Love Can't Feed You

Winner of the Zibby Award for Best Coming-of-Age Book

A CBS New York Book Club Top 3 FickPick

A People Book of the Week

Gold House October Book Club Pick

An Amazon Best Book of the Month

One of Vanity Fair’s “Can’t-Miss Novels to Read in November”

“[A] gorgeously written, shattering debut…Deeply compassionate and devastating.”
—People, “Best of October”

“A tender-hearted coming-of-age story”
—Harper’s Bazaar, “Best Books of Fall”

“Occasionally dark, ultimately profound, Love Can’t Feed You illustrates the challenge of figuring out who you are when your life straddles two worlds.”
—Real Simple

“This powerful debut novel explores the complexities of immigration, identity, and family through the lens of Queenie, a young Filipina woman navigating life in the U.S. as she balances familial expectations and her own ambitions. Set against the backdrop of the American dream, Queenie’s journey paints a vivid portrait of intergenerational fractures, cultural displacement, and the longing for belonging.”
—Gold House

“Astonishing . . . Sy skillfully lays bare Queenie’s wide-ranging emotions, from rage to sadness, and reveals the nuances of the family members’ relationships. Rich details of Filipino culture such as folk stories and religious iconography are interwoven with gritty depictions of the compromises made by the immigrant characters . . . It’s a knockout.”
—Publishers Weekly, *starred review*

“Strong characterizations and heartfelt emotions are well depicted in this engrossing coming-of-age story, full of surprising narratives.”
—Library Journal

“Love Can’t Feed You is a stunningly written, devastating book about all manners of suspension, between countries, between parents, between identities, between what it is to be a woman and what it is to be a girl. Cherry Lou Sy is a brilliant and exacting observer of human uncertainty and desire and this book is an utter thrill.”
—Lynn Steger Strong, author of Flight

“One of my favorite genres is New York City immigrant literature, and so it is extra-thrilling to immerse oneself in a new entry in that canon! Cherry Lou Sy brings her expert playwriting gifts into the realm of Filipina coming-of-age novel and the results are stunning. At every turn, I was struck by our storyteller’s stunning precision—that kind of attention to detail is often described as ‘cold’ and ‘sharp’ but in Cherry Lou Sy’s moving novel the skill is sourced from much warmth and tenderness. Plus, the unwillingness to simplify and spoon-feed identity is key to why Love Can’t Feed You works so well; this novel is an intensely engrossing master-class in a most real all-encompassing humanity!”
—Porochista Khakpour, author of Tehrangeles

“Love Can’t Feed You is a searing, searching, soulful novel of the utmost humanity. An intoxicating examination of desire and shame, at turns sublimely tender and incandescent with rage, it asks who deserves to live with dignity in an America divided by class, color, and capitalism. I devoured this book.”
—Cecily Wong, author of Kaleidoscope

“Cherry Lou Sy’s picaresque-like Love Can’t Feed You follows five years of our mixed Chinese Filipina narrator’s life as she immigrates to New York, adapts to her family’s fracturing dynamic, and transitions to adulthood. Imbued with folklore and biting social critique, this novel interrogates the ways young women come to terms with their own desires inside familial and social structures designed to work against them. ‘We can’t eat stories,’ the narrator claims, but I swallowed this alternately haunting and heartening tale whole, and chewed on it long after.”
—Jami Nakamura Lin, author of The Night Parade

“In Love Can’t Feed You, Cherry Lou Sy keenly and compassionately evokes a vivid cast of characters. Queenie is an irresistibly honest and wise narrator who carries the reader along as she navigates her many identities—Filipina, Chinese, New Yorker, immigrant, daughter, sister, student, worker, woman, friend, lover. Rich with emotional nuance and deeply absorbing, Love Can’t Feed You is a potent debut from a powerful new voice.”
—Helen Phillips, author of The Need

“A rollercoaster of emotions and an assault on the senses. Through the lives of one family, Sy has distilled the immigrant experience down to its most painful and traumatic moments, in the process writing an intelligent, wide ranging gut-punch of a debut. Queenie, the protagonist, is the very personification of instinct, curiosity, dislocation, and adaptation. This is a New York book that captures well what happens when life becomes about survival more than living.”
—Alejandro Varela, author of The Town of Babylon