Li Jing suffers a catistrophic injury when a building calapses around him. When he awakens he is unable to speak. An American doctor is hired to help him learn to speak agaain. ( )

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. ( )

This book is really terrible. I was horrified by the story, but not in the way that the author intended... this book is about a hugely inappropriate doctor. Seriously, what kind of professional acts like that? Moving in with her patient, going to the spa and shopping with the patient's wife... oh it goes on and on and gets even worse. I shudder to think of it.
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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. ( )

2.5**

Ji Ling is a prominent businessman. Born in America while his father was a student, he has lived in Shanghai since he was 10 years old and no longer speaks English. When he suffers a brain injury as a result of an explosion in the hotel where he has met his father for dinner, the result is loss of language … except for a few English phrases. Frustrated and frightened, his family brings in an American doctor, a neurologist specializing in bilingual aphasia (loss of speech), to help him recover his speech. Months later the physical wreckage of the explosion has been cleared away, leaving no evidence of the rubble through which Ji Ling crawled to safety. But there is plenty of evidence of the wreckage in the emotional scars Ji Ling and his family bear.

In her debut novel, Xu explores the most intimate of human interactions – communication. The loneliness and isolation of not being able to communicate our wants, desires, feelings, and hopes are evident in all the characters. Of course there is the obvious injury to Ji Ling, but the American doctor – Rosalyn Neal – is no more able to communicate than her patient (and not only because she does not speak Chinese). Meiling, Ji’s wife, is locked in a pattern of not communicating. His father, Professor Ji, is silenced by the conventions of society and his fear of interfering in his son’s marriage. Alan, the interpreter, manages to convey words without any feeling or meaning.

It’s the kind of story and the kind of novel that I should have loved. I like character-based novels that explore the intricacies of human interaction. But somehow Xu’s writing went too far in giving us the sense of isolation that comes from the inability to communicate. This reader could not connect with any of the characters. I felt their frustration, because I felt frustrated. But rather than empathizing and caring about their predicament, I felt so removed from them as to not care at all what would happen to them.
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