Best Book of 2025?

Okay, I have to start with a confession.

I didn't choose to read The Original Daughter—it chose me. It came anonymously in brown paper at The Paper Boat in Seattle, where they were giving away ARCs in celebration of Independent Bookstore Day. I hadn't heard of it, and since my toxic reader trait is avoiding books unknown to me, I didn't open it. The Original Daughter would hit the new fiction table a week later, and only when it gained some traction did I decide to give it a shot.

Holy f##k.

I read this book in one day. It's been a while since a book has moved me like this, and reading The Original Daughter was like falling in love with prose all over again. It's the kind of book you want to hug when you're finished as if to say thank you. Thank you for consuming me and making it so I'll never be the same again.

Wei is a master at piecing apart the idiosyncrasies of familial relationships, especially in a family as tarnished by abandonment as Genevieve and Arin Yang's. Right away I wanted to protect the unbreakable bond between the two adoptive sisters, only to be smacked with their impossible plight: while both are tenacious, only one can flourish, and their relationship will suffer.

It's clear that Wei knows what it feels like to be surrendered to pressure, so utterly trapped that your acts aren't choices but merely attempts to prevent the immediate loss of all you've worked for. And what happens when that pressure is at odds with the threads that hold your family together? In this gut-wrenching story, Wei explores the intricate relationship between sisters who are as shackled to the pursuit of success as they are to each other and the unforgivable sacrifice when all comes to a head. An enrapturing story about sisterly love so fierce that it's both unshakeable and self-destructive, The Original Daughter is a triumph of a debut.