Review of Rental House by Weike Wang

*Rental House* by Weike Wang (2024). Published by Riverhead Books.

If you’re new here, and stumbled upon this blog through the mythical powers of the Internet, welcome! I know a lot of visitors to my website are people who randomly come upon this website through search engines like Google, but I also do have a lot of visitors who come back. Regardless: my name is Ashley, and I started this blog in order to keep track of everything I’m coming across in the world.

As a book blogger, something I’ve always been super clear about and dedicated towards promoting are local libraries. I know having access to a good library is a privilege, and there are countries where people don’t really have access to books at all. I am so grateful every day that I have access to a decent library system, especially in today’s world.

This blog post is coming out when I was thankfully employed, but when I was reading this book and writing this post, I was unemployed. I was unemployed for over a year thanks to circumstances very much out of my control, and in order to cope with the mounds of job applications I was turning to literature and movies in order to try and get my sanity back.

My library was a sacred space for me because of how it was a place where you could linger for free, as well as getting books, DVDs, and so much more for free. They even stopped charging late fees, so if I needed a book an extra day or two (anything longer would make me very guilty), I could hang onto it to finish that last chapter.

I was going to the library every week to find a new book, and a lot of what I was doing was wandering the new fiction and regular stacks to see if there’s something I could read among the shelves. I went really outside of my comfort zone doing this—that’s been a broader goal of mine throughout my little blogging adventures. Reading diversely is important to me!

I had heard of this specific book before seeing it at the library, but when I saw it on the shelves I decided it was time to finally read it and see what it was about. It’s a fairly short read, so you could probably read the entire book over a weekend unless you don’t have time or your attention span is fried.

Let’s get into the review! I don’t want to keep going on and on during the introduction.

For one interracial American couple, a rental house with their parents becomes a trial for their relationship.

In this novel, we have two main characters: Keru and Nate. We learn a lot about their backgrounds over the course of the novel, but for the sake of brevity in this review, let’s describe them upfront.

Keru is the daughter of Chinese immigrants, who, like many other Asian immigrants, are strict and tight about how life should be lived. They have a different kind of ambition than Nate’s family, especially who and what they left behind when they came to the United States from China.

For Nate, his family consists of rural white Americans. Think of the stereotypes in some ways, and you might have an idea of what his family is like. They don’t understand his decision to go to a prestigious college, and they certainly don’t understand when he chooses to date and then marry a foreigner.

Speaking of said prestigious college: that’s where these two met. By the time this novel starts though, they’ve been married for a bit, and now they went to go to a rental house. The first half of the novel is about vacationing with their families, Nate’s family really doesn’t understand why he would want a job in academia or pursue higher education, and Keru has some friction with them and her own traditional parents.

Something somewhat big happens during this vacation, which leads to consequences. The second half of the novel takes place some time after, when Nate’s dad has already passed from a heart attack, and then we see some tension in their own marriage as Keru spends a lot of her time in another city for work.

Then Keru and Nate decide to go on their own vacation, which leads to different sets of questions and how they’re going to handle the scenarios in place. A lot of what this is getting at is this: what do you do when your chosen family, as well as your original family, becomes a point of contention?

These two have very different backgrounds, and kudos to them for trying to make it work. This is a portrait of marriage, especially an interracial one, and how it looks like for this specific couple trying to navigate their own issues.

Overall Thoughts

For me, I feel like this novel is one you’re either going to love or hate. I didn’t care for it much personally, although I did find the interracial marriage and the issues that arose from it, especially with Nate being from an Appalachian background, to be quite interesting in the end.

The writing style to me felt a little cut and dry, which can be fine for this story, but it made it a bit more difficult to get through. The characters didn’t come alive in a way that I wanted them to, which, as I mentioned before, is fine. It just isn’t what I expected in the end.

Anyways: give this book a chance if it interests you. I don’t think I’ll be returning to it personally, but I could see how someone else might really enjoy this novel or even see themselves in it. I did find the situations depicted in it to be realistic, and I enjoy seeing how people from underserved and immigrant backgrounds are able to find successful careers for themselves in a competitive world that doesn’t favor them.

Go to your local library or indie bookstore to find a copy!

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