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emmaskies 's review for:
Portrait of a Thief
by Grace D. Li
"Diaspora meant something different to all of them..."
I thoroughly enjoyed my time with this book, but I feel like marketing this as a heist novel does it a disservice and I can see why people who go in for that and only that would be disappointed.
The heist plot feels like the backdrop for the more important, main, character-driven story of the different ways each member of the group experiences being first generation American, what Chinese culture and heritage means to them, and how that has shaped their lives and their choices.
Given that it's a novel about a group dynamic, I thought that was incredibly well done. There's a solid balance of each of the five POV characters and I felt like the author did a great job taking it from a group with a central core surrounded by people who knew them but were strangers to each other to a group of inter-connected friends. The group dynamics in a book like this will make or break it and I think Grace Li really nailed it.
The heists themselves aren't great, but that doesn't bother me much because it doesn't feel like that's the meat of the story and our thieves are amateurs, college students in their early twenties who've never done anything like this. That said, I didn't get this book based on the Ocean's 11 comparisons (I got it in the Illumicrate subscription so I went in with no preconceived notions or expectations) and that probably helped me out a lot.
I thoroughly enjoyed my time with this book, but I feel like marketing this as a heist novel does it a disservice and I can see why people who go in for that and only that would be disappointed.
The heist plot feels like the backdrop for the more important, main, character-driven story of the different ways each member of the group experiences being first generation American, what Chinese culture and heritage means to them, and how that has shaped their lives and their choices.
Given that it's a novel about a group dynamic, I thought that was incredibly well done. There's a solid balance of each of the five POV characters and I felt like the author did a great job taking it from a group with a central core surrounded by people who knew them but were strangers to each other to a group of inter-connected friends. The group dynamics in a book like this will make or break it and I think Grace Li really nailed it.
The heists themselves aren't great, but that doesn't bother me much because it doesn't feel like that's the meat of the story and our thieves are amateurs, college students in their early twenties who've never done anything like this. That said, I didn't get this book based on the Ocean's 11 comparisons (I got it in the Illumicrate subscription so I went in with no preconceived notions or expectations) and that probably helped me out a lot.