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A review by violentvixen
The Shadow of the Empire by Qiu Xiaolong
1.0
I'm doing a summer reading challenge through a local bookstore, and one of the challenges was to read a mystery. The library happened to share a summer reading list and this book was on there. A murder mystery based on a historical case in China sounded right up my alley, and since it was at least related to series of books I thought that was a good sign.
But oh man I haven't disliked a book so much in quite a while. The writing is so inconsistent and awkward in tone. Characters don't have unique voices, and internal thoughts are often incredibly unclear. There's far too much unnecessary exposition about everything.
The early scene of the meal in the temple was where the writing issues first jumped out at me. The characters are discussing poetry and their meal when they move to an account of the court case, then start talking about her being beaten in the courtroom. This somehow turns into discussing her pubic hair, fucking and dildos, and I guess this is related to her being loose? What? Then they're back to discussing the vegetarian menu. There were other scenes where the usage of more modern language like that didn't work. Overall it just felt like many sections of the book were written separately then pasted together and there was no final editing pass to create consistency.
I did very much enjoy the appendix of Xuanji's poems with notes at the end, so I'm glad I at least learned about a historical figure I can look into.
But oh man I haven't disliked a book so much in quite a while. The writing is so inconsistent and awkward in tone. Characters don't have unique voices, and internal thoughts are often incredibly unclear. There's far too much unnecessary exposition about everything.
The early scene of the meal in the temple was where the writing issues first jumped out at me. The characters are discussing poetry and their meal when they move to an account of the court case, then start talking about her being beaten in the courtroom. This somehow turns into discussing her pubic hair, fucking and dildos, and I guess this is related to her being loose? What? Then they're back to discussing the vegetarian menu. There were other scenes where the usage of more modern language like that didn't work. Overall it just felt like many sections of the book were written separately then pasted together and there was no final editing pass to create consistency.
I did very much enjoy the appendix of Xuanji's poems with notes at the end, so I'm glad I at least learned about a historical figure I can look into.