A review by avmash
La ballata di un piccolo giocatore by Lawrence Osborne

4.0

I'm hovering between two and three stars on this one. The writing was fairly good, and I enjoyed reading the book - got through it in a day, it isn't a difficult read - but the orientalism and the tired Chinese stereotypes just dragged it down. The book felt as if it had been written in the '50s. I can forgive a book that's 70 years old for believing that only white men are real people, but it feels a bit unnecessary in 2014. Add that to the fact that it didn't really seem to offer anything new, and I think I'm going to keep it to two stars - three for the writing, and minus one for the cliched unconscious racism.