For Yip-Williams, accepting death meant embracing life. Answering her daughter Mia's wish to narrate her story, Yip-­Williams, who died in 2018 at age 42, shares an emotional and powerful work of family and living with a visual disability. Born to an ethnic Chinese family living in poverty in Vietnam, the author also had congenital cataracts and was legally blind. To save her from a life of dependency, her grandma suggested a potion that would allow her granddaughter to sleep-and never wake up. Yip-Williams tells intertwining accounts of fate and luck; her family fleeing Vietnam during a period of ethnic cleansing, making their way to a refugee camp in Hong Kong and ultimately to California, where she would receive sight-giving surgery. Yip-Williams describes her resentment, her feelings of not fitting in because of her thick glasses and later being diagnosed with Stage IV colon cancer in the midst of a successful law career. Yip-­Williams relates her final journey of physical, emotional, and spiritual fatigue, writing letters to daughters Mia and Isabelle and husband Josh along the way. VERDICT Similar to Paul Kalanithi's When Breath Becomes Air, this page-turner will be hard to keep on the shelves.-Stephanie Sendaula, Library Journal © Copyright 2019. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Yip-Williams chronicles her medical and psychological struggles with the metastatic colon cancer that killed her in March 2018; she was 42.As she writes, the author barely escaped childhood. Born in Vietnam (to Chinese parents) with severe cataracts, her grandmother decided that, due to her blindness, she be "filled as an infant." Thankfully, family and friends with moral consciences demurred, and the young girl eventually escaped with her family, arriving in the United States, where she pursued an education at Williams College, earned a law degree at Harvard, and commenced a career. The diagnosis came in 2013, and the author, who divides her text by years, journeys around in time in each section with evident ease. Her story is unquestionably painfuland sadly familiar to those suffering from terminal illnesses. Moving among doctors, hospitals, scans, tests, and surgeries as well as increasingly darker news and deepening emotional and psychological stress, on her and her familythese are the events she relates, sometimes with a reporter's disinterest, other times with a sufferer's anger, depression, and sorrow. Yip-Williams had two daughters, both early in elementary school, and her grief at not being able to be with themto see them grow and matureis palpable throughout. Along the way, the author considers a fundamental question: Is it more courageous to keep struggling (trying new meds and procedures, seeing new specialists) or to surrender to the inevitable? Eventually, she realizes, she will have to do the latter, and she enters hospice care. Although she is careful to tell stories of other sufferers she met, she does not talk about her great fortune of having a substantial income and a good health care plan. She confesses that she is not traditionally religious but does believe in a God and an afterlife.The human confrontation with deathstark and painful and often inspiring. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

*Starred Review* This is the poignant and compelling memoir of Yip-Williams' battle with and eventual surrender to cancer. Entries written in real time during the five years between the author's diagnosis and death document her deteriorating physical condition, her emotional angst, and her family's anguish. Throughout, she reflects on her life and reveals what an amazing miracle it has been. Born blind in Vietnam, she survived a perilous boat trip as a refugee, came to the U.S., excelled in school, traveled, earned a law degree from Harvard, enjoyed a successful career, got married, and had two daughters all by age 37, when this story begins. Her writing is honest and, by turns, angry, humorous, and heart-breaking, especially when she talks about her two little girls, who are just starting elementary school. Even though readers know the ending the prologue indicates that if they're reading this, she's already gone every bit of new bad news hits like a blow to the gut. Readers' will smile when Yip-Williams facetiously describes the slutty second wife she envisions for her husband and share in her grief as she makes plans for her funeral. Never mawkish, The Unwinding of the Miracle will resonate with readers.--Kathleen McBroom Copyright 2018 Booklist

When lawyer Yip-Williams was diagnosed with stage-IV colon cancer at the age of 37 in 2013, she decided to write her story, which resulted in this inspiring and remarkable work that chronicles her immigration to the U.S. and her final five years. Born in Vietnam with congenital cataracts, Yip-Williams writes that her grandmother-who deemed her a burden to the family-had found an herbalist she hoped would administer a potion to put the infant to "sleep forever." He refused, and Yip-Williams's ethnic Chinese family later moved to Hong Kong, where a Catholic charity sponsored their relocation to California, where Yip-Williams was raised and underwent corrective eye surgery. She attended Harvard Law School, joined a firm where she met her husband, moved to Brooklyn, and had two children. After her diagnosis, she was determined to make the most of the time left (she died in March 2018), and to leave a written legacy for her daughters. Yip-Williams faced cancer head on, with "brutal honesty," anger, humor, and resolve. Planning her death, she made Costco runs, traveled to the Galapagos Islands, found a child psychologist for her daughters ages six and eight, and even joked about her husband getting a "Slutty Second Wife." Yip-Williams's wise and moving account of her battle with cancer is an extraordinary call to live wholeheartedly. (Jan.) c Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

