Our Wayward Fate by Gloria Chao | Review

Publisher: Simon Pulse
Release Date: October 15, 2019 (out now!)
Source of my copy:publisher
Series: standalone
My rating:

Synopsis
Seventeen-year-old Ali Chu knows that as the only Asian person at her school in middle-of-nowhere Indiana, she must be bland as white toast to survive. This means swapping her congee lunch for PB&Js, ignoring the clueless racism from her classmates and teachers, and keeping her mouth shut when people wrongly call her Allie instead of her actual name, pronounced Āh-lěe, after the mountain in Taiwan.

Her autopilot existence is disrupted when she finds out that Chase Yu, the new kid in school, is also Taiwanese. Despite some initial resistance due to the "they belong together" whispers, Ali and Chase soon spark a chemistry rooted in competitive martial arts, joking in two languages, and, most importantly, pushing back against the discrimination they face.

But when Ali’s mom finds out about the relationship, she forces Ali to end it. As Ali covertly digs into the why behind her mother’s disapproval, she uncovers secrets about her family and Chase that force her to question everything she thought she knew about life, love, and her unknowable future.

Snippets of a love story from nineteenth-century China (a retelling of the Chinese folktale The Butterfly Lovers) are interspersed with Ali’s narrative and intertwined with her fate.

When I first heard of Our Wayward Fate, I immediately wanted to read it. As someone who immigrated to the US when I was nine years old, I enjoy reading about the immigrant experience of others. In this instance, our main character Ali was born in the US to parents who immigrated to the US--our circumstances do differ (I was born in the Philippines and I immigrated to the US when I was nine--to Hawaii where whites are actually the minority), but I did see a bit of myself in her.

Things I Liked About Our Wayward Fate:

Exploration of Chinese culture and Ali's family dynamics: It's always great to have an inside look in different cultures, especially from an own-voices author. I particularly found Ali's family dynamics really interesting--Ali's relationship with her mom and dad, her parents' relationship with each other, and how Chinese culture plays a part in how they interact and communicate with each other. I also love the incorporation of Mandarin and how we as readers have to rely on context clues to figure out meaning like how one would when learning a new language.

The romance: I thought Ali and Chase were really great together. From their shared interests in martial arts, their banter, their pun-filled texts--they were super cute together! While the time from their meeting to forming a friendship to becoming something more was very quick, I did believe in their connection. The two had great chemistry, and that made all the difference.

Chase: My favorite character in the novel! I really liked his self-confidence and how he spoke up and confronted his classmates' and teachers' racism and microaggressions head on.

Things I Didn't Like So Much:

Plot: The plot was messy and lacked flow, and pretty much everything that happened in the second half felt very contrived.

We have Ali's story in the present time, then between her chapters we the retelling of The Butterfly Lovers set in 19th century China, and then we also got a couple chapters here about a meeting between strangers set in a park in China a few months prior to Ali's. All the stories come together in the end, but they didn't quite gel together in a satisfying way. I thought Our Wayward Fate had a fairly solid start, but it seemed the author had a long list of ideas she wanted to incorporate in the story and they didn't quite come together organically.

Ali's character development: I like Ali for the most part--I enjoyed her sass and her sarcastic inner voice. But, she went from trying to blend in with her white classmates and keeping her head down for YEARS to skipping class and sneaking out at night to breaking into her high school counselor's office seemingly overnight. It would've been more believable if the change in Ali was more gradual fitting her character a bit more.

Yun and Ali: We met Yun in a random flashback in the first half of the book. He wasn't mentioned at all during the middle part of the book. And then Ali randomly remembered him, and after one email, they became BFFs and telling each other all their secrets. I really like Yun as a character, but the way he was randomly and suddenly brought back to the story in the latter half--that whole thing with him and Ali and the park just came out of nowhere and it felt very contrived.

Our Wayward Fate wasn't a bad read and I enjoyed some parts of it but I wanted to really like it because the premise sounded so good. The ideas were there, but the problem was there were too many ideas and it was trying to do too much that the plot fell apart and character development suffered. I don't recommend you purchase it, but it might still be worth checking out in the library.