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The Family Chao Book Review

Lan Samantha Chang's retelling of The Brothers Karamazov is dark and chilling, diving deeply into the original story to tell a unique one about the immigrant experience and three flawed brothers. An engrossing read, The Family Chao is compelling with an ending that is determined to haunt anyone who reads.

Lan Samantha Chang is the author of a collection of short fiction, Hunger, and two previous novels, Inheritance and All Is Forgotten, Nothing Is Lost. Her work has been translated into nine languages. The Director of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, she lives in Iowa City. You can find her online at lansamanthachang.com.

The residents of Haven, Wisconsin, have dined on the Fine Chao restaurant's Americanized Chinese food for thirty-five years, content to ignore any unsavory whispers about the family owners. But when brothers Dagou, Ming, and James Chao reunite with their parents in Haven, the family's simmering secrets boil over at last. Before long, brash, charismatic, and tyrannical patriarch Leo is found deadā€”presumed murderedā€”and his sons find they've drawn the exacting gaze of the entire town. The ensuing trial brings to light potential motives for all three brothers, forcing them to reckon with the legacy of their father's outsized appetites and their own future survival. 

I have not read The Brothers Karamazov, but know that The Family Chao is a retelling of the famous novel. With no prior knowledge of the Russian novel, I dove into this one completely blind, and was surprised at how much I enjoyed it. It was dark, and filled with lots of good food imagery, and had very compelling characters even if they weren't at all relatable. I love how the three brothers were depicted. Ming, James, and Dagou were all very different and specific, and not for one second did they do anything outside of their character, which is definitely to be appreciated in a novel like this. The other characters in the periphery, such as Katherine and Alice, were also wonderfully supporting, giving readers further insight into those brothers.

The book is a look into the immigrant experience through the lens of this retelling, but it's also a murder mystery. I found that these two elements played off of one another really well, allowing for deep discussion and philosophical thought on both sides. As the murder is a potential patricide, there's also a lot of look into how children become their parents, and whether or not that can be avoided. There's a lot of rich exploration of these topics. Maybe the book doesn't dive into all the implications of exactly all of these things, but it certainly has a great and strong start.

The only reason this isn't quite a five-star read for me is because my mind sometimes snagged on the prose. There's no doubt that it's brilliantly written, that each sentence was very deliberately chosen and written. I just know for me, that type of writing is a bit harder to get into, and my mind snags on those types of sentences easier, making it harder to remember what the sentence before it was. Overall, though, again there's no doubt that the writing is brilliant, and is exactly what you'd expect of someone who is the Director of the Iowa Writers' Workshop!

Lan Samantha Chang is a brilliant writer, and after the success of The Family Chao, there are so many places she can go. Until then, you can find her online at lansamanthachang.com.

*This review can also be found on my Goodreads page*

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