Dear Fang, With Love

Starred review from January 4, 2016
Describing the Vilnius, Lithuania, where she’s gone on a summer history tour with her father, 17-year-old Vera emails her boyfriend, Fang, back in California: “So there is a thing called baroque architecture, and the word baroque means ‘imperfect pearl,’ which I think should be made into a sexual euphemism for clitoris.” The epistolary form is often an obstacle for writers, but these emails, interspersed throughout the book—otherwise narrated by Vera’s father, Lucas—bring tremendous depth and texture to the narrative, and also showcase Thorpe’s (The Girls from Corona del Mar) fabulous versatility, insight, and humor. Lucas and Vera are getting acquainted with the father-daughter relationship, as well as the country where they’ve arrived. Lucas didn’t meet Vera until she was four, and spent only weekends with her several years after that. Their sudden close companionship comes in the wake of Vera’s recent psychotic episode, after which she was diagnosed with bipolar disorder, which Lucas is struggling to accept and hoping to understand better over the course of the trip. Lucas, whose grandmother hailed from Lithuania, comes with a fair number of his own emotional complications, including his mythic and tangled ancestry. But while the themes of the book—mania, the Holocaust, and the devastating number of ways that any parent-child dynamic can go awry—are undeniably dark, Thorpe’s prose is light, often hilarious, and unshakably grounded in the concrete details of daily life. The story wraps up a bit too tidily, but Thorpe has written an absolute winner.

November 1, 2016

Lucas and Katya have a daughter, Vera, who was conceived when they were both teenagers at boarding school. They are no longer a couple, and Lucas is a weekend dad who has just started to be involved in high schooler Vera's life. When Vera has a psychotic break while attending a party, Lucas takes her to Lithuania to discover his family history and give her an opportunity to heal. The book title refers to the emails that Vera writes to her boyfriend, Fang, at home. The story line wanders for much of the first half of the novel but then comes together in a satisfying resolution. Narrator Stephen Thorne is excellent, and the author does a solid job of covering the issue of mental illness and of one's family history. VERDICT For literary fiction collections. ["Lucas is an affable and kindhearted narrator whose perspective makes the dark subjects of the novel accessible": LJ 5/15/16 review of the Knopf hc.]--Michele Lauer-Bader, formerly with Half Hollow Hills Community Lib., Dix Hills, NY

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