anna_unkreativ's review against another edition
3.0
Disclaimer: I received a free ebook from the author for reviewing.
This book portrays a wide array of perspectives on life in three cities in the South of China by telling snippets of the life of twelve different people. Their stories were interesting and felt real, and I certainly liked some characters more than others and hated the misogynistic views of some characters.
Overall I liked this book and would recommend checking it out, but there were some things that bothered me.
The chapters are named with the twelve Chinese animal zodiac signs, each one stands for a person. As a person who never read Chinese before I found it really hard to figure out who the chapters where about because I couldn’t remember the matching names for each Zodiac sign and couldn’t really be bothered to scroll through the whole ebook each time to try and figure out which Chinese letter stood at the beginning of each chapter.
Having a paper next to you with the chinese letters and character names would solve this problem though.
The language felt a little bit bleak in some paragraphs. The characters also felt a bit shallow at times due to the short periods of their lives that were described and the sometimes simple language. In retrospect both of these things probably come from the fact that this book has a lot of dialogue between native English speakers and Chinese people who learned it as a second language. (Also I was reading Lord of the Rings at the same time so that may have impacted my perception of language)
I think I would have enjoyed it more if there were fewer characters but longer stories about them as the storylines would have been less confusing to follow.
3.5 stars
This book portrays a wide array of perspectives on life in three cities in the South of China by telling snippets of the life of twelve different people. Their stories were interesting and felt real, and I certainly liked some characters more than others and hated the misogynistic views of some characters.
Overall I liked this book and would recommend checking it out, but there were some things that bothered me.
The chapters are named with the twelve Chinese animal zodiac signs, each one stands for a person. As a person who never read Chinese before I found it really hard to figure out who the chapters where about because I couldn’t remember the matching names for each Zodiac sign and couldn’t really be bothered to scroll through the whole ebook each time to try and figure out which Chinese letter stood at the beginning of each chapter.
Having a paper next to you with the chinese letters and character names would solve this problem though.
The language felt a little bit bleak in some paragraphs. The characters also felt a bit shallow at times due to the short periods of their lives that were described and the sometimes simple language. In retrospect both of these things probably come from the fact that this book has a lot of dialogue between native English speakers and Chinese people who learned it as a second language. (Also I was reading Lord of the Rings at the same time so that may have impacted my perception of language)
I think I would have enjoyed it more if there were fewer characters but longer stories about them as the storylines would have been less confusing to follow.
3.5 stars
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