Portrait of a Thief by Grace D. Li

INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER Named A Most Anticipated Book of 2022 by *Marie Claire* *Washington Post* *Vulture* *NBC News* *Buzzfeed* *Veranda* *PopSugar* *Paste* *The Millions* *Bustle* *Crimereads* Goodreads* *Bookbub* *Boston.com* and more! "The thefts are engaging and surprising, and the narrative brims with international intrigue. Li, however, has delivered more than a straight thriller here, especially in the parts that depict the despair Will and his pals feel at being displaced, overlooked, underestimated and discriminated against. This is as much a novel as a reckoning." —New York Times Book Review Ocean's Eleven meets The Farewell in Portrait of a Thief, a lush, lyrical heist novel inspired by the true story of Chinese art vanishing from Western museums; about diaspora, the colonization of art, and the complexity of the Chinese American identity. History is told by the conquerors. Across the Western world, museums display the spoils of war, of conquest, of colonialism: priceless pieces of art looted from other countries, kept even now. Will Chen plans to steal them back. A senior at Harvard, Will fits comfortably in his carefully curated roles: a perfect student, an art history major and sometimes artist, the eldest son who has always been his parents' American Dream. But when a mysterious Chinese benefactor reaches out with an impossible—and illegal—job offer, Will finds himself something else as well: the leader of a heist to steal back five priceless Chinese sculptures, looted from Beijing centuries ago. His crew is every heist archetype one can imagine—or at least, the closest he can get. A con artist: Irene Chen, a public policy major at Duke who can talk her way out of anything. A thief: Daniel Liang, a premed student with steady hands just as capable of lockpicking as suturing. A getaway driver: Lily Wu, an engineering major who races cars in her free time. A hacker: Alex Huang, an MIT dropout turned Silicon Valley software engineer. Each member of his crew has their own complicated relationship with China and the identity they've cultivated as Chinese Americans, but when Will asks, none of them can turn him down. Because if they succeed? They earn fifty million dollars—and a chance to make history. But if they fail, it will mean not just the loss of everything they've dreamed for themselves but yet another thwarted attempt to take back what colonialism has stolen. Equal parts beautiful, thoughtful, and thrilling, Portrait of a Thief is a cultural heist and an examination of Chinese American identity, as well as a necessary critique of the lingering effects of colonialism.

I adore the premise (I gave a presentation on the zodiac heads in an art law seminar during 3L!), but I found the characters flat and difficult to relate to. The writing style was very much not for me; descriptions were repetitive and felt like impressionistic but meaningless sketches. There was a lot of underspecified yearning and handwaving towards memories. Personally, as an American born member of the Chinese and Taiwanese diasporas, I don't think the story of how it feels to be Chinese American or how we might feel about mainland China and Chinese culture was well or sufficiently told. I don't think the importance of repatriating cultural patrimony was well explained either. But it was still a fun story, and I have high hopes for the Netflix adaptation!

Definitely more of a 4.5 and I'm rounding up.

Even though I was immediately taken in by the premise of this story when it was first announced, it took me a long while to actually get to it. Meanwhile, I read both glowing and not so glowing reviews about it, adjusted my expectations, and hoped that I would get to it someday. Finally the time came when my friends chose it as a pick for one of my readathon prompts and I had no reason to put it off anymore. And this turned out to be an experience I can't accurately describe.

The first thing I realized while reading this was that promoting this majorly as a heist novel was a mistake. Yes we have a crew of friends and yes they plan and execute multiple heists, but frankly those are a minuscule part of this book. This story is so much more - it's about friendship and family, it's about grief and loss, uncertainty and fear, home and belonging, country and culture, past and future - and how each person is shaped by each of these things. This story is less about the actual heists and more about the motivation behind it, why the characters agree to it, what drives them, what they hope to achieve and if they actual end up getting what they want. It's about feeling the pressure of the eldest child bearing the weight of the family's expectations and never being enough; it's about comparing yourself to your elder brother and trying to one up him in every aspect but not feeling satisfied by it; it's about not being able to communicate the love you have for your family; it's about being born and living all your life in a country but being made to feel like you don't belong; it's about doing everything right and as expected but still feeling unfulfilled; it's about wanting to escape from the small life you have but not knowing where to go next; and also ultimately about feeling the trauma of the legacy of colonialism even when you are generations away from it, and wanting to reclaim those losses in whatever small or big ways you can.

