Picture Us in the Light
by Kelly Loy GilbertSetting: California
Genres: Fiction
Published on April 10th 2018
Pages: 361
Source: Library
Danny Cheng has always known his parents have secrets. But when he discovers a taped-up box in his father's closet filled with old letters and a file on a powerful Silicon Valley family, he realizes there's much more to his family's past than he ever imagined.
Danny has been an artist for as long as he can remember and it seems his path is set, with a scholarship to RISD and his family's blessing to pursue the career he's always dreamed of. Still, contemplating a future without his best friend, Harry Wong, by his side makes Danny feel a panic he can barely put into words. Harry and Danny's lives are deeply intertwined and as they approach the one-year anniversary of a tragedy that shook their friend group to its core, Danny can't stop asking himself if Harry is truly in love with his girlfriend, Regina Chan.
When Danny digs deeper into his parents' past, he uncovers a secret that disturbs the foundations of his family history and the carefully constructed facade his parents have maintained begins to crumble. With everything he loves in danger of being stripped away, Danny must face the ghosts of the past in order to build a future that belongs to him.
I’ve heard a lot of hype for Picture Us in the Light but I didn’t really know what it was about. That’s the point, I suppose. This is a book about mysteries.
For me the main mystery in Danny’s family’s past was obvious from the first few pages of discussion of it. That contributed to my frustration with this book. It is hard to listen to people go on and on about how strange it all is and how they can’t figure it out when you, the reader, is sitting there thinking, “Dude, it’s obvious.”
There is another story line about a friend of Danny’s who died of suicide a year before. There is a lot of good writing about how the different characters deal with survivor’s guilt and their feelings about whether their last interactions with her may have added to her decision to kill herself.
I admit that I was not that interested in this book while I was reading it. But I had been in a bit of a reading slump where I was only interested in romance and nonfiction. I was determined to finish something that didn’t fit into those categories. People like this book. I was going to finish this book even if I wasted away from boredom in the process.
Then I got to the ending. I love an unexpected ending. They make me want to stand up and cheer. It perked me up and made me pay close attention again. I loved it. It made me glad I read the book for the last two chapters.
I would recommend this book to anyone, but especially who don’t tend to get bored to tears reading about teenagers and their angst, just for the ending.
I’ve had this book on my TBR for a long time. Once I realized that I was going to do AsianLitBingo, I downloaded the ebook from the library.
I loved the main character of this book. She’s always been told that she isn’t special enough to do anything. She struggled in school and works as a dishwasher. She wears hand me down clothes from the old ladies in her neighborhood. The only skill she has is tai chi. Her mother was a ballerina in China and she started Charlie in tai chi as a child. But she doesn’t think of this as a talent. She just thinks that she was bound to have picked up some skills since she’s been doing it for twenty years.
Her father and uncle tightly control her life. So when she gets a job as a receptionist at a dance studio outside Chinatown, she keeps it secret. She wants the extra money to help put her little sister into a private school.
At the school she is thrust into a world where people pay hundreds of dollars a week for dance lessons. This isn’t a world that she knows. Her coworkers take her on as a project to find the real person beneath the hand me down clothes and deferential manner.
This book is about branching out beyond what you’ve always been told your limits are. How far do you go without losing parts of yourself?
