doorisajar 's review for:

Vagabonds by Hao Jingfang

2.0

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There are definitely interesting ideas and scenes, but overall it wasn't for me. Mainly, I was disappointed with the protagonist's arc, but there were a lot of secondary things that just didn't work for me (non-spoiler example: scrupulous heteronormativity). I'm sure part of it is I don't have the cultural frame of reference, which is part of why I read the book to begin with - so maybe it's unfair to complain that a book explores ideas from the perspective of a very different value system and arrives at different very different conclusions than I would. But I really did feel that some of those conclusions weren't justified by the story or characters.