I'm not an American but I live here; I'm an Indian but I don't live there. Being an immigrant is always straddling two worlds and at times feeling closer and farther from both. On the other hand, despite not having any background in art nor having a creative bone in my body, I absolutely love being in the midst of an art museum and just imbibing it all. While visiting the Met was an amazing experience, I didn't know how to feel when I saw the many Indian artifacts, some chipped and broken, because while some may have a clean provenance, I'm not sure of everything. And I know that it's been more than 75 years of independence, and I don't even have any personal stories shared to me by my family about life during colonial occupation, but it's still a legacy that's left an indelible mark on our society and upbringing and culture, and maybe I can't change anything about it, but I can still let myself feel the pain and loss of that history while reading stories like this, and hope that there are people like these characters irl who will do something to get back some of India's looted art back home - because while we can never erase the mark of colonialism, this small reclamation can still be powerful.

I feel like I've gone on a tangent and I didn't even write about the characters. But I don't think I can. There were parts of each of them that felt like me, and parts of them I hoped were me some or the other time in my life. I loved them and felt for them and wanted to be with them. And everything else is too personal for me to share in a review here.

I haven't felt this difficult to write a review in a long while, for a book which had so many elements I loved, living breathing characters who felt so close to me, a full cast audio narration which was amazing, and ultimately full of heart and feelings which were too relatable. I don't know who to recommend this book to but if you are belong to the diaspora, I'm sure you'll find something in it for you. Can't wait to see what the author writes next.

There are two major issues with this book. The first is the characters. They do not have enough differentiating them - in particular, their characterization and their voices, but also in background. What makes the best heist thrillers exciting is a bunch of characters coming from different places, different motivations and often having different goals. There is none of that here - all of these characters are elite college students, all coming from families with high expectations, who all have a similar motivation of returning a piece of their ancestral history to its home. That leaves the story with little friction or dissonance to make things exciting to read, and on top of it there is no distinctive voice to any of them.

Which leads me to the second problem - the prose style. For a heist book, the prose here is very....sleepy. Dreamy, if I'm being generous. It's pretty, at first, but it becomes a droning one-note very quickly. The pace never picks up to create any sense of urgency, and descriptions are often so repetitive that they evoke very little. So while I wanted to stay in it at least to the first of five heists, by the time I got to it, I was mostly skimming. At which point, I realized I had to give up.

This is a pretty big bummer. I was hoping for something exciting, slick and fun. But on top of the very unrealistic premise (five students with zero experience get randomly chosen by a company to conduct a huge complicated heist?? in what universe??), which I was initially willing to let slide as a kind of wish-fulfillment fantasy, this book doesn't have much else to offer in terms of characters or tension.

i'll do my best to mince my (mean) words and clarify my feelings on this book as best as possible, but honestly the more i think about it, the more it upsets me

there are a lot of concepts and archetypes that the author tried to pull in that were not well executed. i love cars and racing, but was severely let down by the clear lack of research spent towards building a car girl who loves to race. it became incredibly clear that the author used major movie franchises like fast and furious and ocean's 11 for this book but did not go the extra (necessary) mile to research the mechanics of things like street racing or oh uh i don't know actual heisting?

if you're thinking of picking up this book for the thrill of a heist, let me stop you there, because you aren't gonna find that in this book. despite great potential for heist glory, any semblance of heist execution in this book is lackluster and far too short for anyone to truly get the thrill or satisfaction of a good heist. none of the characters have any actual heist knowledge and make the stupidest mistakes that boggled my mind. i stopped taking this book seriously at like the 20% mark because of it

what i think shines particularly from this is the discussion of diaspora identity, which is tackled from five different perspectives in a pretty good way. however, as satisfied as i was with the discussion of diaspora identity struggles, it wasn't enough to outweigh my incredible disappointment towards this book.

bruh what is with this streak of me reading low vibe books? i'm UPSET...