Goodreads Blurb

Four years after their bitter divorce, Claire and Aaron Litvak get a phone call no parent is prepared for: Their twenty-two-year-old daughter Lindsey, teaching English in China during a college gap year, has been critically injured in a hit-and-run accident. At a Shanghai hospital they wait at her bedside, hoping for the best and preparing for the worst.

The accident unearths a deeper fissure in the family: the shocking event that ended the Litvaks’ marriage and turned Lindsey against them. Estranged from her parents, she has confided only in her younger sister, Grace, adopted as an infant from China. As Claire and Aaron struggle to get their bearings in bustling, cosmopolitan Shanghai, the newly prosperous “miracle city,” they face troubling questions about Lindsey’s life there, in which nothing is as it seems.

My Review: Rated 3 out of 5 stars

Life can change in the blink of an eye. You mindlessly go through life like you are in survival mode. Lindsey Litvak was searching for her place in this world, and unfortunately, life put her through terrible challenges; she was alone in finding where she fit in society. While struggling to survive in China, a different country from where she grew up, a careless driver hit her with his car, changing the course of her life forever. That one second of a life amid death will unravel a broken family secret. Readers will have a front-row seat to the life Lindsey had led up to this horrifying unknown moment, fighting between life and death.

Having a support system and a family to guide you when you grow up plays a role in your future. Claire and Aaron Litvak had Lindsey and adopted Grace from China. Lindsey’s childhood wasn’t too bad until she fell in love with a married man; this was the beginning of her downfall. What gave Lindsey comfort was the close bond she had with her sister.

I wasn’t thrilled about this story. In part, it could be that I don’t enjoy reading about broken families and because the police officers investigating this incident did nothing to find out who the culprit was. They had many opportunities to find the suspect, and they dragged their feet. I had hoped that Grace would have located people from Lindsey’s past in China. She did run into one, but that character kept the secret of knowing Lindsey to herself. It’s a sad, dark story without a happy ending. It was a story about a female trying to figure out life and walking straight into harm’s way. Some topics this book addresses include the bonds between sisters, finding love with the wrong men, being an escort while living through terrifying experiences, dealing with the dynamics of parental divorce, and coping with death.

Author Biography

Jennifer Haigh is an American novelist and short story writer. Her new novel MERCY STREET takes on the contentious issue of abortion rights, following the daily life of Claudia Birch, a counselor at an embattled women’s clinic in Boston.


Her last novel, HEAT AND LIGHT, looks at a Pennsylvania town divided by the controversy over fracking, and was named a Best Book of 2016 by The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal and NPR. Earlier books include the novel FAITH, about a beloved Boston priest accused of a molesting a child in his parish, and THE CONDITION, the story of a woman diagnosed in childhood with Turner’s Syndrome.

Haigh’s critically acclaimed debut novel MRS. KIMBLE won the PEN/Hemingway Award for first fiction. Her second novel, the New York Times bestseller BAKER TOWERS, won the PEN/L. L. Winship Award for outstanding book by a New England author. Her short story collection NEWS FROM HEAVEN won of the Massachusetts Book Award and the PEN New England Award in Fiction. A Guggenheim Foundation Fellow and a graduate of the Iowa Writer’s Workshop, she writes frequently for The New York Times Book Review. Her fiction has been published in eighteen languages.