Name: Dear Fang, with Love
Rating: 4.2 (5 reviews)
ISBN: 9781101875773

Rufi Thorpe

Lucas and Katya were boarding school seniors when they decided to have a baby. Seventeen years later, and after a decade of absence, Lucas is newly involved in his daughter Vera's life. But after Vera suffers a terrifying psychotic break at a high school party Lucas takes her to Vilnius, Lithuania, his grandmother's homeland, for the summer. As he uncovers a secret about his grandmother, a Home Army rebel who escaped Stutthof, Vera searches for answers to Lucas's past mistakes and her own uncertain future.

Dear Fang, with Love

Lucas and Katya were boarding school seniors when, blindingly in love, they decided to have a baby. Seventeen years later, after a decade of absence, Lucas is a weekend dad, newly involved in his daughter Vera's life. But after Vera suffers a terrifying psychotic break at a high school party, Lucas takes her to Lithuania, his grandmother's homeland, for the summer. Here, in the city of Vilnius, Lucas hopes to save Vera from the sorrow of her diagnosis. As he uncovers a secret about his grandmother, a Home Army rebel who escaped Stutthof, Vera searches for answers of her own. Why did Lucas abandon her as a baby? What really happened the night of her breakdown? And who can she trust with the truth? Skillfully weaving family mythology and Lithuanian history with a story of mental illness, inheritance, young love, and adventure, Rufi Thorpe has written a breathtakingly intelligent, emotionally enthralling book.

Dear Fang, With Love

ikkychan

When members of my book club voiced their frustration with unreliable narrators, I found myself reconsidering my own resistance to the trope. I understand the complaint: most readers want firm ground beneath them, a clear line to follow, a sense that the author isn’t deliberately misleading them. There’s comfort in coherence. But the more I thought about it, the more unreliable narration began to feel not like a trick, but like an honest reflection of how we move through the world. After all, unreliability is something we practice daily. Because of bias, fear, guilt, naïveté, or self-interest, we routinely distort reality—not always consciously, but persistently. We reshape events to protect ourselves or to make sense of what would otherwise feel intolerable. This shaping is a form of myth-making, and in that sense, we are all unreliable narrators of our own lives. When writers use this device well, they’re not obscuring truth; they’re mimicking consciousness itself, showing how identity and culture are built not on facts alone, but on the stories we choose to tell and believe. Rufi Thorpe’s 
 Dear Fang, With Love
 takes this idea seriously. Myth-making in the novel becomes a way of examining how identity is constructed and defended. The book suggests that the self is not a stable essence, but a personal mythology—one we revise constantly in order to live with ourselves. Here, the unreliable narrator isn’t a broken reporter so much as an unconscious (and sometimes very deliberate) mythographer. Unreliability is the tool that shapes raw experience into something patterned and survivable. For Thorpe’s characters, myth-making is less an artistic impulse than a coping strategy. People reach for it when responsibility feels unbearable, when staying put would mean confronting damage they helped create. The novel centers on Lucas, a man in his thirties, and Vera, the daughter he effectively abandoned for seven years. After Vera experiences a manic episode at her prom—cutting her wrist in front of her classmates—Lucas responds not by learning how to care for her in the present, but by proposing a trip. He takes her to Vilnius, Lithuania, ostensibly to help her heal while he traces his family history through his grandmother Sylvia, a Holocaust survivor. He convinces himself that a change of scenery, and the weight of history, might do what he cannot. On the surface, the gesture appears generous, even brave: a father uprooting his life to help his mentally ill daughter recover. But Thorpe is careful to show that travel functions here as avoidance long before it becomes connection. Lucas does not know how to be present with Vera in Los Angeles. He does not know how to sit with her illness, her fear, or his own role in her loneliness. So he changes the setting. Distance promises relief: a break from routines where failure is obvious, a narrative arc that suggests progress, the comforting illusion that movement itself equals healing. Thorpe steadily dismantles this fantasy. Vera’s illness does not respond to geographical shift. Lucas’s emotional immaturity does not improve because the streets are older or more symbolic. The trip cannot metabolize what Lucas refuses to face. Travel delays reckoning; it does not enact it. Vilnius also functions as symbolic inheritance. Lucas frames his grandmother’s trauma as a key to understanding himself and, by extension, Vera. History becomes explanatory: this is why my family is broken; this is why I am this way; this is why my daughter suffers. Thorpe treats this impulse with skepticism. Lucas’s engagement with the past is selective and self-serving. He wants tragedy without responsibility, suffering without accountability, explanation without transformation. His grandmother’s story becomes a mythic alibi, a way to locate pain somewhere noble and external rather than in his own failures as a father. Thorpe does not deny the reality of historical trauma, but she refuses to let it absolve present harm. In this novel, history may explain—but it does not excuse. The book is most incisive when it shows myth-making as emotional anesthesia. Lucas constantly narrativizes himself: the sensitive young father who “wasn’t ready,” the romantic exile, the damaged man doing his best. These stories allow him to feel tragic instead of negligent. They soften the edges of abandonment and let him imagine himself as complex rather than simply absent. Vera, too, mythologizes—but in a fundamentally different way. Her emails to Fang, her boyfriend, are lyrical, intimate, sometimes grandiose. They’re filled with heightened meaning. For Vera, myth is not an escape but a container. When her mind becomes untrustworthy, narrative helps her stabilize reality. The difference matters: Lucas uses myth to avoid responsibility; Vera uses it to survive instability. Thorpe does not condemn myth-making itself—only the way its costs are unevenly distributed. She clearly pointed out that the one who pays the price is usually those who are at the short end of the stick. By the novel’s end, Thorpe makes her position clear without sermonizing. Healing does not come from distance, explanation, or symbolic gestures. It comes from sustained presence. Lucas’s growth—limited, imperfect, but real—does not occur while uncovering family history or wandering foreign streets. It happens in small, uncomfortable moments: when he listens instead of narrating, stays instead of reframing, and allows discomfort to exist without converting it into a story. This shift becomes visible in the scene with Susan, where Lucas’s preferred coping mechanism finally fails. Accustomed to survival through narration, he approaches Susan assuming she will receive his story. He even notes how grateful he is for “such a clear cue to begin my narrative.” The word performative hangs quietly in the background. Susan’s refusal is devastating because it is calm rather than cruel. She does not dispute his pain or challenge his facts. She simply refuses the role he has assigned her. “It’s not my job to leap in and help you get your life sorted,” she tells him. In that moment, Lucas confronts the illusion that healing comes from being understood by the right audience. Susan exposes the narcissism embedded in his vulnerability: his pain is real, but he has repeatedly outsourced the labor of repair to women willing—or expected—to absorb it. He is not rejected as a person; he is rejected as a story. Crucially, Susan offers no alternative narrative. No consolation, no redemptive arc. She leaves Lucas alone with the discomfort he usually transforms into meaning. Thorpe signals here that healing will require him to remain inside feeling without immediately translating it into explanation. If Susan represents the collapse of narration, Katya, Vera’s mother, represents its opposite: care without commentary. In the hospital scenes with Vera, almost nothing is explained. Katya does not theorize about illness or search for meaning. She does not require reciprocity. She performs care through ordinary, embodied acts—washing, brushing hair, choosing textures and smells, returning the next day. This is care stripped of interpretation. Lucas’s role shifts accordingly. He does not lead or fix or narrate. He becomes, as he puts it, a sentinel—someone whose job is simply to stay. Earlier in the novel, activity meant movement, research, explanation. Here, it looks like repetition, routine, waiting. Thorpe shows how unglamorous healing is, how procedural. When Katya breaks down after leaving the room, it becomes clear that presence does not eliminate pain; it redistributes it so the most vulnerable person does not carry it alone. This understanding is tested when Lucas confronts Adam, who plans to leave Rūta once his program ends. Adam’s reasoning echoes Lucas’s younger self: lack of readiness, lack of money, the belief that love can exist without responsibility, that departure is neutral if framed honestly. Lucas challenges him, while privately mourning the fact that no one once challenged him in the same way. What matters is not that Lucas “wins” the argument—he doesn’t—but that he finally articulates a truth he has long avoided: “Simple and easy are different.” By contradicting Adam, Lucas is not claiming moral superiority; he is acknowledging regret. He understands that no one stopped him from leaving, and that the absence of resistance allowed him to believe his choices were ethically weightless. Thorpe avoids redemption fantasy here. Growth is not efficacy, but clarity. Lucas no longer mistakes freedom for innocence. In Dear Fang, With Love, healing is not achieved through insight, distance, or symbolic movement. It emerges only when Lucas relinquishes narrative control and accepts the unglamorous labor of staying—without guarantees, without explanation, without applause. Susan teaches him that vulnerability performed as story is still control. Katya teaches him that care does not require interpretation. Vera teaches him that love means returning tomorrow. Adam teaches him, retroactively, what Lucas needed to learn when it mattered. This sharply contrasts with The Girls from Corona del Mar, where Lorrie Ann uses myth-making and disappearance to evade the unbearable. Across both novels, Thorpe suggests the same hard truth: you can’t think your way out of obligation, aestheticize your way into love, or travel far enough to escape what you owe. Thorpe is deeply suspicious of elegant suffering—the kind that looks meaningful from the outside while leaving others to carry the cost. Travel, myth, and self-reinvention are seductive because they feel active and brave. Without accountability, they become moral theater. In Dear Fang, With Love, healing is not a revelation. It is not a story. It is not a place. It is staying when leaving would be easier—and accepting that love does not improve your narrative arc.

