{On a mountain above the clouds once lived a man who had been the gardener of the Emperor of Japan.) In the highlands of Malaya, a woman sets out to build a memorial to her sister, killed at the hands of the Japanese during the brutal Occupation of their country. Yun Ling's quest leads her to The Garden of Evening Mists, and to Aritomo, a man of extraordinary skill and reputation, once the gardener of the Emperor of Japan. When she accepts his offer to become his apprentice, she begins a journey into her past, inextricably linked with the secrets of her troubled country's history. I read this for 2017 Popsugar Reading Challenge. The category is 'a book where the main character is a different ethnicity to you'. (Canongate, 2 May 2013, charity shop buy)
I have mixed feelings about this book.
There is much I enjoyed. I loved the setting; the author brings it to brilliant and vivid life. I fell in the love with the sense of place created. It was all very romantic and beautiful.
I enjoyed the way the author explores the history of Malaysia.
Two areas of the book didn't work for me.
The prose is sumptuous but this is a little too much at times. Excessive description is not always a good thing and large chunks of the text bored me at times. There is one image where a man touching a woman's back is described as a dragonfly settling on a leaf. This might be pretty but felt really flat and pointless to me. Just pretty words used that essentially meant nothing. I started to get bored about three quarters of the way through and finishing it was a slog.
I didn't feel like the characters had a lot of life. For the most part they are flat, dull and I felt nothing for them. The prose is sumptuous and the setting vivid and yet these cold, bland characters are stuck in the middle of it all. I didn't really feel the characters. They weren't real enough for me so I cared nothing about what happened to me.
I didn't like Yun Ling as a narrator; she is cold, distant and just horrible at time. She is petulant most of the time and comes across as a whiny child. Her endless anger also started to tick me off pretty quickly. I get that she experienced trauma but her behaviour was exhausting and did not elicit the slightest bit of sympathy.
I thought I'd love The Garden of Evening Mists but it fell flat on it's pretty face.
