Where I Read the Fun Book Years After the Cool Kids

Crazy Rich Asians by Kevin Kwan
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is a fun book, an entertaining and informative book, well worth reading, IMO. It has some flaws that might make you go, "Hmmm," but then you're back in the crazy rich flow, jetting off to someone's private island or spending enormous amounts of money, and you let it go and enjoy the flight.

Half the time, I was astounded at the author's knowledge of shopping, travel, culture, languages, and high-end everything, from food to jets, from schools to jewelry, from clothes to plants. Just being able to name all of those brands was beyond impressive. It may be that Kevin Kwan was born to write this book (and series) because it's unlikely anybody else could come close to possessing all the skills and knowledge necessary to pull it off.

You realize that the author is on the side of Rachel and those who live in something like our world, from middle-class to self-made millionaires, but he's also sympathetic to the spoiled, privileged, judgmental, super-rich. All of them look foolish to some degree, but most are spared his spite. Rachel's college friend and her family are skewered some, their gaudy excess lampooned, but they are kind to her and can laugh at themselves and are comfortable, normal people, despite their wealth. Astrid is sweet, and her very rich old boyfriend Charlie surprisingly unselfish (kind of a spoiler), showing how the power of money can be used for someone else's happiness.

And so on. There are quite a few characters in this category.

But the cruelty of wealthy older family members destroying the happiness of young couples is returned to again and again, a serious theme in an otherwise comic novel spiced with naughty language and frank sex talk. There are examples of rich men being foolish on their own, hurting those they are supposed to love, and super-mean mean girls, but most of the anger in the novel is aimed at manipulative older women "protecting" their families from adult children marrying for love. The author is unsparing when it comes to this topic, and as a reader I am right there with him.

There's a bit of roughness here, a bit of unpolished first-time-author stuff that should have been edited, and it detracts a little. When we bounce from head to head, getting the thoughts of multiple characters--not every chapter, but a little bit off and on throughout the novel--it is distracting. It feels not just old-fashioned but wrong, jarring, like blatant typos. And the feel of the dialogue is sometimes off, less professional than the rest. But the overall tone of the book is so glib, the pacing so fluent, that the reader slides past these flaws and gets on to new events and shinier objects.

So, yeah, I enjoyed the story and the characters and the theme. I also found being immersed in a Singapore-centric world enlightening; learning about their world, and seeing the US and the West as places to visit or maybe go to school before leaving it behind, was rather refreshing. It may be impossible not to see one's own experience, one's hometown or adopted hometown, as the center of the universe, at least some of the time time, and it's interesting to take on another perspective and realize we all live in exotic, strange places.

Good book. Read it if you like. Nobody should tell you how to live your life. :)

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