Shanghailanders
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15
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Average rating3
A dazzling and ambitious debut novel that follows a cosmopolitan Shanghai household backward in time—beginning in 2040 and moving through our present and the recent past—exploring their secrets, their losses, and the ways a family makes and remakes itself across the years.
2040: Wealthy real estate investor Leo Yang—handsome, distinguished, a real Shanghai man—is on the train back to the city after seeing his family off at the airport. His sophisticated Japanese-French wife, Eko, and their two eldest children, Yumi and Yoko, are headed for Boston, though one daughter’s revelation will soon reroute them to Paris. 2039: Kiko, their youngest daughter and an aspiring actress, decides to pursue fame at any cost, like her icon Marilyn Monroe. 2038: Yumi comes to Yoko in need, after a college-dorm situation at Harvard goes disastrously wrong.
As the years rewind to 2014, Shanghailanders brings readers into the shared and separate lives of the Yang family parent by parent, daughter by daughter, and through the eyes of the people in their orbit—a nanny from the provinces, a private driver with a penchant for danger, and a grandmother whose memories of the past echo the present. We glimpse a future where the city’s waters rise and the specter of apocalypse is never far off. But in Juli Min’s hands, we also see that whatever may change, universal constants remain: love is complex, life is not fair, and family will always be stubbornly connected by blood, secrets, and longing.
Brilliantly constructed and achingly resonant, Shanghailanders is an unforgettable exploration of marriage, relationships, and the layered experience of time.
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Shanghailanders is an ambitious debut story about a super rich Shanghai family told in reverse order from 2040 back to 2014. The book opens as the family has basically ended – the children have grown up, grown apart, the husband and wife argue fairly frequently and are apart more often than together. Then, each chapter takes the story back a few years to see how the family got to that point. Each chapter dials the time period back a few years, and follows a different member of the family initially (the three girls, the husband, the wife), and then starts also including various members of the household as well (a driver, a nanny, etc.) to paint a more full story of this family’s life.
The prose of the book was what ultimately kept me reading. The author has a way with words that really painted the scenes, the cities, the different ways the family has of interacting with one another. Ultimately, though, I left disappointed in the book, because it felt like the reverse way of telling the story didn’t add anything. There wasn’t any real payoff at the end for reading the story backwards, and at more than one point in the book I found myself wanting to know what happens as a result of the chapter, not what came before.
There’s a good story here, I just wish it were told differently.
I received an ARC copy free through Goodreads Giveaways.
