What does it really mean to grieve someone you didn’t truly know?
Seventeen-year-old Nina Yeung lives by a certain set of rules: Mom’s Basic Rules.
“Yeungs don’t make a scene. Yeungs always look presentable. Yeungs are never late.”
But all of those are thrown out the window when Nina meets Ethan Travvers, a beautiful, artistic, mysterious boy with specks of gold in his eyes. Suddenly, the pressures of senior year don’t seem to be as hefty on Nina’s shoulders, as long as she has Ethan. Until, suddenly: he’s gone.
After Ethan takes his own life, Nina is lost. It feels like she is in a state of perpetual falling. “Yeungs don’t make a scene,” so Nina knows that her grief must stay buried. As she tries and fails to pull herself out of the despair that she’s feeling, everything is thrown into further disarray when her all-too-perfect older sister, Carmen, comes back from college unexpectedly. Secrets are slowly uncovered now that Carmen is back, and it becomes clear to Nina that maybe she didn’t know Ethan or her sister at all.
Author Eunice Chan creates a beautiful mosaic of memories throughout This Side of Falling, portraying grief and family in all of its complexities. As Nina attempts to grapple with her feelings towards Ethan, it is clear that she doesn’t know the whole story.
Many of the chapters are less than 10 pages long, which works to convey how quickly Nina is moving from moment to moment after Ethan’s death. This is then heavily contrasted to the longer chapters that center around her memories of her loved ones, her family, Carmen, her friend Roger, and Ethan.
Capturing the pain of loss is not an easy feat, but Chan does this by using a plethora of analogies and metaphors. As Nina is trying to get back on track with her senior year activities—mainly through playing the violin at her senior recital—Chan describes it as akin to doing a bench-press that is just heavy. Nina thinks about planting her feet and pushing with all her strength, but her arms still shake, and her sweat still forms on her forehead. No matter how hard she tries to straighten her arms, the bar is too heavy. Similarly to the emotions she has been hiding and suppressing, they are crushing her.
This Side of Falling also heavily focuses on the idea of family. While Nina is juggling a million different things, her family is always on the forefront of her mind. This is something I greatly appreciated about Chan’s writing. Growing up Asian American, I am all too familiar with the feeling of upholding the family image. No matter what I was doing, I could hear my mom or dad’s voice in the back of my head, telling me what I should and shouldn’t be doing. This is one of the reasons that Nina felt so authentic as a character. Even though the things she was facing were significantly more important than keeping up appearances, she couldn’t ignore the MBR (Mom’s Basic Rules) that had been ingrained into her brain.
Chan takes readers on a journey of self-discovery through sadness and heartbreak that is realistic, but hopeful. This novel left me with a sense of unease because it didn’t give me the cookie-cutter happy ending that I have come to expect from a lot of young adult books. This book is honest and real, just like Nina, and that made me appreciate it even more than if it had a perfect ending. At the heart of this novel is a story about love. Love for our friends, love for our families, and love for ourselves.
