The Weight of Change: Exploring Loss and Identity

This Side of Falling by Eunice Chan depicts a story of a high school senior girl named Nina Yeung, a high school senior and talented violinist whose life is thrown into disarray after the suicide of Ethan Travvers — her friend, her maybe-love, and her burst of color in an otherwise monochrome world. As Nina juggles the pressures of college applications, her senior recital, and strained family dynamics, she is haunted by memories of Ethan. She questions her perception of him when he was alive. Chan’s book is a beautifully written book that explores grief, identity, pressure, and relationships between characters, and the importance of moving on.

One of the most unique aspects of this book is its raw portrayal of grief. Nina’s world completely shatters with Ethan’s absence; her reality starts spiraling, her behavior, and her beliefs as well. Before meeting Ethan, Nina had always maintained a strict structure and schedule in her life; however, after meeting him, this structure is shattered, and with his absence, all of what she knows is broken again. The structure of the book mirrors this emotional confusion, with disjointed timelines and blurred transitions between Nina’s memories while she’s reminiscing about the past and dealing with what is going on presently. While the timeline of the book does occasionally become confusing and disorienting, this nonlinear format reflects the way that grief heavily distorts your sense of time, clarity, and reality. 

The novel never glamorizes Ethan’s suicide, or any of the mental health issues that the characters grapple with. Instead, it emphasizes the silent isolation and internal pressure that so many teens endure. At one point, Ethan tells Nina, “his biggest fear was change.” That single line speaks volumes about his resistance to a world he couldn’t control, about how even growth can feel like a threat when you're already overwhelmed. This constant fear of change also echoes throughout Nina’s own story, as she’s forced to confront how change, unwanted, painful, and inevitable, has reshaped every part of her life. Ironically, while Ethan himself hated change, his existence and death were the main catalysts for change and growth in Nina’s character. 

Nina’s family dynamics also add a layer of complication to her burdens. Her mother’s strict structure, her grandmother’s cultural expectations, and her father’s emotional absence due to work all create a household that feels more like an institution than a safe space. Mental health, as in many Asian households, is not spoken about until it erupts into something that can no longer be ignored. For many readers, especially those from Asian households, this portrayal may hit close to home. The idea that you must break to be heard is a sobering reflection of real-life cultural dynamics.

Carmen, Nina’s older sister, was once the shining example of these expectations: the perfect daughter, the UCLA student-athlete, the girl who always seemed to have it together. But as the story unfolds, Carmen becomes more distant, eventually unraveling under the same pressures Nina faces. Her fall from grace forces Nina to recognize the fragility behind the masks we wear and the danger of assuming anyone is as perfect as they seem. This turn is a powerful reminder that mental health struggles don’t always look the way we expect. Sometimes, the people who seem the strongest are the ones hiding the most.

That’s what makes this novel so relevant today, especially for Gen Z readers navigating the intersection of cultural identity, academic expectations, and mental health. This Side of Falling doesn’t flinch from the hard parts of growing up: grief, identity, academic pressure, mental illness, and the silent exhaustion of always trying to be enough. Its emotional authenticity and rich character development make it a unique read that strikes a chord. Eunice Chan dares to ask her readers: What do we do when the people we counted on fall apart? When the world refuses to stay the same? When change is the only thing constant we have left in our lives?

This Side of Falling is out June 17th.

Lead photo: Cover of This Side of Falling from Soho Press Inc.

This article was written on special assignment through the TeenTix Press Corps. The TeenTix Press Corps promotes critical thinking, communication, and information literacy through criticism and journalism practice for teens. For more information about the Press Corps program see HERE.