Margaret Macintosh

I did not like this book at all. In fact I could not finish it which is very unusual for me. I thought the writing was pretentious, quite unnecessarily emphasising the writer’s linguistic knowledge and with too many references to obscure languages which most readers I am sure would be unfamiliar with. If this had helped the story it would have been forgivable but it did not do so. Nor did I like Ms Kuang’s writing style. I had to check several times if it was actually a translation because it frequently had the stiltedness of translation. Given the subject matter I suppose that might have been intentional but I can’t see the point. Note to be recommended except possibly to linguistic academics.