This is a dark horse, and I like dark horses. It shows the challenges and lack of options immigrants have and flies directly in the face of the model minority examination that most fiction tends to do. Instead Ivy’s parents are shown to put immense pressure on her due to their social privilege and indoctrination of family status and values, and a premium on wealth because they don’t have the ability to accrue it, which creates the circumstances that put Ivy on a course that is, essentially, predetermined.

Luxury is not merely material goods and sustenance, though that is reiterated a lot throughout, but also the ability to choose and see a path forward, based on upbringing and station. Pivotally, when Ivy does finally put together pieces peppered throughout regarding one of the most important decisions in her life, she has become so skewed that the path forward is the same choices her family has had to made, which can really only end with continuing a trauma cycle.

But neither is the reader supposed to be overtly sympathetic with Ivy while she continues numerous condemnable actions, just understand why they are happening, even as it’s obfuscated from the character herself.

In short, it’s one of those novels where you will either enjoy watching unlikable characters unfold like train wrecks, or you won’t. In particular, her inability to perceive something so obvious about a man she ends up seeing, and the fruition of that outcome, I think really drives home the themes of the novel—but it is quite literally the very last thing that occurs, making it a very slow burn (which I don’t mind, but some may).