Everyone has a mirror face

Once, when I was a teenager, my grandma asked me to help her sort her embroidery floss. She was cross-stitching a birth announcement for my niece, and she had chosen a complicated pattern that required various shades of each color. "I can't tell them apart. I need young eyes," she said, so I sat cross-legged by her armchair and unraveled the snarled bunches of thread for her. What I remember most about this task was the stillness of it. The ticking of the mantle clock. The sun-warmed shag carpet, ugly but comfortable. The gentle shushing of the tree leaves outside the window. My grandma leaning over the instruction sheet, turning slightly in the chair so her head did not block the sun and cast a shadow. Her hand reaching up to adjust her glasses. The floss in my own hands wafting apart, silky as cobwebs, as I untangled the colors. Each hook of the floss sorter slowly filling up, becoming a rainbow.

When I read Room for a Stranger by Melanie Cheng, I was reminded of this memory, of that feeling of connection, the surprise of discovering unexpected profundity in the everyday. The story Cheng tells is a quiet one, teeming with quiet, powerful moments. She writes about the lives of ordinary people with humor, poignancy, and unflinching honesty, rendering them familiar yet unknowable.

The story begins when Meg Hughes, an elderly woman living in Melbourne, decides to join a home-share program after a break-in at her house. Having spent most of her life taking care of her disabled sister, Meg never went to university or got married, and she now finds herself utterly alone in the house in which she has lived since childhood. Her only company is her sister's pet African gray parrot, Atticus, who she is convinced is mocking her.

Andy Chan, a twenty-one-year-old college student from Hong Kong, is equally alone. Although he does have one friend at school—a friend who gives very questionable advice—he feels invisible, especially when it comes to the pretty girl from his class who has not yet realized he exists. All he wants is to complete his degree and live up to his parents' expectations, but he is slowly buckling under the pressure and the loneliness.

The homeshare program, which pairs elderly or disabled home owners with companions who need housing, brings these two characters together. Although Meg and Andy do not seem to have much in common on the surface, Cheng's narrative techniques reveal that they have very similar reactions to the situations they face. Both are appalled and disturbed by a rude man's racist rant on the tram, and neither knows what to do about it. Both are easily flustered when interacting with their respective potential love interests. Both try to appear happy with their lives for the sake of those that care about them, when they are both on the brink of unraveling.

One of the novel's greatest strengths is this interplay between the inner and outer lives of the characters. Cheng's chapters are brief, rarely over four pages, and they alternate focus between Meg's point of view and Andy's. This approach shows readers how each perceives the other and how often their perceptions are wrong, which provides much of the humor in the story. For example, after their very first dinner together, Meg retires to her room feeling "lighter than she had in years" (19). She thinks that they are a lot alike, "which was perfect, really, just what she'd been hoping for" (19), and that he had just as good a time as she did. However, on the very next page, in Andy's chapter, it is revealed that he left the table feeling very differently. Although he thinks Meg is a nice lady, he has spent most of dinner battling nausea because she continued to pet Atticus, the parrot, while she cooked—"He'd watched and waited for her to...