Reviews and Comments

I read this with one of my students, and both of us found it a bit boring. That's about all I can say for the book. Neither of us really enjoyed it. It was just... something we had to read.

But finding the following sentence in its marketing descriptions has made me find it more obnoxious:

At a time when childhood obesity rates are soaring and money is tight for many families, here is a book that invites readers to join in the fun of active play with games that cost nothing.

I would not support books that use fatphobia to try to sell themselves, so download (and print) it if you want to read it. The author or illustrator (or both) should also be working against this, as "outdoor play" is not a solution to childhood obesity... But a whole range of other things that are not individual solutions are (better quality food, less sugar in our foods, dismantling modern agribusiness, etc).

This book is probably one of her most well-known novels with a dozen or so adaptations, and I personally find it to be the most bland (in terms of writing) but most interesting (in terms of its adaptations).

In terms of writing a mystery, I find many of the clues too subtle to even be recognisable. Some of that is due to the audience she was clearly writing for, with Americanisms being far less common in daily speech (such as the clue of an English person who uses the phrasing of 'long distance' rather than 'trunk call', which wouldn't really even seem like a clue to many people today). Some of it is due to things that, probably as a person from the United States reading this book, I find to be more perplexing than useful as clues because they also felt wrong for us (like an American actress playing up an accent and Christie choosing to write this dialogue as 'kinder' [kinda], vurry, and Parrus... which all feel wrong, but are probably recognisable to a British audience who says 'er' as 'ah').

Other clues are sentences that would be more noticeable as stage directions, and I think this is why more people really engage with this story through a visual medium. The glances between characters that you're supposed to take note of are easier to recognise in the way cameras can follow a character's glance. It truly is a story that, I think, is boring to read on the page but is more engaging on-screen (even if, for some reason, one adaptation has Poirot losing his cool over everyone lying to him, which feels super out of character).

I also think this kind of story would be better if removed from the aristocracy. The aristocracy often receives what they feel is justice, and it's incredibly rare that they don't. It's also absurd to think that every single person in a household (particularly those often labeled as 'the help') would fawn over the same small child. It feels incredibly unrealistic and is clearly a story that comes from someone who... would see the world in that manner.

I think it'd be a better kind of story in the hands of, for example, victims of abuses that almost never receive any consequences. Maybe if someone like Brock Turner were the Ratchett/Cassetti character, it'd actually be very good.

I want to just start that I genuinely enjoyed this book more than I was expecting. I've found myself quite disappointed by sci-fi as of late because so much of it feels... the same, even when it's recommended for being 'more queer' or 'more feminist' or something. It still follows the same patterns, same narrative beats, same... failure to even imagine something different or new.

It's also been quite tiring reading a lot of sci-fi that focuses on perpetual conflicts. And while this book includes a conflict of sorts, it does not focus purely on the conflict itself. Instead, it focuses on the relationships between all of the characters. It looks at how things impact them, how they feel about each other, how they get to know each other... It actually gives a very necessary look at people within sci-fi, which I think more stories are in need of.

There are areas that I feel disappointed with, and it's largely because they felt glossed over. There's a whole thing between Ohan and Corbin, and their later interactions or the development of their relationship is never explored in the resolution. It's annoying because everything else is so beautifully done, but I feel like this one should've been handled much better considering the whole story around at least one of them. (And also, it leaves Corbin feeling really on the outskirts of the whole ship's crew.)

This entire book suffers from one of the things I hate the most about detective fiction: cops. It's not that the protagonist works with the cops because the protagonist is a cop. He's the Chief Inspector of the Shanghai Police, and he works within the Communist Party of China.

Despite that, the story was initially interesting. The confused exploration around Chairman Mao (as the book was "for those who had been harmed by Mao") was also interesting as an idea... Especially as there are two separate but intertwined mysteries that are presented: one related to Chairman Mao and one related to Jiao, who is the fictional granddaughter of a fictional actress who was one of Mao's mistresses. She supposedly, according to a minister in Beijing, has "Mao material" that has enabled her to improve her life from that of a humble secretary to a rich young woman. I liked this premise because it did initially highlight the paranoia of having to maintain the image of someone like Mao (something that has been done), and it really could've been an engaging story to explore both the harms of Mao (something this book claimed it would do) and the mystery around Jiao.

However, the author basically throws away in the final two chapters when he grabs for an absurd ableist trope (multiple personality disorder) along with a terrible explanation that does incredibly little to settle anything with regards to either the mystery about Jiao (which also includes two subsequent murders) and does absolutely nothing to settle the exploration around Mao. The cop acts as a cop would (including doing nothing while a woman is being murdered except hide in the closet), and he does nothing to even really consider his place in the system that he's been quasi-questioning throughout the exploration.

On top of the terrible editing (and it is among one of the worst books I've read), it's a work that is so engaging only to slap the audience in the face with the most stereotypical of "twists" and a failure to do whatever it claimed it set out to do.

My first thought is that the person who was thanked for editorial ability really shouldn't have been because they... simply didn't catch things that would improve readability in at least a section of about ten pages (e.g., using 'lead' as the past tense instead of 'led' because of homophones, dropped articles which disrupt the flow of reading, weirdly used commas that create strange lists when it's not supposed to be one, missing plurals...). I would not have thanked him because he did not do his job well and appears to have randomly skipped large sections, as if he read three pages and was like "Yeah, these three pages had minimal problems" and made that assumption for later sections.

ANYWAY, the poor editing aside (which really is a me-issue in terms of flow because of how I learned to read with dyslexia), it doesn't detract from the story. The story is succeeding in making me want to learn more about Mao (the person) because... holy shit. The things being discussed are just... unsurprising, but I've never looked into them.

To be fair, the book's acknowledgement says that it is 'for those who suffered under Mao'.