Loveboat, Taipei
(Loveboat, Taipei #1)
Author: Abigail Hing Wen
Reading Level: Young Adult
Genre: Contemporary
Published: January 7th 2020
Review Source: Simon & Schuster Children’s UK
When eighteen-year-old Ever Wong’s parents send her from Ohio to Taiwan to study Mandarin for the summer, she finds herself thrust among the very over-achieving kids her parents have always wanted her to be, including Rick Woo, the Yale-bound prodigy profiled in the Chinese newspapers since they were nine—and her parents’ yardstick for her never-measuring-up life.
Unbeknownst to her parents, however, the program is actually an infamous teen meet-market nicknamed Loveboat, where the kids are more into clubbing than calligraphy and drinking snake-blood sake than touring sacred shrines.
Free for the first time, Ever sets out to break all her parents’ uber-strict rules—but how far can she go before she breaks her own heart?
If there was anyway to give this a 3.5 I would, because it deserves it. Ignore the horrific book trailer above it does this no justice. This as a contemporary surprised me, after all (and I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again) contemporary reads are not my usual reads. This however, felt like fresh air for once. TBF I should probably tell you that a lot of that came from the nostalgia of having lived in China for over three and a half years in my early twenties, and while I didn’t learn enough Mandarin to entirely live on my own I learned how to navigate traveling in a jitny and haggling in the night market streets to dancing it up at Club Sugar (yes even on stage if I’d drank enough). So maybe this book for me, was like going back to a place that holds a little something extra.
I was leaning towards a flat three stars for the nostalgia alone but that last few chapters, after her father shows up in the end really made me tear up it was so sweet. This book tries to cover a lot in a few pages because it’s not very thick as far as books go, but it does an okay job of developing a lot of the main points of feeling like an impostor or having each foot in a different identity between heritage and the assimilation into American culture as a first generation born Chinese-American. As a young woman there is a considerable amount of learning about yourself as a coming of age story.
Overall it was good, a nice book but there was that one week where I put it down and didn’t get that itch to pick it back up. That alone reminded me why I didn’t usually read contemporary novels as I need that surge to read it that I get from other genres. The only thing was the love triangle, did it make sense, well at times maybe but a lot of it felt like it got sorted a little too easily between what Sophie did and how Ever and her patched things up just to easily for my taste. All in all, I would recommend this book to my friends if they were asking for a contemporary recommendation. I’m very excited for this to be turned into a Netflix adaptation, it’s in the works! This is something I’d totally enjoy that much more as a movie rather than a book, and for once I mean it. This as a movie would be a great watch!
Dust Jacket Reviews 