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A review by stephashryver
Five Star Billionaire by Tash Aw
3.0
While 3 stars is a lower rating than I'd usually give, I think it's important to point out that I did like this book. There were just some things that for me personally meant I didn't get on with it as well as I'd hoped.
The writing style was very descriptive and did capture Shanghai life and culture very vividly. Saying that, it was fairly generic and a tad bland in parts. But maybe I'm being picky.
The premise was interesting and this book had a lot of potential, but for me, it fell short.
Throughout this book, I was continually waiting for something to happen. It was very slow moving and full of back story. To put it simply, this book lacks plot. That in itself doesn't mean that it's a bad book. However, I found that I simply didn't care enough about the characters to enjoy the rest of it. Phoebe and Gary in particular felt a bit like they'd been moulded to fit stereotypes.
Gary's chapters were pretty boring, and I feel like the author was continually hitting me over the head with the "being a popstar sucks" message and there wasn't really much else to his point of view at all. To me it just lacked depth and wasn't very interesting.
SPOILERS START
Phoebe's story interested me at first. Despite her original shallowness and naivety, I liked her character. It was cool to see her attempts at and varying degrees of success with climbing the Shanghai social ladder, and I sympathised with her journey. However, she felt a bit 2D, and she really lacked character development until the final 100 pages. It felt like all her character growth was kind of squashed into that final segment, and done so in a very bizarre way that didn't really make sense. I didn't make sense to me that after all her hard work, all her lying and scheming, and all her ambition, Phoebe would just up and leave Shanghai. She finally had what she wanted, and it seemed utterly strange to me that she would give up her job at the spa and her relationship with Walter just because she got drunk and embarrassed herself. Especially because Walter clearly still wanted to be with her afterwards. Maybe she realised that lying about her past and using men to get money and privilege wasn't a fulfilling existence, and while that is important character growth, it was way too sudden, and would've been much better if it had been built up throughout. Giving up on her relationship is one thing, but giving up her job at the spa still doesn't make sense after everything she has done to get to that position.
Side note: I really loved Yanyan, and I think she was one of the best characters in the book (or at least one of my my personal favourites).
Justin's character was also disappointing. I felt like there was lots of wasted potential there. I wanted to see him get out of his depressive slump and stop hiding from society, finally able to start living his life out of his family's shadow. I kept waiting for him to make something of himself, but the aforementioned depressive slump seemed to last... the whole book, which, to me, just isn't interesting to read. That, his crush on Yinghui, and his friendship with Yanyan (which was cute I'll admit) were the only really significant parts of his story.
I think Yinghui was the best character of the main five. Honestly, she bumped this review up an extra star all on her own. I loved her and her back story, and it was really interesting to slowly uncover more of her past and see how it was affecting her. She definitely felt more real than the other characters, and her story was better fleshed out and it felt like more happened. However, as with Justin, it wasn't really resolved properly. We find out through Justin that Walter (more on him later) stabbed her in the back and that she's suffering huge financial losses. But we don't get to see her deal with that. We don't get to see her grow and make peace with what's happened. We don't get her perspective at all. Which again, is such a waste of potential. All we're left with about both her and Justin is that they're back in touch, and they're probably going to get together (it's hinted) but we don't see either of them deal with their issues or grow as characters. So much wasted potential.
As for Walter, I wasn't really sure what to think about him. He's a character who's shrouded in mystery throughout the novel, which is interesting and keeps you on your toes. The problem is that the mystery is never explained. All we know is that he's essentially corrupt and not a good guy because he rips off Yinghui. However, we never get told WHY he does what he does. We never know who he really is. All we have is that story about the run down hotel and his dad and the birds' nests, which eventually links up to Justin's past, yet we are never shown how that links to either Justin or Walter's present.
The "How to be a Five Star Billionaire," self-help style of Walter's chapters was an interesting way of approaching the book (even if I've seen it before in Moshin Hamid's How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia). It could've been interesting, but again, it wasn't really wrapped up or continued throughout the novel very well, leaving it as just another element of the book which felt unfinished and discontinued.
END SPOILERS
So I think, the three main things for me that brought this book down to three stars were:
1) It felt unfinished and the ending was unrealistic and sloppy.
2) Nothing much happened. For my personal tastes, there was too much description, although I wouldn't say that's objectively a bad thing. Often, the back story was more interesting than the current story. The past and present weren't linked together so it felt disjointed and didn't make sense. We were given a lot of tidbits which never really came to anything or linked to each other, meaning they felt like random, insignificant details.
3) The characters were two dimensional and lacked development or depth. If there was development, it felt rushed and sloppy. The characters didn't touch me emotionally. I just didn't care about them enough to enjoy it as much as I'd have liked to.
