Kathy Wang

Book of the Month Club pick

Read this in two days at the beach. Perfect page turner for that kid of setting — interesting but not too intricate. It has a melancholy vibe to it that is a lot less “adrenaline / spy thriller” than I expected and j mean that in a good way.

If I had a complaint it would be that the details of how our main character got from untrained student to COO are missing. I’m not sure we really needed them for the story the author chose to tell but I am curious and maybe would want to read that in a different book.

… (meer)

It's once again Asian American Pacific Islander Heritage Month, so I'm reading stuff by AAPI authors. There's something to be said about narrative scarcity when we compare our handful of stories to each other, I tell myself as I think of this as "the sharp skewering of wealthy expectations in [b:Crazy Rich Asians|16085481|Crazy Rich Asians (Crazy Rich Asians, #1)|Kevin Kwan|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1364852559s/16085481.jpg|21571970] coupled with financial concerns of [b:The Wangs vs. the World|28114515|The Wangs vs. the World|Jade Chang|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1451493647s/28114515.jpg|45235074]"

Family patriarch Stanley Huang has pancreatic cancer, aka the one with one of the lowest survival rates, and the family must cope. Son Fred is a venture capitalist for a "middling" firm (still handling way more money than I've seen, but he feels inadequate as he thinks he should've landed a 'bigger' job with a degree from Harvard Business School) but may have found a lucrative opportunity overseas, and daughter Kate is an executive for a Silicon Valley company that has vibes of an Apple-like with the a creative terror similar to Musk as her boss, though she has trouble at home trying to figure out what her husband does all day as he works on his startup. Stanley's first wife (and Kate & Fred's mother) Linda is a pragmatic woman, but in her loneliness turns to online dating, and second wife Mary seems to be background/kind of just there until we get a PoV later in the book.

I can't put my finger on why I liked this more than Wangs vs the World (perhaps because all the family units felt more woven together, unlike having the older sister in a separate thread from the rest of the family?) Unfortunately, a line Fred says when talking to a would-be partner in an investment that "all the unicorns are staying private, like Uber and Pinterest" is now dated as they've both gone public in spring 2019. Then again, aren't all 'contemporary' novels eventually going to become period pieces? I felt for Kate & Linda's plots the strongest, and had little sympathy for Fred though I can easily see him hanging out with Edison Cheng from CRA, with both men thinking the other an insufferable cock.… (meer)