Love Can't Feed You: A Novel

A beautiful, tender yet searing debut novel about intergenerational fractures and coming of age, following a young woman who immigrates to the United States from the Philippines and finds herself adrift between familial expectations and her own burning desires Love Can't Feed You is a stunning, heartbreaking, and compressed look at coming of age, shifting notions of home, and the disintegration of the American dream. It asks us: What does it mean to be of multiple cultures without a road map for how to belong?         After a harrowing flight, Queenie, her younger brother, and their elderly Chinese father arrive in the United States from the Philippines. They’re here to finally reunite with Queenie’s Filipina mother, who has been working as a nurse in Brooklyn for the past few years—building a life that everyone hopes will set them up for better prospects. But her mother is not the same woman she was in the Philippines: Something in her face is different, almost hardened, and she seems so American already.   Queenie, on the cusp of adulthood, has big dreams of attending college, of spending her days immersed in the pages of books. But there is not enough money for her and her brother to both be in school, so first she must work. Queenie rotates through jobs and settles, tentatively, into her new life, but her brother begins to withdraw and act out, and her father’s anger swells. As the pressures of assimilation compound, and the fissures within her family deepen into fractures, Queenie is left suspended between two countries, two identities, and two parents.

About the Author :
Cherry Lou Sy is a writer and playwright originally from the Philippines currently based in Brooklyn, NY. She received her BA at the Gallatin School of Individualized Study at NYU and her MFA in playwriting from Brooklyn College, where she has been an adjunct lecturer in the English and American Studies departments. Cherry is also a teacher with PEN America’s DREAMing Out Loud. She has received fellowships and residencies from VONA, Tin House, and elsewhere. Love Can’t Feed You is her debut novel.

Review :
Winner of the Zibby Award for Best Coming-of-Age Book A CBS New York Book Club Top 3 FickPick A People Book of the Week Gold House October Book Club Pick An Amazon Best Book of the Month One of Vanity Fair’s “Can’t-Miss Novels to Read in November” “[A] gorgeously written, shattering debut…Deeply compassionate and devastating.” —People, "Best of October" “A tender-hearted coming-of-age story” —Harper’s Bazaar, "Best Books of Fall" “Occasionally dark, ultimately profound, Love Can’t Feed You illustrates the challenge of figuring out who you are when your life straddles two worlds.” —Real Simple “This powerful debut novel explores the complexities of immigration, identity, and family through the lens of Queenie, a young Filipina woman navigating life in the U.S. as she balances familial expectations and her own ambitions. Set against the backdrop of the American dream, Queenie’s journey paints a vivid portrait of intergenerational fractures, cultural displacement, and the longing for belonging.” —Gold House “Astonishing . . . Sy skillfully lays bare Queenie’s wide-ranging emotions, from rage to sadness, and reveals the nuances of the family members’ relationships. Rich details of Filipino culture such as folk stories and religious iconography are interwoven with gritty depictions of the compromises made by the immigrant characters . . . It’s a knockout.” —Publishers Weekly, *starred review* “Strong characterizations and heartfelt emotions are well depicted in this engrossing coming-of-age story, full of surprising narratives.” —Library Journal “Love Can't Feed You is a stunningly written, devastating book about all manners of suspension, between countries, between parents, between identities, between what it is to be a woman and what it is to be a girl. Cherry Lou Sy is a brilliant and exacting observer of human uncertainty and desire and this book is an utter thrill.” —Lynn Steger Strong, author of Flight “One of my favorite genres is New York City immigrant literature, and so it is extra-thrilling to immerse oneself in a new entry in that canon! Cherry Lou Sy brings her expert playwriting gifts into the realm of Filipina coming-of-age novel and the results are stunning. At every turn, I was struck by our storyteller’s stunning precision—that kind of attention to detail is often described as ‘cold’ and ‘sharp’ but in Cherry Lou Sy’s moving novel the skill is sourced from much warmth and tenderness. Plus, the unwillingness to simplify and spoon-feed identity is key to why Love Can't Feed You works so well; this novel is an intensely engrossing master-class in a most real all-encompassing humanity!” —Porochista Khakpour, author of Tehrangeles "Love Can't Feed You is a searing, searching, soulful novel of the utmost humanity. An intoxicating examination of desire and shame, at turns sublimely tender and incandescent with rage, it asks who deserves to live with dignity in an America divided by class, color, and capitalism. I devoured this book." —Cecily Wong, author of Kaleidoscope “Cherry Lou Sy’s picaresque-like Love Can't Feed You follows five years of our mixed Chinese Filipina narrator’s life as she immigrates to New York, adapts to her family’s fracturing dynamic, and transitions to adulthood. Imbued with folklore and biting social critique, this novel interrogates the ways young women come to terms with their own desires inside familial and social structures designed to work against them. ‘We can’t eat stories,’ the narrator claims, but I swallowed this alternately haunting and heartening tale whole, and chewed on it long after.” —Jami Nakamura Lin, author of The Night Parade “In Love Can’t Feed You, Cherry Lou Sy keenly and compassionately evokes a vivid cast of characters. Queenie is an irresistibly honest and wise narrator who carries the reader along as she navigates her many identities—Filipina, Chinese, New Yorker, immigrant, daughter, sister, student, worker, woman, friend, lover. Rich with emotional nuance and deeply absorbing, Love Can’t Feed You is a potent debut from a powerful new voice.” —Helen Phillips, author of The Need “A rollercoaster of emotions and an assault on the senses. Through the lives of one family, Sy has distilled the immigrant experience down to its most painful and traumatic moments, in the process writing an intelligent, wide ranging gut-punch of a debut. Queenie, the protagonist, is the very personification of instinct, curiosity, dislocation, and adaptation. This is a New York book that captures well what happens when life becomes about survival more than living.” —Alejandro Varela, author of The Town of Babylon