The I Index

Heart Radical: A Search for Language, Love, and Belonging

Top of the pile

87

/100

I Index Overall Rating

Readers

94/100

Critics

81/100

Scholars

N/A

Author:

Anne Liu Kellor

Publisher:

She Writes Press

Date:

September 7, 2021

As a mixed-race, bilingual Chinese American woman, Anne grew up unsure where she belonged. In her 20s, she traveled alone to live and teach English in China, her mother's birthplace, a journey toward self-actualization she considers with the wisdom of middle age.

What The Reviewers Say

Amy Reardon,
Los Angeles Review of Books
Like the best literary heroines, Heart Radical’s protagonist declines again and again with each new turn of the story to be subsumed by the men she meets in her travels. Even in the confusion and darkness that guides much of her odyssey, this self-professed quiet, heteronormative good girl nevertheless listens until she can hear her body and mind. To do so, she leans on her senses, on art, literature, dance, meditation, and mostly language. This writer digs until she finds and exposes that deeply human hum. Her prose is at its best in the story’s most vulnerable moments.
Chin-Sun Lee,
The Adroit Journal
... [a] sensitive, soulful memoir.
Kristine Morris,
Foreword Reviews
... intimate and revealing.