Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name

The book:
After reading this book, I feel nothing but disappointment. The ending is incredibly anticlimactic. I was extremely curious throughout the entire book just to be left almost angry with Clarissa. She basically follows in her mother’s footsteps for the entirety of the book and at the end I expected her to realize the amount of pain and trauma she caused as well as endured. I felt a lot of sympathy for Pankaj and she just kind of left him out to dry. I was left feeling that she is just a bad person.
The end of the book makes it seem like Clarissa is a hero. She successfully avoids her past and disappears into Hong Kong and raises her child with another man. It just does not sit well with me. I feel that this was the cowardly thing to do. This is a real border for me as a reader. I am not sure why this is an issue, possibly because of my gender. I really sympathize with Pankaj. She just took off with his child. The author tries to cover that up with saying that the child could go back and visit her father when shes old enough, but is it really fair that he cannot have any say in his child’s upbringing. So far as we know, the child will probably end up just like her mother. She will never face her problems.
Clarissa finds her mother, and realizes how unhappy she actually is inside. What bothers me about this is that immediately after leaving her miserable mother’s side, she continues in her footsteps. Clarissa picks up, leaves the country, finds a husband, and raises her child with another man. It feels like the author is rewriting the same story from the mother’s perspective. I find it annoying that the book leaves Clarissa doing the exact same thing her mother did. The author attempts to show her actions in a better light, but I feel she is just continuing to make harmful decisions. I was left feeling that the main character is a selfish and cowardly person. She never faces her problems and I do not like that. This is another border for me. I simply do not understand how someone can be ok with simply running from her struggles in life.
Overall I am severely disappointed in this book. I thought that Clarissa would finally break the cycle that her mother put in motion. Instead she seems to simply be furthering it by leaving, and possibly passing it down to her child.
The paper:
I feel like I would like to analyze how her mother’s actions have shaped Clarissa’s decision-making ability. My paper would focus on the psychological side of this book. Clarissa has strongly been affected by her mother’s decisions and I would like to examine how that has reflected on Clarissa’s decision making over the course of her life. There are obvious correlations, but I want to look more at the last few pages of the book. The author tries to show Clarissa’s actions at the end of the novel, such as moving to Hong Kong and finding an Australian man, as positive, but I do not see it that way. I feel that she is simply continuing to make poor decisions that will eventually catch up to her. And when those things catch up to her there is really only one thing that she’ll do. Run.