When someone from the publisher reached out about Kaleidoscope, this line caught me: “This book is heart-wrenching and hopeful and the characters truly shine on the page. It’s one of those books where I wish I could read it again for the first time all over again. And I’m so happy that you get to.”
And I downloaded a copy almost immediately, but of course sat on it for a few months, allowing me to forget about the blurb and the subject and go into this completely blind.* This approach, if you’ve followed me for a while, sometimes works for me and sometimes it doesn’t. This time it sort of worked mostly because the intro was a little abrupt and different from the rest of the story, but that’s on me, not the author.
Kaleidoscope is a story of sisters and family and travel and love. Riley and Morgan were inseparable growing up and as Riley heads off to college with the entirety of her family relocating to NYC with her, which put so much unspoken added pressure on her.
The story is simultaneously slow and fast-paced with huge lurches forward and glacial passages that are beautiful and stunningly written. You pick up pretty early on that this is an unanswered letter to someone because of a tragedy and spend that first part of the book wondering when it’s going to happen and how it’s going to happen. And oh boy when it happens it still packs a punch—part of it is the day it happens, some of it is how it happens, but mostly it’s just the build-up and waiting for it to happen that got to me.
The biggest part of the story for me is the hidden lives of everyone in the story. Riley has her secrets, one of which she shares with Morgan, Morgan has her secrets, both parents have their secrets, James has his secrets and there is just so much unsaid throughout the novel. We’re reading most of the book through Riley’s perspective with occasional smaller chapters from others, and we get to go through her maturation from a new/young adult to an adult having to learn and communicate with her parents as adults.
You are the least perfect, most real person I have ever known, and it frightens me every day, every fucking day, how in love I am with you. It’s distressing actually. I don’t know how else to explain it. The last few weeks have been mind-blowing, delirious pain because I had no idea this feeling existed, and now that I do, there’s no going back. There’s no way to forget what it’s like to be with someone who slips into your brain so completely, who makes you think about everything differently, who makes you laugh a hundred times a day and doesn’t take your shit, who makes you feel like the best fucking version of a self you never even knew you could be, it’s you, Riley. You do whatever the hell you want. You don’t care what anyone else thinks. You eat like a monster and you dance like a teenager, but watching you dance makes me want to dance, and eating with you makes me never want to eat without you. You’re the truest friend I’ve ever had. You have no idea how sexy you are. You’re a smartass with a smart mouth and I am lucky to be here, to be here with you, and I’m sorry if I ever made you feel otherwise. (Part 4: Bangkok)
As incredible as the emotional journey was in this novel, seriously the James and Riley story and that confession of love above could be an entire novel themselves, where Wong really shone was with her descriptions around the world. From this one in New York City to the moment where Riley has a breakdown when she’s traveling the world and visiting temples in India.
On the days I hated everything, the many piss-and-shit-filled days, this was one thing I still cherished about this city: even when there was nothing, no farmers’ market or heritage-day parade or circle of breakdancing Puerto Ricans, there was something. If you put yourself in the way of New York, she always gave you something to look at, something to change your state of mind. A woman driving a remote control car with a Chihuahua sitting behind the wheel. A white dude furiously nunchucking his way up some stairs. Two toddlers being pulled by a leash. (Part 2: The Crash of 2008)
There were passages I read multiple times because they were so beautiful and passages I couldn’t get through fast enough because they were SOOOOOO uncomfortable. Riley’s evolution as a character and her relationships with her parents, her sister, and James. This novel seemed to have a lot of themes that we read about in school when reading “the classics” with all of these relationships, so I can definitely see this one standing the test of time.
Recommendation: This was an incredibly moving novel and so beautifully written. There were moments I didn’t want to keep reading because Wong’s writing pulls you into the scene and there are conversations NO ONE wants to have. But ultimately, you become a better person when you have them. And thankfully, we got to experience that as Riley grows up over the timespan this novel covers. And I can’t say enough about Wong’s ability to write place and setting. Her descriptions and settings were stunning and I felt like I was in NYC and Mumbai and Bangkok and Oregon, seriously she could write a travelogue and I would read every word of it.
*I received a copy of Kaleidoscope via NetGalley in return for my honest opinion. No goods or money were exchanged.
Opening Line: “The clinic was on Bleecker and Mott, just south of Union Square where Riley had booked the hotel room, paid for it with the collection of money they called the Fund: partly hers, partly her sister’s, partly cash taken from their parents’ house, the knickknack drawer by the kitchen phone, the silver box on their mother’s vanity, the pockets of their father’s cast-off pants.”
Closing Line: “She pushed her worlds together, can see them all in this small room.” (Whited out to avoid spoilers, highlight to read.)
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