A review by emmkayt
The Headmaster's Wager by Vincent Lam

4.0

I found this hard to put down - it was a real page-turner for me. Hadn't read anything set in Vietnam before, and found the particular setting (expatriate Chinese community) very interesting. The interpersonal stuff was pure melodrama, but none the worse for it. Although it's in the third person, the reader sees events and people only through the eyes of the main character. Consequently I found the female characters and the Vietnamese characters rather one-dimensional. However, I'm not quite sure how that could have been avoided given the eyes through which the reader is seeing them. One female character, in particular, came across as the exotic other par excellence.