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.
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.
