Book Addiction

Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstressby Dai Sijie

From the back cover -

In this enchanting tale about the magic of reading and the wonder of romantic awakening, two hapless city boys are exiled to a remote mountain village for reeducation during China’s infamous Cultural Revolution.  There they meet the daughter of the local tailor and discover a hidden stash of Western classics in Chinese translation.  As they flirt with the seamstress and secretly devour these banned works, they find transit from their grim surroundings to worlds they never imagined.

My thoughts -

I found this book to be just kind of ok.  Honestly, it really dragged for me in the beginning and if it wasn’t so short I don’t think I would have finished it.  But since it’s only 180 pages, I figured I might as well see how it ends.  I really love the concept of this book, and the description made me feel like I would just fall in love with it.  But I think perhaps it just fell flat for me - I didn’t feel close to any of the characters, and the writing style simply did not draw me in the way I need a book to do.  I finally started caring about what happened in the story when I only had about 50 pages to go, so that made it easy to finish up, but for the majority of this novel, I was pretty much underwhelmed.

5 stars.

Read Kimbofo’s review here.