The author excels at packaging heartache with humor in this cinematic and fast-paced narrative spanning a broad range of modern dilemmas: divorce, dealing with the in-laws, and the secret to how your personality quirks just might make you kill someone. The cast of characters is a realistic portrayal of contemporary Taiwanese society: the housewife who abandoned her career for her marriage, the intellectually and expressively precocious children, and the primary school cliques that form based on whether kids come from dual or single parent households.
A menagerie of animal imagery provides rich material for metaphors, while the human characters drift between home, office, storage unit, and other locales, as if searching for some place to finally settle down when even private spaces seem to force one into various relationships with others, and with society. As the protagonist attempts to get to the core of the mystery, layer after layer of obscurations are peeled away, testing her ability to face up to the fact that the man she loved never revealed what he was really thinking, and now, he never will.