These Violent Delights

just finished with this one. it was - okay. it wasn't bad but i really felt bogged down by the writing style which i wasn't a fan of. all that excessive description and unnecessary metaphors and similes... i started off not caring about the romance but really interested in the central myster of it all. by the end, i don't think i really cared about anything, not the monster or the bugs, or the politics, least of all the romantic shenanigans. and i think the decline of my interest was really just cos of how excessively wordy and dramatic it was. to illustrate, there was one part where Marshall lit a cigarette and it was described as “flaring up like a miniature star”. i specifically kept that in mind cos i wondered if there was a point for that metaphor but there wasn't one in the end. or like when Alisa talks about how she is so familiar with Shanghai - “Alisa Montagova had memorized almost every street in Shanghai. In her head, instead of dendrites and synaptic nerves, she fancied there lived a map of her city, overlying her temporal lobes and amygala pairs until all that she was made of was the places she had been.” like, that is just way too extra for me.

i guess i just kept on going because i was still at least a bit interested in how closely the author was going to follow the storyline of R&J. i certainly did not expect her to end it with the Tybalt/Mercutio thing but then pull a twist on that with Marshall surviving the same way Juliet had in the play. i also thought that the bugs was a way for there to have been a lot of death in the book but without it having been carried out by the main families/characters, so we can blame all that death on a third party instead. we hear a lot about the two gangs killing each other but don't actually see a lot of important people die at each other's hands tbh.

another redeeming point about the book is that it had occasional moments where it talked about the struggle of having been brought up with two or more different cultures, and i think it was done so well because it resonates with the author's life, being a Shanghainese brought up in NZ i believe. i did enjoy what she had to say about how Juliette changed her name to fit in in America, but then slowly lost touch with her actual Chinese name, which is something still very relatable to a lot of people today. some of the Chinese terms used in the book was a little stilted and awkward (and some had wrong hanyupinyin too) but overall i like that she didn't explain every single one of them and just let its meaning be inferred.

so overall... i guess maybe a 2.5 stars from me?