I received this book as one of Amazon's First Picks, and thought it looked promising.
The thing that Tsao does well is to make Singapore come alive, not as a glittering tourist destination, but as a vibrant, real city that millions of ordinary people live in and call home, where they live and work and bargain and complain about parking next to the new eatery that just opened up down the street.
Unfortunately, the descriptions go on for a long time, with plot points few and far between: it's eighty or so pages to get to the "You're a wizard, Harry!" part, and halfway through, the story has yet to take off.
What has been revealed so far seems full of tropes familiar to SF/F readers: a hapless young man who doesn't fit in the everyday world is shown that there are invisible spaces hidden between the cracks in reality, as it were. Not only that, but our hero is different from both the mundane and the special people, as if fate had something in store Spoiler on his Quest (with a capital Q in the story). Perhaps the One (capital O) will be involved.
On top of everything else, most of the supporting characters are two-dimensional. There's the best friend who's perfect at everything, the main character's parents who torment him for no good reason (I was going to write "for no adequately explored reason", but the reason is explained Spoiler, and it's just that they don't like him; they're also married to each other because they hate each other less than they hate other European expats). In fact, the most exotic locale was Singapore.

Now, maybe I'm missing the point. Maybe Tsao was trying to do something else, and the criticisms above are like criticizing a Rothco for not being photorealistic. All I can say is that I didn't care for it; if you're looking for something with a brisk story or complex characters, you may want to look elsewhere.