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4.13 AVERAGE
4.13 AVERAGE
dark
sad
tense
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
sad
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Plot
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
No
dark
emotional
sad
tense
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
Sigh. There’s so much good about this book. I almost gave up on it several times but I’m glad I finished because the back half is the best part. There are some compelling parts to the narrative but it felt clunky in some ways to me. I think the writing advice “show, don’t tell” applies here some. Even though it’s first person narration, I think Daiyu verges on preachy sometimes. I also find the other characters more likable than the main - Nam, Lum, Nelson, and even the random Joe are all quite lovable.
Still, the imagery of Daiyu bravely facing her death and finally having the courage to speak her own name is superb. I loved the epilogue as well.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Child abuse, Confinement, Death, Hate crime, Pedophilia, Racial slurs, Racism, Rape, Sexual assault, Sexual violence, Slavery, Xenophobia, Murder
Moderate: Misogyny, Physical abuse, Excrement, Police brutality, Kidnapping, Death of parent, Abandonment
emotional
sad
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
No
dark
sad
tense
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
“i am not afraid of death. i am afraid of no longer living.”
no words… 😔
dark
emotional
sad
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
No
dark
emotional
reflective
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
Bro so horrifying but so beautiful
a lovingly written portrait of effects of the Chinese Exclusion Act in late 1880s Idaho - it’s grim, no way around that.
This novel didn't work for me. Zhang's debut received splashy praise, and it felt like it was ubiquitous for a brief moment, but it seems to have fallen off people's radars just a couple of years later. And in fairness, it is a debut. I'm making the conscious decision, then, to write some thoughts about the book, but not give it a star-rating; there's elements of this debut that portend a future talent, but overall it was tonally inconsistent, if didactic, and a little too obvious for my taste.
This novel is extraordinarily plot-heavy, to the point where Zhang seems to confuse circumstance with character. A character experiencing X-trauma or X-event becomes the eliding force to suggest that her protagonist is developing, but there's very little evidence of that development. Instead Daiyu, our heroine, is all eyes--seeing and observing things, but not much of an agent, herself. It's a strange novel, because the central character cross-dresses for a very significant portion of it, but there's so little interiority that this disguise is merely incidental. Zhang is uninterested in a female character who might identify with her disguised persona, or who might experience gender in a more complicated way than most fictional protagonists. But this disinterest isn't a rejection of non-normative gender identity. Daiyu cannot have a gender identity because Zhang's Daiyu has no identity. She is only witness. She is a long, narrational gaze that somehow travels, not from her own agency (kidnapped, forced to leave one place for another to survive), across the Pacific to bear witness to anti-Chinese discrimination in the American West.
Zhang's political aims are noble, and timely. But her plot lacks any sense of surprise in an effort to align with moral clarity, and unrelentingly bear witness to the anti-woman, and anti-Chinese violences that Daiyu experiences. Some might hope that a plot should be driven by characters, or should be connected to characters. But here, Zhang flips it. Her characters live to be plotted, to be subjugated and assaulted, and later tried. It does not matter who they are. It matters that they are. These aren't characters, but symbols. Effigies, to signify systemic violence.
And then, the politics aren't really grappled with in an interesting way, are they? Racism is this thing that produces violence; Zhang makes a spectacle of that violence. But she's totally uninterested in thinking further about where this violence comes from, what forces are at play. She fails to write individual characters, but her politics, or, at least, the politics of the novel, is about individual prejudices and violences, and never about collectives or the propagation of violence. Bad people do bad things. It's a black and white world of moral action. Simple. Understandable. Here's this image that will shock; and here's the easy-to-follow moral failures that produce that image.
These complaints I have about the novel may be pure features of a debut. But the overall effect is a novel with superficial lead, and an over-reliance on plot to make up for rather shallow themes. It's a book that gets stretched thin pretty fast. And then there's 3 more parts to wade through.
This novel is extraordinarily plot-heavy, to the point where Zhang seems to confuse circumstance with character. A character experiencing X-trauma or X-event becomes the eliding force to suggest that her protagonist is developing, but there's very little evidence of that development. Instead Daiyu, our heroine, is all eyes--seeing and observing things, but not much of an agent, herself. It's a strange novel, because the central character cross-dresses for a very significant portion of it, but there's so little interiority that this disguise is merely incidental. Zhang is uninterested in a female character who might identify with her disguised persona, or who might experience gender in a more complicated way than most fictional protagonists. But this disinterest isn't a rejection of non-normative gender identity. Daiyu cannot have a gender identity because Zhang's Daiyu has no identity. She is only witness. She is a long, narrational gaze that somehow travels, not from her own agency (kidnapped, forced to leave one place for another to survive), across the Pacific to bear witness to anti-Chinese discrimination in the American West.
Zhang's political aims are noble, and timely. But her plot lacks any sense of surprise in an effort to align with moral clarity, and unrelentingly bear witness to the anti-woman, and anti-Chinese violences that Daiyu experiences. Some might hope that a plot should be driven by characters, or should be connected to characters. But here, Zhang flips it. Her characters live to be plotted, to be subjugated and assaulted, and later tried. It does not matter who they are. It matters that they are. These aren't characters, but symbols. Effigies, to signify systemic violence.
And then, the politics aren't really grappled with in an interesting way, are they? Racism is this thing that produces violence; Zhang makes a spectacle of that violence. But she's totally uninterested in thinking further about where this violence comes from, what forces are at play. She fails to write individual characters, but her politics, or, at least, the politics of the novel, is about individual prejudices and violences, and never about collectives or the propagation of violence. Bad people do bad things. It's a black and white world of moral action. Simple. Understandable. Here's this image that will shock; and here's the easy-to-follow moral failures that produce that image.
These complaints I have about the novel may be pure features of a debut. But the overall effect is a novel with superficial lead, and an over-reliance on plot to make up for rather shallow themes. It's a book that gets stretched thin pretty fast. And then there's 3 more parts to wade through.
emotional
fast-paced