This Place Is Still Beautiful, by XiXi Tian, follows sisters Annalie and Margaret Flanagan, who are half-Chinese and have been raised by their Chinese single mother after their father walked out on them. When somebody graffitis their garage with a racial slur, Margaret immediately rushes home from her internship in New York. The two sisters come into conflict over what to do; Margaret wants to bring large amounts of attention to it, while Annalie just wants to hide it. Over the course of the summer, they both must grapple with the repercussions of this hate crime, as well as their relationships with their hometown and with each other.

Annalie and Margaret are strikingly different characters. Annalie is the younger one. She’s still in high school, and the fact that she’s white-passing means that she has never experienced racial discrimination to the same extent as Margaret has, something which shifts her perspective over the course of the story. She just wanted to spend the summer flirting with Thom, a cute boy in her grade, She spent all of high school dealing with the social repercussions of being the outspoken Margaret’s sister, so when her sister comes back from college and again starts calling out injustice in their community, Annalie is all the more resentful. However, as she gets a job at a bakery and begins to think more about what she wants to do with her life, she must reevaluate her passive approach to things.

Meanwhile, Margaret spent all of high school campaigning against all sorts of injustice in their town. She had been glad to escape to NYU for college, but returning home forces her to confront her relationship with her mother and with her past wrongs in the form of an internship alongside her ex-boyfriend. She is driven and outspoken, unwilling to compromise her voice for the sake of being more likable.

I went into this book fully expecting to love it; I adore books about sibling relationships, so this sounded right up my alley, particularly since the synopsis seemed to imply that Margaret and Annalie’s relationship was the main focus of the book. However, I found myself very disappointed for multiple reasons. For one, Annalie’s romance plotline ended up taking up virtually the whole book, overshadowing every other aspect of it. I did not come to this book for a love triangle, nor for listening to Annalie moon over a guy who was obviously the wrong choice. I couldn’t even get myself that invested in the other guy, mostly because he felt so superfluous to the entire story. Meanwhile, Margaret’s romance plotline was cute, but just did not get the page time or backstory necessary for me to actually care about it. It also doesn’t help that the entire plot was completely predictable from about three chapters in, down to every single conflict present and its resolution.

I just wanted more out of this book, honestly. I wanted more depth to the sisters’ relationship with each other, since that was frankly the most interesting part of the book. It was definitely enjoyable, and I think the hate crime discussion in it is an important one to have, and one that should be talked about in our media more, but overall I think that the story should have been handled much better. I’m giving This Place Is Still Beautiful 3.5/5 stars.

Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for providing me with a free eARC in exchange for a fair and honest review.