MixedThe New York Times Book ReviewThe book’s semi-surreal \'world of water\' — with its lonely late-night bars, its anthropomorphic creatures — rarely deviates from the tropes of magical realism, but the first-time novelist, who is Chinese but writes in English, puts her own touches on the genre with quiet observations about contemporary Beijing. It’s the city Yu was born and raised in, and you can tell; the pages throb with the isolation of life in a metropolis ... Yu’s prose is crisp and never tedious, with bursts of startling imagery amid the otherwise restrained style ... The book is most enthralling when it juxtaposes the ancient and the aggressively modern...carefully weaving the disjointed, contradictory parts of Chinese society, like how sacred deities can be reduced to serving a New Age notion of karma ... Unfortunately, Yu introduces several topics only to abandon them before they reach the level of real insight ... Jia Jia’s awakening is less a process of personal development than the result of a plot twist ... As she flails within that liminal space between a traumatic past and a future reinvention, one wonders if such a swift reveal can ever fully subvert the myths upon which not just individuals, but nations, are built.
