this novel presents. I very much admire this writer.
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