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Spokane, Washington  Est. May 19, 1883

‘The Leavers’: Share your own opinions Saturday

Dan Webster

One of the best – and worst – aspects of arts criticism is that seldom do we all have the same opinion.

The best part of that is that it allows us all to bring different perspectives to the respective work, thereby offering us new ways of seeing how or even why it works – or doesn’t.

The worst part, of course, is that negative reviews can turn us away from something that we, especially those of us who hold different perspectives, might actually enjoy.

Take the novel “The Leavers,” by Lisa Ko, which is the subject of a Spokane Public Library Virtual Book Club event. The scheduled hour-long streaming session will take place beginning at 10:30 a.m. on Saturday. (Registration is required.)

“The Leavers,” Ko’s first novel, received the PEN/Bellwether Prize for Socially Engaged Fiction and was nominated for the National Book Award.

In a rather muted review, New York Times critic Gish Jen lauded Ko’s book for being “(t)horoughly researched and ambitious in scope” while, nevertheless, missing “the heedless enchantment, the uncanny attunement, the magisterial iconoclasm — that finally marks our most worthwhile fiction.”

Yet Arifa Akbar, writing in The Guardian, was far more complimentary. She described the book as a “quietly sensational debut novel about migration, deportation and contested citizenship" and "the story of a boy abandoned in the U.S. by his Chinese mother, and the dark, devastating truth behind it.”

And Amy Weiss-Meyer, writing in The Atlantic, falls somewhere in between while stressing the novel's larger message: "Ko dramatizes the personal—a family torn apart—in order to draw attention to a structural social problem."

You may have even more diverse opinions. The library is giving you a chance to share them.

Below: Author Lisa Ko is interviewed at the 2019 AWP Bookfair.