I adored The Glowing Life of Leeann Wu by Mindy Hung, who has written some charming romances as Ruby Lang (Playing House, Open House, House Rules), and one (Wild Life) as Opal Wei.

Leeann Wu is in the middle of the three generations of the Taiwanese-American women in her family. Leeann is a midwife, her mother Shu-ling is an ‘eminent’ ob-gyn and her daughter Lulu, just eighteen, is leaving home very soon to study medicine. Both Shu-Ling and Leeann are single mothers so there are few close male influences in their lives.

Leeann – well, everyone – is struggling with sleeplessness over an oppressively hot summer. The book opens when Leeann notices the local University clock tower is scarred after the impact of a recent lightning strike – a scar which matches the one that Leeann dreamed about the night before. As she watches, and for no obvious reason, the scaffolding being erected around the tower collapses. When she goes to help the injured, she sees that her hands are glowing – again. This has happened before and she suspects the glow is linked to her dreams and her restlessness, and maybe even to the oppressive weather.

When Leeann had asked her doctor about this strange phenomenon, they diagnosed perimenopause, but as Leeann thinks:

“I was pretty sure hormonal temperature dysregulation wasn’t responsible for incandescent digits”

– so something is up.

Leeann enjoys her midwifery, and when she meets a gorgeous young man, Kenji Hartell, helping his sister as she gives birth, they have a moment of mutual attraction. He’s obviously much younger, but it’s hard for Leeann to stay away from him.

Two things are happening as the novel unfolds. Leeann and Kenji keep meeting up and they are falling in love as they share sneaky moments in hotels and cafés. The people in their town though, are suffering. The heat is oppressive, no one can sleep and accidents and hospital presentations are mounting. These occurrences create a sense of disquiet that forms the backdrop to Leeann and Kenji’s romance.

I loved that the ‘glowing’ is both terrifying and confusing to Leeann, but she still gets on with things: seeing her patients, dealing with her mother, savouring her time with Lulu and fighting her attraction to Kenji. As she puts it:

“I … upped my Vitamin D, kept staying away from men, especially young attractive ones and tried very hard not to glow.”

Leeann adores her daughter, who is nothing like her, and she tolerates her mother, whose language of snark and criticism doesn’t feel like love. These three women endure Friday night dinners together at Lulu’s instigation and they all feel time slipping by as the countdown is on until Lulu goes away to uni. Recently Shu-ling has opened up about her life in Taiwan and Leeann finds out about a great-aunt and extended family that, until this point, she had known nothing about.

The Wu women are all Taiwanese-American, and cultural baggage is most apparent in Shu-Ling, who had expectations for Leeann to be a doctor like her. When Leeann fell pregnant, she left medicine and switched to midwifery, which she finds rewarding and satisfying, but which disappointed her mother. There’s a reckoning in their relationships later in the novel (so no spoilers) which made this a #DIK for me.

Author Mindy Hung has nailed the complexity of mothers and daughters. She’s spot on with the push and pull – Lulu initially encourages Leeann to go for it with the younger guy, but soon observes that she hadn’t expected her mother to enjoy being with him that much! Leeann adores and admires Lulu:

“I settled back again and watched her, thinking that it was so much easier to be proud of her than to try and find joy in my own accomplishments.”

That Leeann is able to nurture her relationship with her daughter while struggling with her mother feels so real.

Leeann knows she is falling in love with Kenji, but can still be dispassionate about the bounciness of younger men:

“Men were more exhausting than babies, and I really wasn’t planning to take up with a younger one.”

She’s wry and observant and so much fun.

Yes, Kenji’s character is a little underdeveloped and the reader doesn’t get to know him well, other than that he adores Leeann, he doesn’t care about the age difference and he’s very good in bed. It’s not his book though, as his hands aren’t glowing, and he does his job by offering Leeann a rich and rewarding life after Lulu leaves the nest.

I won’t reveal all the family secrets, but I can say the magic relates to Leeann’s maternal line, that it impacts the whole town and it’s resolved in a very satisfying way.

I’ll be re-reading this more than once. Perhaps next time I’ll focus on the magic, then on the cross-generational relationships, and only after that will I savour the love affair between Kenji and Leeann. I wholeheartedly recommend The Glowing Life of Leeann Wu.