I had such mixed feelings about this book! I freely acknowledge that probably, part of the problem was that I was drawn to it because I loved Téa Obreht's Inland so much, and I kept wanting it to be more like that, which is ridiculous and unfair.
That said, this is a challenging book, and a very uneven one. It's absolutely absorbing, and wonderfully vivid, at times, but it also has big chunks that feel utterly contrived. As I was reading, I found myself thinking, "This is made up. This is all just made up." Which, of course, is all fiction, so what was it that was bugging me here? Was it the plot twists? Was it the writing style? Was it that it seemed like the author was trying to say something profound about gender, cultural identity, etc, but it was actually kind of incoherent? Or — to be charitable to the author — was it that the text was subverting my expectations of what The Olde West is "supposed" to be like, when as I recognize that those expectations are largely invented fictions?
Similarly, was the odd pacing — where crucial details that utterly changed your sense of the entire story were casually tossed out at random, and entire years jumped by in a few paragraphs that were so crammed with plot points that they could be spun out into their own novel — a brilliant innovation that was challenging storytelling conventions, or just... clumsy plotting?
Certainly, there are parts of this story that feel incredibly cliché, and not in an intentional way. But it also does have some wonderfully nuanced explorations of the fluidity of identity.
I don't know. I think Zhang has a ton of potential, but this book...feels like a MFA thesis.
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