Eve Gil

DNF 25%

Wow... this book sucked.

I knew this book had bad reviews, but I wanted to confirm. And well... this utterance of incoherent gibberish should have just stayed as some obscure fanfic written under a pen name and left forgotten.

It doesn't have typos, so the book got 2 stars for the effort. That alone doesn't save the book from its complete lack of any plot and infantile conceptions of China. I have been to Nanjing, it's a very nice and modern city with approximately 9 million inhabitants. Maybe I could have been more forgiving if this book was written in the late 1980s, but it was published only 15 years ago. I never understood why the father had bad experiences attending school there. Like... he went to Nanjing University, one of China's top 3 schools. He hated the experience despite being able to speak Mandarin (so we know it wasn't a language barrier issue), and the book never explains the reason. Book only hints he thought the city was very run down. More like the author never bothered to do some research on the city with Wikipedia.

Book also screws up with the language. Mandarin uses 4 tones, not 5. The scenes where the MC mentions one parent speaking in Japanese and the father answering in Mandarin make zero sense. When did the mom learn Japanese anyways? She never showed interest in Japan, and that language isn't widely spoken in Mexico. And Mandarin? Why would she need to learn Mandarin if she always lived in Mexico and her husband was a fellow Spanish-speaking Mexican?

I could have continued nitpicking the book further, but there was just zero plot at this point, and I lost interest. This book should have never gotten trad published. I'd recommend readers to avoid reading it at all costs.… (mehr)