I loved this book.
As anyone who's read [a:John Steinbeck|585|John Steinbeck|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1182118389p2/585.jpg]'s [b:East of Eden|8111671|East of Eden|John Steinbeck|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1319643757l/8111671.SX50.jpg|2574991] will tell you, the first thing to do is to forget about the 1955 movie version of it. The movie is only of the fourth of four parts of the book and is a melodrama, though it's always fun to watch James Dean act.
It's exactly the book I wanted to read at this time; a book that takes me away from the events of this awful year (2020) but isn't escapist fluff. (I don't mean to sound like a snob. I have no problem with escapist fiction but I personally read so little that I try to find something that challenges me a little without adding to my stress level.)
For me the best surprise was the character Lee, who's left out of the movie though he's nearly the most important character in the story. He is the Chinese servant of the main characters and in the beginning he's an annoying stereotype, what you might expect of someone in a book written in 1950 that takes place in the early Twentieth Century.
When you first meet him, Lee says things like, "Allee time talkee. Me Chinee number one boy. You leddy go now?" That's annoying for many reasons, among them that the dialect is taking from Japanese stereotypes, not Chinese. It turns out that Lee only talked that way because it shielded him from the white people he worked for. He was born in America. As the novel progresses, he drops it completely and emerges like a wise, hip character from 2020 somehow transported back in time, and says things like:

All colors and blends of Americans have somewhat the same tendencies. It's a breed—selected out by accident. And so we're overbrave and overfearful—we're kind and cruel as children. We're overfriendly and at the same time frightened of strangers. We boast and are impressed. We're oversentimental and realistic. We are mundane and materialistic—and do you know of any other nations that acts for ideals? We eat too much. We have no taste, no sense of proportion. We throw our energy about like waste. In the old lands they say of us that we go from barbarism to decadence without an intervening culture. Can it be that our critics have not the key or the language of our culture?