LOVE MADE OF HEART

Bland and coy as its title, this debut novel tells the story of a young woman coming to terms with her troubled family past. Twenty-seven-year-old Ruby Lin has finally gotten her life together, working as a manager of special events at San Francisco's upscale St. Mark Hotel and finishing her B.A. at night. Just as she is settling into a gorgeous new apartment, her mother shows up, having left Ruby's abusive father. A month later mom is still there, locked into the spare bedroom, starving herself and arguing with voices no one else can hear. The worried Ruby has her placed in a residential care facility and goes into therapy to explore her violent childhood in America and Hong Kong. Through flashbacks and extended therapy scenes, we discover the secrets of Ruby's past—the periodic rages of her inexpressive father, the criticisms and guilt trips meted out by her overly fastidious mother—as she obligingly reaches epiphanies in time to solve all her problems, sitcom-like, by book's end. While there are occasional moving moments, they are cheapened by characters who speak in identical, didactic voices ("You must forgive yourself, Ruby," says her therapist. "Now that you're cognizant of your behaviors, you won't use those methods of communicating"). The pattern is broken only by Ruby's elderly neighbor, Mrs. Nussbaum, a caricature who makes endless pots of soup and punctuates her speech with Yiddishisms. There is little new here to satisfy readers looking for a fresh voice in Asian-American fiction. Agent, Stacey Glick, Jane Dystel Literary Agency. (Oct.)