(hope you don’t mind wandering commenters, procrastinating on their own booklogs by reading other people’s) – I really enjoyed this as well. I’d completely forgotten the blurb when I started reading, and I loved that the family really are from another world, and both cultures, and the interaction, are so well drawn. It reminded me a lot of Anne Fadiman’s The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down, which is nonfiction about a Hmong family’s interactions with the American medical system - there’s a bit in there where an educator gets a family to line up in their traditional hierarchy (men and elders), and then line up again based on their experiences as first gen immigrants, where suddenly the youngest family members get the power by speaking English, and gender often switches as well. I thought Zamatryna was a great example of that.

I agree with you that the ending’s too neat, and one of my own buttons was having everybody be matched up in couples at the end (or almost matched up, clown-throwing aside); but they don’t go back, and they do think, and change. Very cool.