Take a photo of a barcode or cover
gorgonine 's review for:
When Fox is a Thousand
by Larissa Lai
22 Jan 2021
Objective v. Subjective Rating: 3 stars v. 1 star
Reason: I can recognize why this would be a book a lot of people would love, I swear. I'm just not going to be one of them. DNF @54%.
Thoughts:
1. Well, that was a bit of a disappointment.
2. I didn't come into this book with high hopes because I knew it was going to be more literary and experimental than it was storytelling. I did hope it would get better with time, but it mostly just feet like more and more of the same.
3. This story is a split narrative. One set of sections is told from the pov of the titular immortal fox. The other follows the story of a poetess in medieval China. The final section follows a Chinese-Canadian girl. The Fox bits are a bit flowery for my taste but interesting enough nevertheless. The modern stuff is eye-wateringly boring and the prose somehow gets worse. The poetess bits hover somewhere between the two.
4. I like individual elements of this story- the split narrative, the foxes being foxes, the casual lesbianism, fantasy fiction set in historical China and so forth. The problem is they they don't cohesively come together to form a story. It's much more stream of consciousness than plot and not gonna lie, this could have used a bit more plot.
5. Everyone is having (mostly terrible) sex all of the time and I am so bored by that. I was bored by alot of things but I was really bored by that. It sent me into a constant spiral of what is wrong with me why am I reading this?
6. The prose is not always bad. I can admit that. But a few disconnected clever turns of phrase are definitely not worth the hours you spend on listless semi-angst mostly-ennui stuff that doesn't go anywhere.
7. Characters. There were characters? The poetess is bland but her circumstances were interesting. Artemis is bland and so is whatever happens in her life. The Fox is probably the best of the bunch, but her sections are short and rare and there's only so much they can salvage.
8. It's entirely possible that I'm just too dense and disconnected with the premise to understand what this book is trying to say. But that makes no difference to the fact that I found it neither enjoyable nor enlightening.
Objective v. Subjective Rating: 3 stars v. 1 star
Reason: I can recognize why this would be a book a lot of people would love, I swear. I'm just not going to be one of them. DNF @54%.
Thoughts:
1. Well, that was a bit of a disappointment.
2. I didn't come into this book with high hopes because I knew it was going to be more literary and experimental than it was storytelling. I did hope it would get better with time, but it mostly just feet like more and more of the same.
3. This story is a split narrative. One set of sections is told from the pov of the titular immortal fox. The other follows the story of a poetess in medieval China. The final section follows a Chinese-Canadian girl. The Fox bits are a bit flowery for my taste but interesting enough nevertheless. The modern stuff is eye-wateringly boring and the prose somehow gets worse. The poetess bits hover somewhere between the two.
4. I like individual elements of this story- the split narrative, the foxes being foxes, the casual lesbianism, fantasy fiction set in historical China and so forth. The problem is they they don't cohesively come together to form a story. It's much more stream of consciousness than plot and not gonna lie, this could have used a bit more plot.
5. Everyone is having (mostly terrible) sex all of the time and I am so bored by that. I was bored by alot of things but I was really bored by that. It sent me into a constant spiral of what is wrong with me why am I reading this?
6. The prose is not always bad. I can admit that. But a few disconnected clever turns of phrase are definitely not worth the hours you spend on listless semi-angst mostly-ennui stuff that doesn't go anywhere.
7. Characters. There were characters? The poetess is bland but her circumstances were interesting. Artemis is bland and so is whatever happens in her life. The Fox is probably the best of the bunch, but her sections are short and rare and there's only so much they can salvage.
8. It's entirely possible that I'm just too dense and disconnected with the premise to understand what this book is trying to say. But that makes no difference to the fact that I found it neither enjoyable nor enlightening.