Edge Case audiobook

5 StarsI am grateful to the publisher ECCO for sending me a copy of this book for review.Hypnotic, touching, and illuminatingI absolutely loved this story. An immigrant story that explores the experiences of professionals who work in the US on work visas, and the difficulties that come from living between countries/cultures. We get to see how our characters struggled with their identities, expectations, and systematic issues that we all face here in the US. I loved reading from a Chinese-Malaysian perspective, and the comparisons that were made between Malaysian and US society. I also enjoyed the exploration of grief. Grieving the loss of loved ones who have passed away, but also the grieving that we do for people who are still around but have left our lives. I liked how Chin structured the story. This plot centered a relationship, and we get moments from the relationship present and past, with a sprinkle of rich cultural stories.The intersectionality of being Asian, fat, a woman, and an immigrant was powerful. The author showed how as an immigrant you can do everything right and still be faced with discrimination due to systematic racism and xenophobia. Some of the feelings that were described when dealing with immigration officials were so familiar that I felt a true connection to our MC. She was an accomplished professional but still found herself living with uncertainty and doubt, and her mental state mirrored the chaos that she was dealing with. Not only the MC but the supporting characters were well developed and used within the story was great. They added depth and texture to the story, and provided a microcosm for the society that out MC was trying to navigate. Clearly I loved this story. I would recommend it to fans of literary fiction and stories about different human experiences.

"Edge Case" usually refers to an unexpected anomaly found while testing the boundaries of an algorithm. This author focuses not only on the literal anomalous presence of one woman in a male-dominated tech field (been there!) but also expands the concept to apply to human interactions in general. The author locks in on how racism, sexism, and xenophobia really feel, even when expectations are low. Maybe the anomaly is the interaction which generates a positive result. If that's the edge case, we have a lot of work to do as humans.

Thanks to Netgalley and Ecco for the early ebook. Edwina comes home to her New York apartment to find that her husband, Marlin, has packed a bag and left leaving no note. Thus begins a modern detective story as the story jumps back and forth as Edwina searches the recent past for clues: She and Marlin are from Malaysia and working in tech as the deadline approaches as they either have to secure a green card or go back. Marlin is also depressed as his father has recently passed away. Marlin has also been exploring alternative beliefs that leave Edwina mystified. Edwina gathers her clues, strays from her vegetarian diet and tries to deal with all her male coworkers who don’t seem to understand the first thing about how to deal with women. This is a very playful first novel that tackles a lot of tough issues with a great dark humor.

Edwina and Marlin are two Malaysian immigrants working in the NY tech industry. The usually logical Marlin turns to communication with spirits to cope after the recent passing of his father, and he walks out on Edwina. EDGE CASE follows Edwina as she examines both herself and their relationship. Interspersed are cringeworthy episodes of lone female employee Edwina working at a company developing a comedian-robot.EDGE CASE is darkly funny (ramen packets are “boiled water someone had farted in“) and lovely- portraying two people simultaneously dealing with different forms of grief. There’s a lot of great nerdy writing here, such as when Edwina compares grief to a coding bug:“The bug was what’s called an integer overflow, which is when a number is too large for its assigned storage capacity and thus can manifest instead as a negative figure. For example, if the number 128 were forced into a signed field that could express only up to 127, the input would ‘overflow’ and be displayed as ˗128. It was mildly gratifying to learn that the human body could also overflow. I idly wondered if, any day now, my pain would grow so great that it converted into happiness.”There are also moments where I felt SEEN for doing something absurd but also universal. Ex: Edwina turns to the internet for advice and does not like the results:“Reading these posts, I felt superiority and abjection blending into a slurry. Surely I was better than these people with their loud, false bravado. Yet wasn’t I on the internet precisely because I wanted someone to give me a to-do list? I objected to the content of the lists, found them laughable, but still—I wanted my hand held, didn’t I?”This book is worth a read. It touches on themes with broad appeal, but it’s the specificity of Edwina’s experience as an immigrant figuring out her identity that I found most compelling. Thanks to Ecco and NetGalley for the review copy!

An intimate look into one side of a marriage on the edge of crumbling as the husband has removed himself without word to the wife, Edwina, we find her stressed by the misogyny at her tech job that may prevent her from getting visa sponsorship and stress from her mother who keeps wondering aloud why she’s in America at all. In New York City distractions from her missing husband abound and she turns to eating meat as her vice throwing away years of vegetarianism. Not so much plot-driven as it is introspective I thoroughly enjoyed being able to watch how Edwina reacts to her present situation. .

Grief unravels her husband and, when he leaves the house without a word after increasingly strange behavior, Edwina sets out to find him. An engaging novel of outer and inner journeys, memories, being an outsider in your place of birth and adopted country, and finding what you didn't think you were looking for.Recommended!

