I have been blown away. Chloe Gong set a high bar with These Violent Delights, a 1920s fantasy version of Romeo and Juliet which transports the story’s action to Shanghai. Our Violent Ends is the first book’s equal. Gong’s talent remains unstinting. You need to read this book. It’s now 1927, and Juliette Cai is…
Stunning prose, a pulse-pounding romance, and unexpected twists upon Shakespeare’s familiar tale of youthful but doomed love make These Violent Delights a high-quality read for anyone who likes a good gangster tale with a heavy skosh of romance thrown in. It’s Shanghai in 1926, and a war between two families – alike in dignity, but…
What We Were Promised is both a look at life in modern day China and an observation on the unchanging nature of humanity. “No man is an island entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main” John Donne told us. This book shows that as a universal…
My experience with books set in China has not been stellar – I’ve read too many authors who seem only interested in transplanting characters with western attitudes to a more exotic setting. Janie Chang’s Dragon Springs Road, I am happy to say, does not fall in this category. If anything, by adhering so strictly to…
All through my reading Burning Tigress I shook my head at this missed opportunity. Author Jade Lee is a good writer with a strong knowledge of 19th century Shanghai. When she’s describing the Chinese scolding each other and struggling with life among English people whom they detest, she is marvelous. In this fourth book in…
Forgive me if this review seems pulled in two directions; that’s the way White Tigress by Jade Lee made me feel. It kind of gave me the creeps, and I wasn’t too sure about the happily-ever-after. However, it definitely has some moments of brilliance. There’s only one thing I can say for sure: if you…