Completed: 1/7/2022
Recommendation: Mild Recommendation
Recommended By: A best book of 2022 list
Review:
This was a mildly interesting book to me which follows several generations of Vietnamese women who all live under a curse. I listened to this book and found the accurate pronunciation of the names very jarring as the names often ended "up" in tone which made the name sound like a question to an English speaker. A few also had very abrupt and guttural endings which made them sound like the end of a sentence when it was not. I don't think I ever got used to it. Many of the women also had several names by which they were referred which always took me a few minutes to resolve and sometimes caused me to pause the book while I tried to figure out which woman it was. That did resolve over time. In the end, however, this was a book about changing character. The changes seemed abrupt and decisive which I actually find sort of comforting. Several characters reach a tipping point (independently) and their characters literally metamorphosed from that point forward. This makes sense to me and I kind of enjoyed trying to figure out who was going to make the change next. It is a good characteristic of Huynh that it was not the same thing for each one and she deftly handled the transitions independently of the plot transitions so there were little highs and lows as the overall plat worked its way to a climax. In the end, however, I did not find the intertwined love lives compelling and it felt like Huynh had so many characters that it was difficult to understand any particular couple except in so far as they tacked into the overall plot.
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