Review copy provided by the publisher.
The most common reason I bounce off a book is the prose voice. That means that the most common reason I read a book all the way through that I don’t end up liking much is also the prose voice. This was a very readable book on the sentence level. I have no complaints about its prose.
On a larger scale, though…this book just didn’t go anywhere deep or interesting with its premise. It’s about a young American woman who is hit by a car in Shanghai when her parents think she’s living and working in Beijing, and about that whole family trying to figure out what’s been going on. Which they mostly don’t do. Mostly they just flail around being a mess. Friendships and relationships are severed more or less by bad luck.
On the up side, the sex workers in the book are treated with respect as people. On the other hand, there’s not a lot of depth in that part either–and it’s a pretty large theme to tackle without having anything in particular to say about it. I can’t say this motivated me to seek out Haigh’s other books. Oh well, they can’t all etc.