I enjoyed Taipei Story a lot. Kuang’s observations of the shifting power relationships among 20-year-old friends ring sharp and true. Her vivid descriptions of Taipei and the way her narrator responds to the city create a heady sense of place that her other novels lack ... uang’s narrator feels like a real person, a complicated mix of dutiful passivity and confused yearning as she tries to sort through her expectations and fears toward a sense of what she truly desires from life. If Kuang’s early books often come across as the product of market research on what a certain type of reader wants in their fantasy fiction, Taipei Story has the authenticity of genuine self-expression.
Taipei Story shows us a more mature Kuang, a writer who is developing her novelistic chops ... Many of Kuang’s favourite themes remain — colonialism, the slipperiness of language and translation, the problem of authenticity — but they are better incorporated into the story through the careful characterisation of Lily and the tight timeline of a single summer. The novel has a sense of restraint and sophistication. Perhaps it was realism Kuang needed to write all along.
More introspective and character-driven, and reads both like a coming-of-age and a travelogue, informed by history and politics ... Quiet, moving, and thought-provoking.
Delightfully nerdy ... Taipei Story is seemingly a simpler tale than Kuang’s previous novels ... But it is also more assured and compulsively paced so that explorations of linguistic idiosyncrasies or complicated history are elegantly woven within Lily’s day-to-day life ... We are lucky to have Kuang to articulate this for us.
Despite clever enhancements of Taiwanese history, identity, immigrant politics, and biting social commentary, best-selling Kuang’s second non-fantasy title ultimately veers too close to performative tedium.
