Where Reasons End by Yiyun Li

 Friday, July 9, 2021--San Antonio

Where Reasons End by Yiyun Li is not your typical novel.  There is no plot.  Instead, there are a series of conversations that tend to involve philosophical reasoning.  The conversations take place between a mother and her deceased 16-year-old son who committed suicide.  The son was very intelligent with signs of being a prodigy based on his use of vocabulary and his form of reasons from a very young age.  Early in the book, I considered quitting it.  But then I went to the reviews and found that ratings were fairly evenly distributed among the "stars" in the 5-star system.  As I continued reading, I found myself thinking both positively and negatively about the book.  I've never been a big fan of philosophical reasoning, and there is a LOT of it.  In fact, there is so much of it that I found myself wondering if some of the writer's purpose in writing the book was to insert a bunch of philosophical ideas that she had collected over the years.  However, the author herself lost a 16-year old son.  So I eventually chalked up the discussions to be based more on the types of discussions she had had with him before he died as well as the ones she imagined she could have had with him after his death.  Anyway, the book is short (about 170 pages) and I stayed with it reading about 20 pages a day.  By the end, I felt a bit more positive about it.  I gave it 3 1/2 stars out of 5.