In her sophomore year of high school, Lin Zhixia became the roommate of transfer student Jiang Yu.
He is always the top academic student in his grade, and she is an ordinary girl who worked hard to get into the top ten.
She secretly wrote his name on the corner of her desk, and then quietly erased it on the eve of graduation.
Three days before the college entrance examination, a misunderstanding caused them to break up in the rain.
She tore up the confession letter she had been preparing for three years, and he watched in silence as she turned and left.
Seven years later, she is a well-known author and he is an upstart in technology.
Only after they met again at the class reunion did she know——
The unsent gift in his drawer that year was written "To Gardenia: My Light."
The youthful past of Gu Chen, Shen Qinghe, Su Man and Ji Chenguang also slowly emerged in time...
Reader comments
I cried three times on the subway the week I read "The Cicada." Lin Zhixia and Jiang Yu are like another me in parallel time and space - we have spent our entire youth practicing saying goodbye, catching a glimpse of light in the shell of inferiority. The cruelest and tenderest thing about this book is that it allows you to see the most beautiful form of love, which is not salvation, but two broken souls deciding to rebuild a summer for each other on the ruins that will never collapse. The day I finished reading, I sent a text message to the person I had a crush on when I was seventeen: "Thank you for being my light."
I cried three times on the subway the week I read "The Cicada." Lin Zhixia and Jiang Yu are like another me in parallel time and space - we have spent our entire youth practicing saying goodbye, catching a glimpse of light in the shell of inferiority. The cruelest and tenderest thing about this book is that it allows you to see the most beautiful form of love, which is not salvation, but two broken souls deciding to rebuild a summer for each other on the ruins that will never collapse. The day I finished reading, I sent a text message to the person I had a crush on when I was seventeen: "Thank you for being my light."