Virginia

Character development wasn't very good (or maybe I just didn't care for them). Descriptions of sexual coming of age were written at a jr. high school level - a teen boy's world, without an adult's complexity of language and story-telling, simplistic... boring. At the beginning of the book, I lost interest book when a description of a man's muscular arms were described as like "Sylvester Stallone". I thought this was the Cultural Revolution. Alternatively, I recommend -Snow Flower and the Secret Fan, by See- where the characters are developed, you learn and can almost taste a period of history. Although highly raved about, Balzac and the Little Seamstress falls very short to my taste. BD Wong was a good, acceptable reader.