Jeannette Ordas

This is really a 4.5 star book but I'm bumping it up to five because this book just thrilled me in so many ways. Partly the reason I felt so close to this book is that it takes place in Vilnius, Lithuania (my fatherland) and I've been there and the author really writes about it in such a charming and delightful way. It is probably one of my favourite cities and she really captures all of its specialness. and uniqueness. Plus, there is interesting relationships between father and daughter, about mental illness and bipolar disorder and about history and the holocaust. Not only did I feel like I learned about my own history a bit (my father never talks about life in Lithuania so I use books to fill in the large gaps), but it's a good reminder to keep travelling and learning and not forgetting the past. Plus, the pink cover just looked so good on my nightstand. One of the best books I've read this year.

After a frightening psychotic break at a high-school party in California, Vera has been diagnosed with bipolar disorder. Suddenly, she and her family are plunged into the absurdity and banality of the mental health system. Her father Lucas, who has only recently re-entered Vera's life, hatches an unlikely plan: he will take her to Lithuania, homeland of his grandmother. Maybe trying to reconnect to his family's past can show them the way forward for Vera's future. But Lithuania turns out to be a much stranger and darker place than either of them could have imagined. As Lucas searches Vilnius for answers about his family, Vera struggles with her own impossible questions: What really happened the night of her episode? And who is it safe to tell? Skillfully weaving family mythology and Lithuanian history with a story of memory, mental illness, young love and adventure, Rufi Thorpe has written a wildly accomplished, stunningly emotional book.

Dear Fang, with Love

Reviews

Highlights