Book Review: Central Places, by Delia Cai

*Thank you to Netgalley and the publisher for an ARC ebook in exchange for an honest review.*

Central Places follows Audrey Zhou who, daughter to Chinese immigrants who left her small town Hickory Grove in Illinois for a life of success in the big city of New York. However, when she returns home in the first time in eight years with her fiancé Ben, she must confront her high-school crush Kyle, her ex-best friend Kristen and her parents all while attempting to come to terms with returning to a place she had abandoned and turned her back on.

Review

Initially the concept had potential and opportunity to discuss race and the feeling of being an outsider in a place where no one is anonymous. This novel did start off with promise of Audrey returning to her hometown with her fiancé Ben after leaving and making a successful life in New York. Delia Cai articulates the issue of feeling insecure, vulnerability and wanting to appease ones parents when returning home after a long period of living away. Cai presents those feelings of retuning to somewhere as a different person from when one left through Audrey’s perspectives. Due to the first person perspective of Audrey, the reader is presented with a very one sided story where Audrey acts in an immature or ‘victim’ mindset that everything bad only happens to her. This becomes extremely tedious and makes her character unlikeable. I think it would have been beneficial to have a perspective of her mother or Kyle her old school crush to emphasise how much Audrey has changed. Ben is two dimensional and is unfairly criticised by Audrey as being self centred when in fact all Ben is presented as, is generous and overly sensitive to Audrey’s anxieties of returning home. The conflicts throughout the novel are undermined by the insufferable personality of Audrey and how she deals with situations.

The pacing is slow and nothing particularly exciitng or gripping happens to make me want to read further. I found this a difficult start and then I lost interest after 30%. I did finish the book only to see how Audrey’s character would develop and whether her relationship with her mother would be resolved, but this was disappointing. The conflict between Audrey and her high standard holding mother fell flat and didn’t resolve itself. There was a lot of potential for tension between Audrey and her family, yet this was dismissed as a few curt words here and there.

Overall, I think this novel has an opportunity to explore the anxieties and guilt around starting a new life in a different place to where you grew up and experiencing racism in a poignant way, but this novel undermines these themes. Audrey is too immature, selfish and doesn’t attempt to see the point of view of other characters. By the end of the novel, Audrey isn’t redeemed for her actions, in my opinion, and I can’t envision what will happen to her character next. Like in life one should never forget their roots and pretend they are something they are not. One can grow, but should never turn their back on the people who supported them before their success elsewhere.

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