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A review by jenibus
Sarong Party Girls by Cheryl Lu-Lien Tan
2.0
I feel bad about disliking this book - I was really hoping to love it after all the 4/5 star reviews it got. But the book is now done and the main emotion I'm feeling is disappointment.
In the beginning of the book, I perhaps made an incorrect assumption that it'd either be fully comedy/satire or that if it was more serious, Jazzy and her friends would grow and change throughout the book. They have a pretty horrible worldview in the beginning and I thought that would change or at least the book would make it more evident that this isn't a good worldview. And although they did change by the end, it happened at like the very end and we had to endure a middle section that was very cynical/depressing in regards to the outside reader seeing how bad her life is and how others treat her. The book ends essentially right as she makes a life decision that will better her life and the previous chapter showed how she was coming to realize her self worth, but then it just ends. If this happened earlier and we had more book to show her life turning around and her finding value in herself, I would have liked it more. But the ratios are too heavily weighted on the depressing end with not enough payoff.
There's an argument to be made that perhaps I didn't appreciate it as much because I'm fairly ignorant when it comes to Singapore culture and that I projected my western white ideals onto the characters. I found the Singlish fairly easy to follow and although I didn't know specific meanings of words, I could figure them out through context clues.
All in all, I went in expecting a glitzy and happier novel about Jazzy learning to value herself and change her sexist and sometimes racist mindsets, and too much of the novel was bad things happening to her over and over with her justification that there's nothing she can do and not enough actual good things. I'm bummed.
In the beginning of the book, I perhaps made an incorrect assumption that it'd either be fully comedy/satire or that if it was more serious, Jazzy and her friends would grow and change throughout the book. They have a pretty horrible worldview in the beginning and I thought that would change or at least the book would make it more evident that this isn't a good worldview. And although they did change by the end, it happened at like the very end and we had to endure a middle section that was very cynical/depressing in regards to the outside reader seeing how bad her life is and how others treat her. The book ends essentially right as she makes a life decision that will better her life and the previous chapter showed how she was coming to realize her self worth, but then it just ends. If this happened earlier and we had more book to show her life turning around and her finding value in herself, I would have liked it more. But the ratios are too heavily weighted on the depressing end with not enough payoff.
There's an argument to be made that perhaps I didn't appreciate it as much because I'm fairly ignorant when it comes to Singapore culture and that I projected my western white ideals onto the characters. I found the Singlish fairly easy to follow and although I didn't know specific meanings of words, I could figure them out through context clues.
All in all, I went in expecting a glitzy and happier novel about Jazzy learning to value herself and change her sexist and sometimes racist mindsets, and too much of the novel was bad things happening to her over and over with her justification that there's nothing she can do and not enough actual good things. I'm bummed.