Next Time Will Be Our Turn
A grandmother tells her granddaughter about her twisty, often surprising, journey to who she is now in this sweeping love story by USA Today bestselling author Jesse Q. Sutanto.
Izzy Chen is dreading her family’s annual Chinese New Year celebration, where they all come together at a Michelin-starred restaurant to flaunt their status and successes in hopes to one up each other. So when her seventy-three-year-old glamorous and formidable grandmother walks in with a stunning woman on her arm and kisses her in front of everyone, it shakes Izzy to her core. She’d always considered herself the black sheep of the family for harboring similar feelings to the ones her Nainai just displayed.
Seeing herself in her teenage granddaughter's struggles with identity and acceptance, Magnolia Chen tells Izzy her own story, of how as a teen she was sent by her Indo-Chinese parents from Jakarta to Los Angeles for her education and fell in love with someone completely forbidden to her by both culture and gender norms—Ellery, an American college student who became Magnolia's best friend and the love of her life. Stretching across decades and continents, Magnolia's star-crossed love story reveals how life can take unexpected turns but ultimately lead you to exactly who you're meant to be.
- Pages
- 352
- First published
- November 11, 2025
- Language
- English
- Edition
- Ebook
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Shelved by 3 Litcadians
Reviews
Finished November 11, 2025
I'm so disappointed that I was so disappointed by this book. There's a lot of misogyny just baked into Magnolia's culture back home and even though she attempts to disrupt that it's frustrating to read the narrative for about 75% of the book and then add abuse and cheating on top of that it was just a lot of unpleasant topics that weren't fun to read about. real life sucks enough & this just hurt. in the beginning the age gap was a big issue for me because she was still a minor (16 and 22) even though nothing happened until they were older it made me really uncomfortable- and when they finally get together she was still married? the ending just felt cruel. it was an emotional rollercoaster with a final downward plummet that left me feeling bereft and like i wasted my time finishing this. it would have been better to have stopped halfway and live with the hope that it all worked out than to be left with the reality of what happened. I'll never be done with Jesse Q Sutanto, this was just unfortunately a miss for me. so thankful to Berkley for this eARC!
Finished June 13, 2026
Aww Nainai is a boss bitch!!