when we meet Julie Yip-Williams at the beginning of "The Unwinding of the Miracle," her eloquent, gutting and at times disarmingly funny memoir, she has already died, having succumbed to colon cancer in March 2018 at the age of 42, leaving behind her husband and two young daughters. And so she joins the recent spate of debuts from dead authors, including Paul Kalanithi and Nina Riggs, who also documented their early demises. We might be tempted to assume that these books were written mostly for the writers themselves, as a way to make sense of a frightening diagnosis and uncertain future; or for their families, as a legacy of sorts, in order to be known more fully while alive and kept in mind once they were gone. By dint of being published, though, they were also written for us - strangers looking in from the outside. From our seemingly safe vantage point, we're granted the privilege of witnessing a life-altering experience while knowing that we have the luxury of time. We can set the book down and mindlessly scroll through Twitter, defer our dreams for another year or worry about repairing a rift later, because our paths are different. Except that's not entirely true. Life has a 100 percent mortality rate; each of us will die, and most of us have no idea when. Therefore, Yip-Williams tells us, she has set out to write an "exhortation" to us in our complacency: "Live while you're living, friends." Before her diagnosis in 2013, YipWilliams had done more than her share of living. It was, indeed, something of a miracle that she was alive at age 37 when she traveled to a family wedding and ended up in the hospital where she received her cancer diagnosis. Born poor and blind to Chinese parents in postwar Vietnam, she was sentenced to death by her paternal grandmother, who believed that her disability would bring shame to the family and render her an unmarriageable burden. But when her parents brought her to an herbalist and asked him to euthanize her, he refused. The family would eventually survive a dangerous escape on a sinking boat to Hong Kong, and less than a year later make their way to the United States, where at 4 years old, Yip-Williams had a surgery that granted her some vision, if not enough to drive or read a menu without a magnifying glass. She would go on to defy her family's expectations, eventually graduating from Harvard Law School, traveling the world solo and working at a prestigious law firm where she meets Josh, the love of her life. She becomes a mother and, soon after, a cancer patient, and soon after that, because of this unfortunate circumstance, a magnificent writer. during the five years from her diagnosis to her death, we enter her world in the most intimate way as she cycles through Elisabeth Kiibler-Ross's famous stages of grieving: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. Describing the ways in which terminally ill patients cope with their own deaths, these stages weren't meant to delineate a neat sequential progression but rather the various emotional states a dying person might visit, leave and visit again. Yip-Williams toggles between optimism and despair, between believing she'll defy the statistics as she had so many times in her life - "odds are not prophecy" - and trying to persuade her husband to confront their harrowing reality. She makes bargains with God, just as she did as a young girl when, in exchange for her poor vision, she asked for a soul mate one day. ("God accepted my deal!") She posts pictures of contented normalcy on Facebook - of meals cooked, a car purchased - but rages at her husband, healthy people, the universe and, silently, at the moms at a birthday party who ask how she's doing. "Oh, fine. Just hanging in there," she replies, while wanting to scream: "I didn't deserve this! My children didn't deserve this!" She frets about the "Slutty Second Wife" her husband will one day marry and the pain her daughters will experience in her absence. And, near the end, she oscillates between being game to try every possible treatment and accepting that nothing will keep her alive. "Paradoxes abound in life," YipWilliams writes in a heart-rending letter to her daughters; she asks us to confront these paradoxes with her head-on. One of the paradoxes of this book is that Yip-Williams writes with such vibrancy and electricity even as she is dying. She moves seamlessly from an incisive description of her mother as "the type of woman who sucks blame and guilt into herself through a giant straw," to the gallows humor of "Nothing says 'commitment to living' quite like taking out a mortgage," to the keen observation "Health is wasted on the healthy, and life is wasted on the living." Unlike the woman in her support group who, after being given a terminal prognosis, defiantly declares, "Dying is not an option," Yip-Williams prepares meticulously for her death while paying close attention to the life she will one day miss: "the simple ritual of loading and unloading the dishwasher. ... making Costco runs. ... watching TV with Josh.... taking my kids to school." This memoir is so many things - a triumphant tale of a blind immigrant, a remarkable philosophical treatise and a call to arms to pay attention to the limited time we have on this earth. But at its core, it's an exquisitely moving portrait of the daily stuff of life: family secrets and family ties, marriage and its limitlessness and limitations, wild and unbounded parental love and, ultimately, the graceful recognition of what we can't - and can - control. "We control the effort we have put into living," Yip-Williams writes, and the effort she has put into it is palpable. Of all the reasons we're drawn to these memoirs, perhaps we read them most for this: They remind us to put in our own effort. It would be nearly impossible to read this book and not take her exhortation seriously. At its core, this memoir is an exquisitely moving portredt of the daily stuff of life. lori Gottlieb writes the Dear Therapist column for The Atlantic. Her new book, "Maybe You Should Talk to Someone: A Therapist, Her Therapist, and Our Lives Revealed," will be published in April.