A review by ben_miller
Tropic of Orange by Karen Tei Yamashita

2.0

Like other readers who have posted their thoughts, I wanted to like this book and it disappointed me. To be honest, it's fairly awful. The plot is convoluted and slow-moving (kind of like the 405 on a Friday afternoon, but in this case the imitative fallacy is not working in Yamashita's favor). The structure of the book tries to liven things up, but instead it backfires and prevents us from getting truly involved in any of the 7 narratives. I could give a laundry list of problems here, but the worst transgression is simply that the prose is sloppy and often listless. Scenes are handled ineptly, setting is lazily drawn, and some of the sentences are straight out of Harlequin romance: "Gabe turned on his heels, impassioned anguish embodied in his dark figure..."

It's not all bad news. I liked Bobby's chapters, mainly because he was the only character who really seemed to want something beyond abstractions. Occasionally Yamashita's prose does hit a nice rhythm. The chapter titles were pretty cool.