Ok, here is a confession. I’m an extreme Law & Order: SVU fan—to the point where I am now caught up on almost every season (still working on season 21, but I’m up to date on the currently airing season and every season before 21!). I don’t watch many other procedural shows, but SVU is one of my favorites—it’s like a cozy blanket you can settle into at the end of the day. It may not be luxurious or sophisticated, but you feel good at the end (or at least a little morally rustled). For some reason, maybe because I do not like procedural shows qua procedurals, I do not often read books that feature courtroom drama. I do like mysteries and whodunits, and I do like a good courtroom scene; but I suppose I never really got into the habit of consuming them in book form. (The greatest exception being To Kill a Mockingbird, perhaps, which is naturally timeless and a classic.) I am glad I took the chance on this book though, because it ties together this courtroom/legal aspect with a lot of other important themes, and Angie Kim weaves them together brilliantly.

Kim was a trial lawyer, a litigator, in her previous career, so she knows her stuff. It is no surprise then that the courtroom scenes were a delight to read, especially the cross examinations and even more what you don’t get to see in a TV show or real life—the defendant’s and witnesses’ inner thoughts as they are hearing what version of truth is being said. The different character perspectives in the book allow us to go through the incident with the Miracle Submarine and the court scenes several times over, each time seeing it in a new light and having new possible suspects or motives. I can’t remember the exact phrase, but there is a pithy saying that goes something like ‘Ask a group of people for what happened, and you will get ten different versions of truth’ or something like that. This perfectly summarizes the characters in the book. Each has a complex background and motivations as to what they did on the day of the incident; though the book starts out as a solved whodunit, it becomes clear that the real purpose of the novel is not to find out who really ‘did it’, but why and how.

Because much of the novel was inspired by Kim’s personal experiences growing up in the US as an immigrant, many of the characters and scenes in the novel feel quite realistic and carry a lot of emotional weight. I related somewhat to the struggles between Mary and Young, the child forced to assimilate to a culture, and then feeling somewhat trapped in between two worlds yet belonging to neither. My family immigrated when I was young, so I did not have a cognizant experience of assimilating to the culture; it just came naturally to me. But this nonetheless presented a rift between my parents and me, who expected me to behave as was culturally appropriate to their own homeland, despite being thousands of leagues away. Young’s perspective was especially interesting for this reason; as Kim herself states in the Q&A portion, it was not a perspective the immigrant kid thinks about when they are growing up, and hardly in adulthood either. It helped me understand a bit of what my parents must have felt. Still, the narrative emphasizes the key players and focuses on those narratives, so some of the many perspectives felt as if they were tossed aside or less significant than the rest; as a result, their characters felt a bit stagnant or even forgettable. On the other hand, the characters are delightfully morally grey, and the reader’s assumptions won’t last through even the first third of the book. No one is perfect and all have enough at stake to make the narrative quite challenging for the reader to uncover.

Another important element of the book are its philosophical themes, particularly concerning the butterfly effect. The traditional understanding of the butterfly effect is how a butterfly flapping its wings can effect the beginning of a storm across the world, more or less; here, it refers more to the regrets and actions of the characters. If only the dive session had started on time, if only certain characters did or did not do what they did, etc. Kim was apparently a philosophy major, and this was another element of the book I enjoyed, but felt that it was merely hinted at. There is a lot of telling and not enough showing. In the Q&A, Kim says her agent/editor recommended cutting back on the courtroom and philosophical scenes, which is unfortunate because those were the parts I enjoyed most. It would be really interesting to sit down for coffee and chat with Kim about her experiences and thoughts on those themes.

Around the two-thirds mark of the book, the plot started waning for me, in part because of the themes of parenthood taking on a stronger role. A great portion of the book deals with parenting kids with disabilities and the difficulties that entails. I am not someone who has an innate affection for children, nor any desire to have or interact with children; so I did not sympathize much with the discussions about parenthood in the book, especially concerning the kids with disabilities. After a certain point, the ‘whodunit’ and courtroom elements of the book give way for this discussion focused on parenthood and so on; while interesting, it did not hold my attention as easily as the other parts, so it took some time to get through the last third of the book. I still enjoyed the ending and appreciated the efforts that Kim goes to in tying up the loose ends and giving the reader the satisfaction that comes from having a realistic and well-fleshed out ending. Overall, I quite liked this book and would recommend it.

Side note: It seems that my reading streak immediately dropped as soon as classes started back up… unfortunate. But hey, it means that at least I got a head start in January, so I have no excuse not to keep it up throughout the rest of the year (even if at a slower pace) to reach my reading goal this year.