In her latest novel, “Under the Ghost Moon,” Lyn Liao Butler shares her cultural heritage with readers as we meet Joey, the daughter of two Taiwanese physicians. It’s through Joey’s narrative that we learn about Taiwan’s oft-violent history, and the sacrifices that many made to ensure a democratic government. Joey’s journey begins when her last living relative, her brother, dies.

When Joey receives the news that her brother Sam has died, she is stunned. Her shock turns to anger and frustration when she realizes that when Sam was dying, and he kept that fact hidden from her. Sam was her only family as their parents had died when Joey was a young child. Sam raised her as he went to medical school, and the two of them were very close. She had visited Sam in Hawaii a few months before his death, and noticed that he had lost weight. But he brushed it off, and she didn’t think twice about it.

Now he informs her, posthumously, through a series of videos he made for her, that he was diagnosed with late stage pancreatic cancer. He didn’t want prolonged treatment that wouldn’t cure him, just make the suffering last longer. He wanted to go out on his own terms. But in the videos, he also confesses that there is information about their family which he has kept from her. Information about her parents, their nanny, and how their parents died. It’s this information that rocks Joey to her core and causes her to rethink her childhood and her memories of her parents and her nanny.

Butler delves into Taiwan’s history, and we learn about the 228 massacre. It’s called that because it happened on February 28, and tens of thousands of civilians were brutally killed after government agents (KMT) struck a widow selling cigarettes and shot a man defending her. That was just the start of decades of martial law during which many of the intellectual elite in Taiwan disappeared into prisons and burial plots. Reading about Taiwan’s history on Wikipedia isn’t the same as hearing about it from the lips of Butler’s characters, as we feel the trauma of missing family members and the pervasive fear of those who fought against the brutal military rule.

The history is an important part of the story, but central to the plot is Joey and her search for truth. What Joey wants to know is why her family was fractured, why her parents died, and why her brother sent their nanny away. She wants to explore her feelings for Sam’s best friend from childhood, Ethan, but at the same time she’s disheartened by her family’s horrible luck with love. She wonders if there is such a thing as true love because she realizes that it’s certainly not what her parents had.

Butler excels at juggling multiple timelines, and this novel is a perfect example of her ability to seamlessly alternate points of view and time periods. There’s Joey’s narration in the present and her brother’s narration from shortly before his death. Then there is the first person narration from Joey’s mother’s diary, wherein she shares her heartbreak at what has become of her once-idyllic marriage and the cunning manner in which she decides to resolve the problem.

It’s when Joey travels to Taiwan to try to connect with family members that some hard truths about family appear. Not all family members can forgive; not all family members want to be close; and yet surprisingly, some family members are the opposite. In addition to the notion of family and what makes us family is the idea of forgiveness. Joey comes to understand that someone who irrevocably harmed her parents’ marriage may have not been the one at fault. And even though Joey’s father was a very flawed human being, he had some qualities that she could appreciate nonetheless.

This novel is neither a mystery nor really a love story. Rather, it’s the journey of a woman to find family and to understand her family’s history, because then she will be able to understand herself. There’s heartbreak, there’s betrayal, and there’s unimaginable cruelty. But at the end, there’s love and there’s the family that wants to be there for each other, all shared in Butler’s beautifully poignant prose.

This review was first posted on Bookreporter.com.