A review by kdawn999
The Tapestries by Kien Nguyen

3.0

I liked this more than my book club did, but, I acknowledge, there are issues. The writing, dialogue, and word choices are clumsy in several spots, and the characters are lacking in depth. What is not lacking is action. Every page is engaging with events—some gory with violence. We have several memorable settings too—haunted mansions and a nighttime masquerade on a lake. Oh, there’s a pirate treasure map too! The villain is extremely villainous and the hero and his lover are blank-slate bland. The most interesting character is the hero’s adoptive mother-wife Ven—who really ought to be our protagonist throughout. The melodrama of the story makes it take on a fantastical, tall-tale feeling—like the movie Big Fish or Secondhand Lions. I liked this fairy-tale feeling and was not put off by the author’s note at the end in which he claims to have based the lovers off of his grandparents. I found it, overall, refreshing to read a story set in Vietnam that wasn’t obsessed with the American war or centered on white colonials. Impressive, too, that the writer composed this in English, which he didn’t learn proficiently until his teens.