Thanks to Ecco for giving me access to a galley. After reading Chin's excellent, award-winning story collection "Though I Go Home" a few years ago, I knew I wanted to read her next book and couldn't wait to get my hands on this one once I learned of it. To be honest, I merely scanned the synopsis before diving in.The novel follows the professional, marital, and bureaucratic trials of Edwina, an immigrant from Malaysia working as the only woman on the team of an AI-tech startup in New York while trying to figure out why her husband left, where he's gone, and how she can find him and secure their permanent resident status as the expiration on their visas approaches. All the plot elements could have added up to a novel vastly different in tone—this would make an illuminating pairing alongside Lisa Ko's "The Leavers." There are certainly serious sections of heartbreak and melancholy as Edwina deals with separation from her husband and her mother back home in Malaysia, but the overall balance of comic banter with blissfully ignorant friends, cringey office encounters, and some P.I.-lite investigation kept surprising me to the very end.The anxieties of immigration bureaucracy give the whole narrative a through-line of ambient stress that occasionally shatters through the surface. Even as legal immigrants, the weight of visa expiration dates and the quest for green card sponsorship hums in the mind of the narrator. I found Chin's brilliance in keeping this apparent in the narrative without soliloquizing about it to be one of the real strong points of the novel, along with Edwina's patience in dealing with friends and coworkers blissfully unaware of her struggle. There's enough exposition to clue in readers without personal experience of it, but my own background in working abroad on a visa and of helping my wife in her years-long navigation of the U.S. immigration system made it really hit home.I plan to read this one again, and to pay more attention to the moments when Edwina meditates on her motivations for immigrating. While the twists and turns of her tracking down Marlin kept up the momentum in the middle section, and Edwina's dietary experimentation added some psychological tension reminiscent of Han Kang's "The Vegetarian" (including a scene or two that truly shocked me), the ending surprised me. Certainly, the elements threaded throughout made it a logical and satisfying conclusion, but I believe it will reward a second read with renewed focus.

I wasn't quite sure what to expect from this book, especially with a summary that made it seem like a mystery, but it's a quiet gem of a novel.Edwina, a Chinese Malaysian immigrant who works as a QA tester at a startup, comes home from work one day to discover her husband, Marlin, has left. Marlin is an engineer at an IT company, and is also a Chinese Malaysian immigrant, though he is mixed race and has darker skin, leading to many microaggressions and racist encounters with DHS. Edwina begins to spiral, wondering where Marlin is, and begins rethinking her identity as she reflects back over her decision to emigrate, the beginnings of her marriage to Marlin, her career choices, and whether to move forward with the green card process or go back to Malaysia.While there is certainly a plot to this novel, it is at its best when Edwina talks about her relationships, including the difficult and fat-shaming one she has with her mother, the less-than-perfect times with Marlin since his father passed away, her misogynistic coworkers, and her best friend Katie, who is the child of Chinese immigrants and thus doesn't have the same cultural struggles that Edwina does (not to say she doesn't have them, but they are different). I really related to the difficult relationship Edwina has with her mother, and the continuing sense of love she has for her that is also tied up with resentment and obligation. Chin is able to illustrate these tensions very skillfully, but still with a hint of dark humor.If you like clever and heartfelt meditations on culture, immigration, relationships, and identity, I highly recommend this one.

Not your typical missing persons crime story, Edge Case follows Edwina as she must decide whether she can bring her husband back to her, or if she ever really knew him at all. Bonded together by their shared Malaysian nationality, vegetarian and vegan diets, and perils of trying to navigate the US immigration system, Edwina and Marlin are a solid couple. However, after the death of his father, Marlin vanishes inexplicably, leaving behind a destroyed memory of his proposal to Edwina.I thought about the story and its characters long after putting it down. Edwina's exploration of her own place in her relationship, family, birth country and current country are all extremely compelling. The immigration story from the perspective of skilled workers/professionals is one I am interested in reading more of and learning about.Note: I received a free ebook copy of Edge Case from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

Edwina's husband suddenly and mysteriously leaves her. What she thought was a solid marriage suddenly is not and she is in many ways unmoored and adrift from other parts of her life she thought were certain too. She had come to the US dreaming of a new start, free of a mother who has never accepted her the way she is. But in the midst of a week that almost seems like a fever dream she comes to realize that her efforts to blend in have led her to lose sight of who she really is. Her mother with her strange stories of past lives is more a part of her life than ever. Her job and its requirements are increasingly bizarre. She ends up doing things she never would have dreamed of doing a week before. Her search for her husband is in reality a search for herself. Edwina is a funny likeable charachter and narrator. I found myself rooting for her every step of the way. Far from action packed, this is a novel which is a page turner simply because you want to go along for the ride. I thoroughly enjoyed this novel and think at the end of the day it will be on many lists of the year's best books.

I wasn't quite sure what to expect going into this novel but I was pleasantly wowed by the writing. I am from Singapore (the neighboring country of Malaysia) and also a transplant in NYC, so I knew I wanted to read this and I could absolutely identify with the character and what she was struggling with... although I am not sure if everyone else will. Chin did a beautiful jov of bringing us into the inner world of the protagonist Edwina, and I thought the before and after of her husband's depature actually worked very well and aided the unravelling of the plot. This being the uncorrected e-proof, there were some minor grammatical errors. I also feel like the title of the book "Edge Case" doesn't quite do the novel justice, Definitely will be recommending this to my friends to read!