Eleanor Liu is a “chronic avoider”—she runs from every difficulty life presents, but how long can she outrun grief? In this story, Eleanor is trying to figure out her life with all the trappings (customs/traditions) in the United States. Instead we get a whole book of Eleanor’s avoidance behaviors with no hope for improvement, and reading it was a bleak and unenjoyable experience.

Eleanor thought, just because her mother's marriage was an unhappy one, so hers will be one as well?

In the present timeline however, the mother-daughter relationship wasn’t explored much outside of the first few pages, which felt like a lost opportunity to me.

She’s a very traumatized woman who comes from an abusive family, and she isn’t making any attempts to recover or get help. The story resides at the muddled intersection of grief, disillusionment, and complacency with surprising clarity.At the same time, she is conducting illegal experiments with mice from the lab, and if she gets caught, it could mean the end for her husband along with her. The present-day storyline is told in first person, while the past is told in third person, giving a more omniscient view into Eleanor’s parents’ interiority. I think the closest comparison you could compare this book to is Disorientation, which is about another PhD student trying to uncover a secret about a Chinese poet she’s studying.