The Thousand Crimes of Ming Tsu

What a banger. I loved it. The writing was excellent. The magical realism induced the perfect level of weirdness into the revenge plot. The characters were pretty flat but fit super well. And an old-school western was so much fun to read.

I also thought it did a solid job breaking up a whitewashed Western genre with its MC and the sequences in the book while still following genre conventions. I read the book feeling like it was a Western even though it was breaking the stereotypes of the genre. It reminded me of something Neil Gaiman said where genre fiction is defined by what people would be disappointed if a book did not do. In that regard, this book did a great job both hitting the feeling of a western and subverting its norms.

I also was reading through some reviews that basically said it was a ‘missed opportunity' to dive into some of the Chinese heritage and stories of the railroad. I can see that but I subscribe to the idea that stories just exist and we have personal relations with them. Its not on the author to write a story for an agenda. Thats not on them.

Besides the cover is dope.