Shanghailanders

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.