Yukiko Oyama is a lonely sixteen year old girl living in New York in 1968. Yuki's parents are ready to go back to Japan after many years of working in the USA. Yuki's father has little confidence that she will get into a Japanese university and Yuki has no desire to try to adjust to life in a place that is foreign and seemingly unfriendly to her. Yuki is a third culture kid at a time when there weren't many of them anywhere in the world. New York in the sixties wasn't as diverse as it is now and Yuki is different in many ways, finding herself quite alone at her parochial school in the village. She constantly disappoints her father with her low scores in math and her love of art. Art is the only thing that transforms her lonely heart to one of joy. She manages to make a friend and then stay with that friend when her parents travel back to Japan.

Harmless Like You is a powerful story of loneliness, depression, and grief. Rowan Hisayo Buchanan has shown extraordinary talent in creating a narrative of events that reach far back into history, showing their effect on descendants for many years afterwards. RHB's writing pulled me into Yuki's world. I ached for her solitary years as a teenager and then cringed at the decisions she made, mostly ones that might have helped her but almost always made things worse.

The life of an expat, especially that of a young person, is never easy. Buchanan has taken that experience and created a work of art that many of us have lived and understand so well. She told the story of one woman but gave us glimpse into the lives of many.

ARC courtesy of NetGalley and W. W. Norton & Company (publish date: February 28th 2017).

Rowan Hisayo Buchanan’s debut novel about identity, abuse, art, and familial bonds, packs several punches. Harmless Like You is a breathtakingly crafted story of mother and son. First, we meet Yuki Oyama, a teenage Japanese-American immigrant, caught in the cross heirs of identity in an early 1970’s New York. Her father has been on a years-long exile to America for work when he is finally called back. Torn between leaving the only land she’s ever known, and losing her family, Yuki ultimately decides to remain in the Big Apple, with her only friend, Odile, the beautiful and cunning aspiring model. Then, we meet Jay, Yuki’s adult son in 2016 Connecticut and Berlin. Still dealing with the abandonment of his mother when he was just two years old, Jay enters into fatherhood, reeling with discontentment and frustration. As the novel builds, Hisayo Buchanan seeks to answer “how does a mother desert her own son?”.

Full of beautiful, literary prose, Hisayo Buchanan’s novel is hard to get into. Once there, however, I was hooked. Her voice is fresh, intelligent, and compelling. The characters are well crafted, and, unlike other books detailing abuse and abandonment, feel real and consistent. Only Jay’s father feels forced for the narrative, but the other characters don’t excuse his behavior, and call him for being unlike a human, flawed and difficult, making the improbability of his character feel possible.

Hisayo Buchanan’s biggest asset though, is her climatic structure. She arrives with a big sense of occasion and gradually and consistently builds the action, never dragging anything out, or forcing us to choke down the complexity of a fleeing mother in the last 20 pages of the novel. Authors I’ve read in the past err on one side or the other, but Harmless Like You splits the difference, making this one of the best crafted novels I’ve read in a while.

And yet, as with any debut, there is room for improvement. At times, it feels Harmless Like You is too big, trying to do too much. While Hisayo Buchanan’s ideas are breathtaking and well argued, they can fell a bit pretentious and awkwardly placed. Similarly, she crammed a lot of themes into this book, all of which were wonderfully crafted, but occasionally felt overwhelming.

Nevertheless, I read Harmless Like You in two blissful, desiring sittings, and wouldn’t have put the book down for anything. It is a breathtaking, accomplished novel, so rich and full, your next read will dull by comparison. For a debut, Rowan Hisayo Buchanan has much to be proud of.

Pick up Harmless Like You when it’s released in February 2017.

ARC provided by publisher via a Goodreads giveaway

Truly beautifully written - it is rare that I have to stop to savor the prose when I'm reading, yet I found myself doing so constantly while reading this. The understated story with an overarching feeling of perpetual sadness was right up my alley as well.

A really simple story told in a beautiful and emotive way.

The structure of the book, how it alternated between Yuki's and Jay's stories, was very effective, particularly towards the end of the book when their paths were about to converge. I liked how the book only focussed on a small handful of characters because it meant that there were no pointless characters. The characters' diverse range of ethnicities was done well, it didn't seem gratuitous and didn't play to stereotypes.

The best thing about the book was how emotive it was. I could really feel the loneliness and emptiness that Yuki was feeling, as well as the frustration her and Jay both felt at their newborn children. Yuki's decision to leave her husband and child was deeply saddening but was rationalised so well by her thinking she'd come back once she felt better.

My favourite character was definitely Edison. His and Yuki's relationship reminded me of Katsuya and Kyoko from Fruits Basket. I also loved Jay and Mimi's relationship, prior to having Eliot, and hope that their relationship is reconciled beyond the end of the book.

The only thing I would have liked to know more about was Yuki's time in Berlin. Did she go there in the hopes of finding Lou?

Not a good sign when you find yourself actually saying out loud, "This is bullshit!" while you're reading. I tried really hard to go along with this but it only got worse as it went along. Not a single relationship in this book feels true, instead it all feels like someone's idea of how people act. In the end, the book is very hard on a bad mother and goes very easy on a bad father, so wait, I guess one part did feel true after all.

This is the story of a female artist who decides to leave her family in order to pursue her art. More than 30 years later, her son flies over an ocean with some paperwork that he has to hand her in person. To be honest, I found the Jay parts much more interesting than Yuki. Yuki's chapters growing up in New York were overly long and a bit boring. I couldn't really relate to her and long ramblings about Art aren't usually entertaining for me. What was the point of Odile? Jay, on the other hand, is also a quirky character but there's a lot more action and less rambling. I liked the story itself, it was interesting, and the ending was really good [edit: except for the part about the mice, yikes], I just didn't have the best time reading about Yuki.

This beautifully-written book is about Yuki, a Japanese girl growing up in America, struggling to fit in and find her artistic vision. Her life changes when she meets an overblown anorexic girl who self-named herself Odile, smokes cigarettes, and wants to be a model. The story follows her as she grows up, makes a lot of really awful life decisions, and battles artist's block and depression.

The parts about Yuki are interspersed with shorter parts about Jay, her son, whom she abandoned when he was a toddler. He has a tempestuous marriage, a child he's not sure he loves, and a bald therapy cat. He doesn't know why his mom abandoned him, and when his father dies, he flies overseas to find her.

The descriptions of the art and their lives are beautiful. Linguistically, this book is stunning. The book is basically a painting. The plot's fairly interesting/unpredictible, too, even though you know, obviously, whom Yuki will marry, and that she abandons her child.

I just wished I liked the characters more. Yuki is so miserable/bland all the time that she's not much of a delight to hang out with. Jay is a bit of an ass-hat. He thinks his pregnant wife is gross and cheats on her. He doesn't like his own kid, but can't figure out why his own mom abandoned him. (Maybe they genetically just don't like kids?) Almost every one of the characters is mean or fractured somehow. The ONLY nice character (Yuki's eventual husband) winds up getting shafted by all of the cruddy people around him.

That said, if you yearn for something that excels at description, this is for you. It's great inspiration for an aspiring writer who might not know how to make some of those details click yet.