I dunno if I just wasn’t in the mood for it, or if it was just a hard act to follow after the gentleman in Moscow, but I didn’t love this book, and joined through it for book club rather than for any other reason. Maybe it’s my ignorance of malay history. Maybe it’s that I don’t really care about the marriages of white people in history. It hit some sweet notes and I appreciated the theme of what loyalty may mean in the context of friendship and marriage and with lovers. But despite some evocative scenes and clever plot weaving it just felt two dimensional.