Review | Lisa Ko’s emotive debut novel The Leavers explores heartbreak and identity in two Americas
The Leavers follows a Chinese-American in search of his roots and the mother who abandoned him 10 years earlier, as it moves between the Bronx and upstate New York
by Lisa Ko
Algonquin Books
Tough love runs through The Leavers, Lisa Ko’s funny and touching but also painfully hard-hitting debut novel. It begins with 11-year-old Deming Gao walking home from school in the Bronx, in New York, with his embarrassingly noisy Fujianese mother: “[…] her voice was so loud that when she called his name dogs would bark and other kids jerked around. When she saw his last report card he thought her shouting would set off the car alarms four stories below. But her laughter was as loud as her shouting, and there was no better, more gratifying sound […]”
Two revelations dominate the opening pages. The first comes when we learn, in the very first sentence, that Deming’s walk home will be one of the last times he sees his mother. The second comes a few pages later, when the book jumps ahead a decade and we meet Daniel Wilkinson, a tall and hefty young man with mall-bought clothes and a guitar slung on his back. He has travelled from the pleasant middle-class suburb where he grew up to play a gig in New York.
