Starred Review For as long as she can remember, Lily has been responsible for taking care of and consoling her Singaporean mother, May: consoling her after her explosive outbursts, cooking traditional Peranakan food, changing her own appearance to look more Asian, and tasting May's spoiled juice r favorite fore serving it to her. Feeling abandoned by her two older siblings and suffocated at home, Lily bears her mother's erratic behavior and her white British father's passive responses to it with the expectation of leaving to attend Oxford University in just a few months. However, as Lily watches her mother become increasingly volatile and combative, she begins having visions of unknown memories that frighten her, leading to a terrifying understanding and a journey to reveal the deep secrets hidden within her family. What she discovers changes her perspective and her relationship with her family forever. In her debut novel, King brilliantly portrays generational abuse and trauma passed down from parent to child and a resulting, conscious fight to break free from the toxic cycle. She writes with mastery as she explores the disturbing effects of childhood trauma within a biracial family. Thrilling and suspenseful, King's exemplary novel will keep readers fascinated until the end.

A woman on the cusp of adulthood navigates a troubled relationship with her abusive mother.Among her siblings, 18-year-old Lily has always been known as their mother's undisputed favorite-"Mama's doll," the only one capable of concocting the semispoiled orange juice May favors and soothing her public meltdowns at grocery stores. Unlike her combative sister, Julia, and anxious lawyer brother, Jacob, Lily hews steadfastly to her mother's rigid expectations, even dyeing her hair dark and wearing color contacts to appear more Chinese (May is Chinese Peranakan and her husband is White). As Lily prepares to enter Oxford in the fall, she subsists on the faith that she must endure only a few weeks more of her mother's chaos before escaping. But after May accuses Lily's father of harboring a secret love for Jacob's ex-wife, Francie, her unpredictability only accelerates-precipitating a string of dramatic family showdowns, public confrontations, and other crises. Simultaneously, Lily is dogged by increasingly frequent flashbacks of some kind that pop into her consciousness, which she suspects may offer clues to her mother's tragedy-riddled childhood in Singapore (involving, hazily, a devastating fire, a car accident, and the untimely death of a family member). As the summer passes-and with the help of Lewis, a young professor and kindred spirit-Lily weighs the two selves she's come to know: the one that's been rigidly formed in her mother's image and the other whose outlines are blurrier but full of possibility. Debut author King skillfully brings to light the layered, deeply complex machinations that lurk below the surface in families and confer the fragile impression of normalcy; this family's crosshairs of obligation, love, and resentment, too, are never oversimplified. May is especially captivating: a veritable tyrant who's also full of sympathetic, deeply human insecurities. Though a few narrative elements are inelegantly constructed-Lily's flashbacks often read as a plot device-King expertly weaves a compelling family novel.Layered, variable, and, like spoiled orange juice, sometimes complicatedly bitter.