By: Siri David

*Warning: This review contains spoilers

The novel ‘The Leavers’ is written by Lisa Ko. This novel is about a boy named Deming Guo who grows up in New York City with his mom Polly. Polly works at a nail salon and one day never comes home. Throughout the novel we learn about Polly’s backstory and how she gets detained by immigration services, while also learning about how this affects Deming and how his life changes.

In the start of the novel we learn about Deming’s childhood as he grew up with Polly and the struggles they went through. Polly had a hard time making enough money to support her family, so she was frequently taking out loans and trying to work as many hours as she could at the nail salon. All while this was happening Deming is going through school and he hates it. He is a very unmotivated kid and had no desire to learn or go to school. During this time they are living in an apartment with Polly’s boyfriend Leon. Leon’s sister Vivian and her son Micheal are also living with them. This helped Polly a lot as it was easier to find someone to watch over Deming if she was working.

One day when Polly goes to work she doesn’t come home. She is taken by ICE and Deming is left alone with Leon and his family. None of them knew what happened to Polly and they were all left in confusion. After some time Vivian decided to put Deming up for adoption, and he was adopted by a white couple in upstate New York. Their names are Peter and Kay.

They struggle a lot to connect with Deming due to him being adopted as an older kid, but also because he comes from a different cultural background. They try to change Deming to help him fit in more by changing his name to Daniel. This causes Deming to lose his sense of identity as he gets older. He also just feels disconnected because he still doesn’t know what happened to his mom.

Later on in the story when Deming grows up he gets reconnected with Micheal and Micheal helps him get in contact with his mom. He calls Polly and she is shocked to hear from him, we then get her whole side of the story. She was detained and was held by ICE for months and then was sent back to China. Once in China she got married and got a job, and she didn’t tell anyone about Deming. They reconnect and she finally tells her husband and he is shocked.

Deming then flies out to China to meet Polly. They reconnect but at the end of the book decide that it’s best for Polly to stay in China and for Deming to go back to New York, and they go their separate ways.

This novel represents the struggles that immigrants and children of immigrants face everyday. The raw emotions and feelings that Ko explains in the novel is what many immigrants face. Ko has a good way of bringing all perspectives into this book and changing the way I perceived the adoption process and program in America as she showed how unaware and innocuous Peter and Kay were when it came to Deming’s ethnic background.

This is a well written novel that shows problems that are very relevant in our world right now. It will take you into what immigrants face and it is truly heartbreaking. I recommend this novel to all who feel strongly about what’s happening in our nation and want to understand better or make a difference.