What I will say for Five Star Billionaire is that the best thing (for me) was the depiction of Shanghai life and culture. It showed the city from a lot of different perspectives and it gave me a well rounded idea of what Shanghai is like. (If only the characters were similarly fleshed out. *sigh*)
The writing style was very descriptive and did capture Shanghai life and culture very vividly. Saying that, it was fairly generic and a tad bland in parts. But maybe I'm being picky.
The premise was interesting and this book had a lot of potential, but for me, it fell short.
Throughout this book, I was continually waiting for something to happen. It was very slow moving and full of back story. To put it simply, this book lacks plot. That in itself doesn't mean that it's a bad book. However, I found that I simply didn't care enough about the characters to enjoy the rest of it. Phoebe and Gary in particular felt a bit like they'd been moulded to fit stereotypes.
Gary's chapters were pretty boring, and I feel like the author was continually hitting me over the head with the "being a popstar sucks" message and there wasn't really much else to his point of view at all. To me it just lacked depth and wasn't very interesting.
SPOILERS START
Phoebe's story interested me at first. Despite her original shallowness and naivety, I liked her character. It was cool to see her attempts at and varying degrees of success with climbing the Shanghai social ladder, and I sympathised with her journey. However, she felt a bit 2D, and she really lacked character development until the final 100 pages. It felt like all her character growth was kind of squashed into that final segment, and done so in a very bizarre way that didn't really make sense. I didn't make sense to me that after all her hard work, all her lying and scheming, and all her ambition, Phoebe would just up and leave Shanghai. She finally had what she wanted, and it seemed utterly strange to me that she would give up her job at the spa and her relationship with Walter just because she got drunk and embarrassed herself. Especially because Walter clearly still wanted to be with her afterwards. Maybe she realised that lying about her past and using men to get money and privilege wasn't a fulfilling existence, and while that is important character growth, it was way too sudden, and would've been much better if it had been built up throughout. Giving up on her relationship is one thing, but giving up her job at the spa still doesn't make sense after everything she has done to get to that position.
Side note: I really loved Yanyan, and I think she was one of the best characters in the book (or at least one of my my personal favourites).
Justin's character was also disappointing. I felt like there was lots of wasted potential there. I wanted to see him get out of his depressive slump and stop hiding from society, finally able to start living his life out of his family's shadow. I kept waiting for him to make something of himself, but the aforementioned depressive slump seemed to last... the whole book, which, to me, just isn't interesting to read. That, his crush on Yinghui, and his friendship with Yanyan (which was cute I'll admit) were the only really significant parts of his story.
I think Yinghui was the best character of the main five. Honestly, she bumped this review up an extra star all on her own. I loved her and her back story, and it was really interesting to slowly uncover more of her past and see how it was affecting her. She definitely felt more real than the other characters, and her story was better fleshed out and it felt like more happened. However, as with Justin, it wasn't really resolved properly. We find out through Justin that Walter (more on him later) stabbed her in the back and that she's suffering huge financial losses. But we don't get to see her deal with that. We don't get to see her grow and make peace with what's happened. We don't get her perspective at all. Which again, is such a waste of potential. All we're left with about both her and Justin is that they're back in touch, and they're probably going to get together (it's hinted) but we don't see either of them deal with their issues or grow as characters. So much wasted potential.
As for Walter, I wasn't really sure what to think about him. He's a character who's shrouded in mystery throughout the novel, which is interesting and keeps you on your toes. The problem is that the mystery is never explained. All we know is that he's essentially corrupt and not a good guy because he rips off Yinghui. However, we never get told WHY he does what he does. We never know who he really is. All we have is that story about the run down hotel and his dad and the birds' nests, which eventually links up to Justin's past, yet we are never shown how that links to either Justin or Walter's present.
The "How to be a Five Star Billionaire," self-help style of Walter's chapters was an interesting way of approaching the book (even if I've seen it before in Moshin Hamid's How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia). It could've been interesting, but again, it wasn't really wrapped up or continued throughout the novel very well, leaving it as just another element of the book which felt unfinished and discontinued.
END SPOILERS
So I think, the three main things for me that brought this book down to three stars were:
1) It felt unfinished and the ending was unrealistic and sloppy.
2) Nothing much happened. For my personal tastes, there was too much description, although I wouldn't say that's objectively a bad thing. Often, the back story was more interesting than the current story. The past and present weren't linked together so it felt disjointed and didn't make sense. We were given a lot of tidbits which never really came to anything or linked to each other, meaning they felt like random, insignificant details.
3) The characters were two dimensional and lacked development or depth. If there was development, it felt rushed and sloppy. The characters didn't touch me emotionally. I just didn't care about them enough to enjoy it as much as I'd have liked to.
What I will say for Five Star Billionaire is that the best thing (for me) was the depiction of Shanghai life and culture. It showed the city from a lot of different perspectives and it gave me a well rounded idea of what Shanghai is like. (If only the characters were similarly fleshed out. *sigh*)