Little Gods

The story of Su Lan evoked a number of emotions but awe is not one of them. I have mixed feelings about the read. The book starts with a seemingly tight grip on the story. The backdrop of the Tiananmen Square massacre is portentous of characters dealing with the aftermath of that fateful day. That does not really prove to be so.

I did feel though, that the author's craft of writing is excellent . I felt the power of her words in many places and found myself rereading passages a number of times.

For instance, “I never stopped loving my mother. Not exactly. A little pin fell out of the contraption of my love for her; bit by bit it fell apart, until one day I discovered she was my enemy. I never ceased to feel strongly—strongest—about her. Even long after the strength of emotion was no longer adoring, my mother retained an ability to extract, with a word, a glance, a simple tone of voice, the well of everything irrational inside me.”
(Excerpt From
Little Gods
Meng Jin
This material may be protected by copyright.)

The love hate relationship between mother and daughter expressed so eloquently.

The book seemed in my mind to have unconvincing twists and turns. Events did not always seem logical. I felt the need for explanations of things happening in the real world in more than one place. The end of the story seems like it is done in haste and there are loose threads there.

Inspite of these flaws the book is worth reading. Its a good debut novel and I feel one can expect some good writing from this author

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.

Meng Jin's debut novel, Little Gods, is such a gorgeously constructed story. It's built on a sturdy frame, decorated beautifully, but it will have some readers scratching their heads saying, but what is it? What does it mean? And that is to say that it is mysterious, clever, thought-provoking, and may leave you with several questions.

Su Lan is a brilliant physicist with an eye always to the future. Liya is gifted with language and searches for answers about her mother's past. That's all you need to know about this novel. It is the marriage of science and language, the meeting of past and future. And though this novel featured less hard science than I'd expected up until the final moments, it never ceased to be intelligent. Equally, the lush language and the perfectly joined story elements came together into a story was that altogether very moving.

Little Gods is a poetic and intellectual debut that may have a little trouble finding its audience. It's one for those who don't mind having to put some thought into their read, but who also hope to experience emotion. Personally, I'd recommend it to readers of Light from Other Stars and Asymmetry.

Thanks to HarperCollins for providing an advanced copy through Goodreads Giveaways.