Portrait of a Thief

my final read of 2023! i generally struggle with rating anything, and i'm having trouble with this book in particular because i think the author gets a solid 5/5 for ambition and a very fun idea but 1.5/5 for execution, and other reviews (like @readwithcindy's) have already covered some specifics of what did end up driving me up a wall about the writing style. my status updates for this book are brimming with snark already so i won't revisit those notes in full, but portrait of a thief read both like it was clearly a debut novel and like a mid-tier fic on ao3 where impossible events are waved past with phrases such as “and then, somehow, x happened,” where a sense of finality is peppered throughout on single-sentence paragraphs (“it would have to be enough”), and where overly dramatic rhetorical questions kept coming back: “of course... how could it not?” / “what else was there?” i found myself doing line edits in my head after a while, which was distracting, and i kept repeatedly skimming ahead just to loop back and “actually” read.

and like, i kinda get it! i tried my hand at creative writing once, and i hated writing scenic descriptions, and would have preferred just focusing on dialogue only (maybe i should have tried writing more plays). the dialogue is the most believable part of any chapter here, and i venture the strongest. i loved when characters argued. i could've done without sentences about the sky being blue or gold or red—or rarely, purple like a bruise.

let's talk about suspension of disbelief. this is what i know (heh): there are elements of the story that are grounded in our reality, like college students doing remote learning during the early parts of the ongoing global pandemic (sidenote: it occurred to me that this book has a certain urgency in its favor in 2022, maybe 2023, maybe not much later than that), and then others that are just... not at all. i don't even mean the heists.

while the storytelling medium didn't work well for me (i am intrigued by how this story will eventually turn out on television), i did think this was a well-timed read, and IRL things layered onto what i enjoyed about it: my parents, now both retired, studying civics questions for their upcoming naturalization tests; my uncle turning in the keys to my grandparents' house in beitou that they built fifty years ago so that it can finally be demolished by the city after months of delay; me propping up a hardcover to read in the twin bed that got transported from childhood home to childhood home to the house my parents now own. asking my mom about the meaning behind 拔苗助长 when i saw it on the page and her adjusting the idiom to 揠苗助長. some might call that projection.

2.5 for being somewhere between “it was OK” and “i liked it” but rounded up because there are no half stars on gr and i'm feeling generous.

also, if this weren't a library book and if i dog-eared pages (ew, never), i'd mark chapter 64—even if once i read it more closely i realized the word “gaze” (heh, iykyk) was used at least five times, including “lifted her gaze” at least twice where the character in question hadn't ever looked away to begin with. spoilers, though.