Goddammit.

I don’t like writing negative reviews of books by authors I like. I especially don’t like it when authors I like write two books in a row that I have to write negative reviews for. Kuang’s sixth book, Katabasis, wasn’t a bad book, and I didn’t dislike it, necessarily, but when you’re coming from an author whose books have nearly all ended up on my end-of-year best-of lists, a book not doing that is a downgrade. But I said in the review of that book that it might have fallen victim to my own expectations for it, and that I wanted to reread it at some point, and I still plan to do that.

Here’s the second-worst thing I can say about Taipei Story: it’s the first of Kuang’s books that I’m nearly certain I’m never going to revisit. Here’s the worst thing I can say about Taipei Story: if this was my first R.F. Kuang book and not my seventh, I would not be planning to pick up her next book.

And yet I’m still not willing to call it a bad book. If you are interested in character studies, and if the idea of spending just shy of 300 pages in the head of an American college sophomore who has moved to Taiwan for a ten-week intensive summer Chinese program sounds like something you might want to read, you will probably like this book! I am, unfortunately, not that reader. Character studies really aren’t my thing, and while I generally don’t need my books to be about people who are like me– I read about wizards and dragons and space aliens, for fuck’s sake– Lily is so closed off and so internal that I couldn’t find a way to care about her. And while I’ve studied enough languages to know that a ten-week residential Chinese course would be insanely difficult, it … doesn’t make for a good story, unfortunately. Lily doesn’t really do much over the course of the book. She doesn’t get along with her roommate, she has the most insanely awkward sex scene in the history of the written word, and that’s really about it.(*)

The meat of the story is supposed to be about when her grandfather dies, a grandfather who she barely knows because she lives in America and he’s still in China, and it leads to this mental crisis where Lily feels like she was learning Chinese to get to know her family and her history, and one of her few connections to China has just died, and her grandmother is sliding into dementia and barely remembers her most of the time. She has a few conversations with her mother where it becomes clear that she doesn’t really know much about her family’s history, partially because she never asked and partially because no one ever bothered to tell her anything, and she has a bit of a breakdown for a while, and I can imagine someone who finds this really fascinating, but it’s just not me.

I’m also frustrated because for the second book in a row I feel like forces external to the book have affected my opinion of it. In the case of Katabasis it was the pre-reading checklists and the idea that the book was super complicated and deep and you needed background knowledge to properly appreciate it that was circling around, and it just turned out to not be true. In the case of this book, Kuang’s grandfather literally died while she was in Taipei at an intensive residential language study. I would really like her next book to Not Be About Her. Do I get to tell her what to write? No, I don’t. Do I get to be disappointed by her choices anyway? I do. But the big difference between Kuang and Lily is that Lily is 19 and Kuang’s experience was in her late twenties, so she’s written Lily as less mature and able to process her feelings than she thinks she was, and again, it just didn’t work for me.

Again, the book’s not bad by any means, and I’m still in on day one for whatever she writes next. But this one just didn’t work for me.

(*) It was awful. I had to put the book down and walk away for a while. Like, the scene was supposed to be alienating and kind of creepy and weird, and it succeeded so much in that goal that it made me not want to read the book any more for a while. That’s sort of a compliment? But I’m still cringing from secondhand embarrassment right now, and I finished this book three days ago.

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It is possible that you just read this piece and are surprised that I didn’t address The Controversy. That is because I find The Controversy to be so fucking stupid that I lose brain cells every time I think about it. If you are unaware of The Controversy, do yourself a favor and don’t look into it. If you are upset by The Controversy, go touch some fucking grass and find a real problem, you zygote.