First comes love, then marriage, tragedy

Writing about depression and suicide takes guts. You want to say something new about devastating subjects that have received extensive and sometimes brilliant literary treatment from Goethe’s “The Sorrows of Young Werther” to Yiyun Li’s 2019 novel, “Where Reasons End.”

You have to tread carefully, especially now, when we’re safeguarding our mental health as we enter our third pandemic winter. Readers expect, or at least desire, some measure of hope, preferably without falsehood or sentimentality. Author Jade Moon Le takes on these challenges in her affecting debut novel, “Invisible Orphans.”

The narrator is Vivi, a Chinese woman, who is looking back over some 20 years at her relationship with Matthew, the white American man she mar