“It's been a long time since I finished a book that was this uniformly childish, shallow and poorly written. I suspect the main problem was with how I was reading it.
I expected a novel about a group of Chinese women trying to come to terms with their own ambitions in an increasingly westernized world where everyone is varying degrees of greedy, self-serving and short-sighted. What I got was a string of blog postings about what they-all talked about, who so-and-so was schtupping that week, and where people were flying off to and the "prestigious" American colleges they were trying to get into or trying to find someone, especially a Rich American who did, depending on whatever scheme they had hatched that day.
It feels like the attempt was to write a Pan-Asian "Sex And The City," but it read more like a Chinese "Amos & Andy." Without a moral core, or even a sympathetic character to get behind (even the narrator, the most mature of the group by default, spends much of the book looking down her nose at all her friends even as she's helping them out with their schemes to find a rich man or achieve celebrity, or at least notoriety), there's not much in here.
I gave it an extra star for being, in all probability, an accurate view into the mind of a stereotypical haute bourgeoise Chinese. But even that feels generous.”
chicobangs wrote this review Friday, August 24 2007.
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