Deng Ming-Dao, Being Chinese American Series 2011: What We Expect of Women
(January 20) This was recommended by Nicole Chung at The Toast last fall (September 2, 2015), and was in hot demand at the library, so off I went.I really liked it… it was fun to read “real fiction” again for some reason… I guess I've been reading so much nonfiction lately: Kate Hepburn’s biography, how-to books, and spiritual books (and Alexander McCall Smith, who’s so stylized in some ways as not to be “normal” fiction).
This mystery reminded me of Gone Girl or John Green’s books, but so much gentler. Good suspense, though, nonetheless.
The story is so touching in a racial-tension way, anyway, to begin with... at first you feel it’s “one of those aching stories about which the reader knows so much more than any of the characters,” which is fine in itself, but which makes what you actually are going to get so unexpected... the story becomes so much more complicated than you've been led to suspect, turning an apparently plausible narrative slowly over onto its head so that it means completely the opposite of what it first appeared to… there is very clever back-and-forth-ing in time, creating new and profound layers of meaning so that each scene is all the more wince-making when you re-encounter it … it's not heavy-handed, either… it doesn't wrench the story around… each new point of view is just a subtle shift … (it’s not like Rashomon or something).
Yeah -- I liked it… but I guess I did not lurve it… it took me till the library's drop-dead return date to finish it.
“Drop dead,” heh.
