altlovesbooks reviewed Little Gods by Meng Jin
Review of 'Little Gods' on 'Goodreads'
3 stars
This was a tough book for me to get through. The main subject of the book is a physicist named Su Lan, who lives in Beijing and gave birth to a daughter on the night of the Tiananmen Square massacre. After she gives birth to the daughter, her mental state steadily declines. But rather than reading the book from her point of view, we get to know Su Lan from the point of view of four people who are greatly impacted by her life. The point of view hops between these four people periodically during the book, and the story of Su Lan and her state of mind isn’t told chronologically either. Personally, I find these other characters more compelling and interesting than Su Lan herself. Complicating matters is the author’s writing style. There are no quotation marks indicating when someone is speaking, so it can be difficult to follow …
This was a tough book for me to get through. The main subject of the book is a physicist named Su Lan, who lives in Beijing and gave birth to a daughter on the night of the Tiananmen Square massacre. After she gives birth to the daughter, her mental state steadily declines. But rather than reading the book from her point of view, we get to know Su Lan from the point of view of four people who are greatly impacted by her life. The point of view hops between these four people periodically during the book, and the story of Su Lan and her state of mind isn’t told chronologically either. Personally, I find these other characters more compelling and interesting than Su Lan herself. Complicating matters is the author’s writing style. There are no quotation marks indicating when someone is speaking, so it can be difficult to follow the flow of a conversation, or know when someone is speaking vs. thinking. Finally the author sprinkles in words of Shanghainese (a dialect, as I learned through Google) without context or translation, and Google is less than helpful when it comes to these local words. Su Lan's daughter plays a large role in the last third of the book, and the resolution at the end is somewhat dull and unsatisfying.
All things together, the secondary characters were fleshed out well and were interesting, and the author does write some beautiful prose. Unfortunately the writing style and ultimately uninteresting plot weren't enough for me to rate the book higher.
