Ruiyan Xu

I struggled with this one on a couple of levels. One, I was baffled that RBDigital (the library service I borrowed the audiobook through) includes this one under its "Suspense/Thriller" genre filter. The "General Fiction" category I get, but no, this is not a suspense/thriller. Not even close, unless you count two chapters near the end. Two, I just do not understand the choice of the title. Usually the title of the story makes sense in the context of the story. This time, I am just not getting the connection.

One one level, this is a story about love, family and how important the ability to communicate (language) is for our relationships and our understanding of the world around us. The writing is eloquent and the depiction of Shanghai is well drawn. I admit to be intrigued by the medical aspects of the story - the bilingual aphasia Li Jing's suffers from that whips out his ability to speak Chinese (his second language) and leaves him with only broken fragments of his first language, English - but that is not enough to save this story. While I found the American neurologist Rosalyn's foreign perspective of Shanghai interesting (and the community of expatriates she encounters was not a big surprise), I found the whole relationship quagmire to get tedious, really fast. I might have enjoyed this story more if Rosalyn had been more professional in her interactions with her patient. Of course, that would have meant a completely different kind of story, so I guess I will just have to chalk this one up as not for me.… (more)

I'll admit that the book makes the reader think about the importance and intimacies of language, and finds a lot of ways to do this. It also highlights how damning or compelling it can be to have someone who either encourages or discourages self-sabotaging behavior when your in crisis. So, I can't call the book crap. But I found it painfully over-written (as if a book about language can't be composed of simple, straight-forward words and sentences—pretentious), slow and boring and I disliked almost all the characters almost the whole time, Rosalyn especially.… (more)