Where Reasons end

Location & Checkout Length	Call Number	Checkout Length	Item Status
Pittsfield Adult Books 4-week checkout	Adult Book / Fiction / General / Li, Yiyun	4-week checkout	On Hold Shelf
Downtown 2nd Floor 4-week checkout	Fiction / Li, Yiyun	4-week checkout	Due 04-29-2024
Traverwood Adult Books 4-week checkout	Adult Book / Fiction / General / Li, Yiyun	4-week checkout	Due 04-27-2024

"'I had but one delusion, which I held onto with all my willpower: we once gave Nikolai a life of flesh and blood; and I'm doing it over again, this time by words.' In a world created outside of time, Li and the son who died talk about their lives. Deeply intimate and moving, this story cycle of grief captures the love and humor in a relationship which goes on now in a mother's heart, between a mother and child, even as it captures the pain of Li's sadness and loss. Written in the months following her son's death, this powerful book takes readers intimately and unforgettably into Li's grief, even as she transforms the pain into imaginary conversations of great beauty, humor, sadness and love"-- Provided by publisher.

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Thoughtful and largehearted submitted by redwood on July 29, 2023, 9:00am I kept putting this off because I wanted to be in the right frame of mind. I knew that it was a conversation between a mother and the son she’d recently lost to suicide, and that Li had written it shortly after her own son died by suicide. But I was surprised to find that I didn’t find it all that sad. It feels like Li got to live a dream in her imagination, to have a nearly unending conversation with a departed loved one. There’s no plot, really. They reach into memory, but they talk more about the roots of words, adjectives like “gormless,” what it means to be a mother or son, what it means to be alive, what can be accomplished in this “after time.” This is existential fiction reframed through the grounding current of a mother’s love.