A novel about the secrets that lie in wait in the crumbling mansion of a former Hollywood starlet, and the intertwined fates of the two Chinese American families fighting to inherit it.
Ambitious. It’s written in dueling timelines, covers three generations and features an ensemble of disparate characters ... Li is so prescriptive it suggests a lack of trust in her readers. Obvious plot devices and character arcs are underscored with overdetermined rhetorical questions ... The conceit behind The Manor of Dreams is rich and enticing, but the novel never really comes together.
Ghostly fun ... Reviewing a novel that relies on reveals for much of its tension can be difficult, as it would be unfair and deleterious to the reading experience to say too much about the twists and turns ... The book falls short in its attempt to tie Yin Manor’s haunted nature to the exploitation of the thousands of Chinese migrants who built the Western half of the first transcontinental railroad ... On the whole, though, The Manor of Dreams is a swift and enjoyable read, increasingly spooky, with a surprising queer romance twining its way through.
Li...spellbinds and unsettles ... A bejeweled puzzle box to unlock. Each perspective provides another fragment in the novel's overall portrait of a family ripped apart by the dark secrets ... Shiver-inducing ... By the novel's end, it's not the twisted paths these characters chose to entrap themselves that readers will remember, but the strength of the muscles...that they employ to rip themselves free of what binds them.
