Family Trust
I picked this book up becuase it was a recommendation from one of those lists I subscribe to (honestly can’t remember which one), and I enjoyed it quite a bit. In a way, i see this book as soft of a parallel to “My Father, the Panda Killer” book that I very much enjoyed last year. The Panda Killer book describes the life of an immigrant refugee family and the trials and travails that life has, and this book describes the life of a successful immigrant family and the trials and travails THIS particular life has. Whereas the panda book showed a family of immigrants running a neighborhood liquor store and what type of life that provides, this one has basically a fully high tech successful family and why even an annual income of 300k a year isn’t enough.
The story follows a family of 5 as they approach the end of the dad’s life. The ex-wife, the son, the daughter and the second wife. The dad likes to style himself as a rich person, so his end of life comes with certain financial and emotional outcomes that each of the other characters are vested in. The ex-wife, becuase she knows the true extent of his fortunes, the son because he needs some money as his own career isn’t taking off like he assumed it would with a harvard business degree, the daughter because she is supporting her husband’s startup, and the second wife becuase not having to go back to a restaurant is itself a dream and she needs that money to make sure she’s not back waitressing.
The story is told from each character’s POV with most of the chapters devoted to the ex-wife, and the 2 kids. Only a very small handful of chapters tells the story from the second wife or even the dad’s perspective. Each of the characters have their own drama to deal with, so you have basically 4 or 5 storylines wrapped underneath the one storyline that kinda sorta brings the whole family together.
The idea is not bad, but i think doing it in the span of one novel is a bit too much and the book strains at satisfactorily tying everything together. As this is the authoress’s first book, some allowances are to be had, but I think a little bit too much to chew was basically what happened here.
Still, the dialouge is snappy, the story lines themselves are a little interesting, but the main draw here is the immigrant family dynamics (at least for me). Lines that the ex-wife says to her kids are basically drawn out of real life in many ways, though the context is somewhat ridiculous at times. The craziness of the situations is probably influenced by way too many tech shows (like Silicon Valley), because while the valley can be crazy, some of the stuff that happens is a little beyond the pale (scams scams scams everywhere!)
One issue i had is that the characters are all a little bit hard to relate to, partially because of insufficient length for each character and also because their motiviations, their sense of self are all there, but for lack of a better word, the characters are all fairly superficial.
Perhaps that was intentional, perhaps because having 5 characters to bounce back and forth in a POV manner takes away from intense characterization, but after following all 5 characters, you just get the sense that all of them lack self-awareness in a major sense. You get why they are doing what they’re doing in the moment, and you get that some of this is supposed to be a satire of silicon valley high tech life, but the characters themselves just don’t have the earthiness that real characters should have.
Each character is almost an archetype of your silicon valley type. tiger mom, neglectful dad, ambitious and selfish son, sacrificial and understated daughter, unfairly maligned second wife, but the manner in which they’re painted ended up making them a caricature instead of a decent archetype.
I still enjoyed the book and made it all the way to the end. The writing style really jives with me for some reason. I’d say give it a chapter or two, and if either the characters or plot gets to you, then drop it. Myself, i’m reading the other books the authoress has.