Synopsis
In Jazz-Age Shanghai, Jingwen carefully balances a double life of glamour and grit, dancing as cabaret showgirl while also running errands for the city’s most powerful gang.
When a series of cabaret dancers are attacked and their stolen faces start appearing on wealthy foreign socialites, Jingwen realises that to help save her closest rivals and friends, she has no choice but to delve deeper into the city’s underworld.
In this treacherous realm of tangled alliances and ancient grudges, silver-armed gangsters haunt every alley, foreign playboys broker deals in exclusive back rooms, and the power of gods is wielded and traded like yuan. Jingwen will have to become something far stranger and more dangerous than she ever imagined if she hopes to survive the forces waiting to sell Shanghai’s bones…
Review
Wow! Daughter of Calamity is the real deal — an artful, skilfully crafted, dazzling tale of deceit and danger in 1930s Shanghai that blends fantasy, noir, and romance in a stunning debut. Keep your eyes on Rosalie M. Lin, because if her next books are half as good as this one, she’s going to have a glorious career.
I love the 1930s. There’s a glamour about the era that’s intoxicating. But there’s also a sadness beneath the sheen as society tries too hard to gloss over its cracks. In so many ways, Jingwen as a character perfectly resonates the 1930s as a product of her era.
She’s a dancing girl at the Paramount — the premier nightclub of Shanghai — who makes a living by hooking the fortunes of the ‘gentlemen elite’ by making them fall in love with her, ready to gift her the world for just one more dance. She’s all about the glitz and sparkle of this decadent lifestyle. But in her spare time, she delivers bones for the city’s most powerful mafia gang, and has grown up watching her grandmother carve out limbs of flesh and replace them with arms of silver.
All this would make an amazing book in itself, but for Daughter of Calamity, it’s just the backdrop to the story. This has more atmosphere and layers than the real life city of Shanghai! The book pulls you into this world so well, and carefully conceals its twists so that they can be unleashed with maximum impact. It delivers a particular kind of thrill that feels fresh, walking the line where criminality meets fantasy, and family meets morality, all of it blending together to addictive effect.
I devoured this in two sittings. That doesn’t happen all too often. But I absolutely adored Jingwen and her world and I couldn’t put it down. The way her dancing was described, and the symbolism is represented in different parts of the book, fully absorbed me. It adds so many layers to her complexity and her secrets. What begins as a rebellion against a mafia cohort soon grows into the epic grandeur of a powerful woman defying deities. The details littered through the narrative give such a feeling of authenticity that I really felt like I was there, living these things with Jingwen. I cannot stress enough how stunned I was by the way the book enveloped me in its underworld.
In terms of sub-plots, there’s the hint of a love triangle that holds enough classic tropes to make it enjoyable for readers who enjoy a sprinkle of romance, but also enough subversion that it doesn’t feel overly familiar or result in any eye rolls. Jingwen is embroiled with both the classic benefactor and the roguish bad boy, and each are given their fair share of page-time. But the way these relationships unfold is actually quite brilliant, and totally upends the way you think it’s going to go.
Daughter of Calamity has everything. Action. Thrills. Heart. An amazing protagonist. An atmosphere that oozes so many layers — it can leave you breathless at times and horrify you at others. It boasts a world I could read a hundred books about. But above all, it’s got the perfect balance between all these different things. Like the jazz that Jingwen dances to, it contains such a broad fusion of so many different elements, but it’s entirely unique and sounds like something totally new. The writing is so solid, and the skill with which the story holds together is so expert and artisanal, that it genuinely leaves my jaw hanging open when I consider this is a debut book!
Come for 1930s fantasy Shanghai, stay for bone-carving intrigue and wolf-mist-summoning shamans. And I haven’t even mentioned the thief who’s stealing body parts or mafia assassination-conspiracies! Seriously, this book has so much to it, if I was to address it all, you’d be reading an essay instead of a review!
Daughter of Calamity is not just a brilliant story, it’s a brilliant everything. I can’t praise Rosalie M. Lin enough for what she’s managed to accomplish with her first novel, and I seriously can’t wait to see what she comes up with next.
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