Wasn't sure if this was a three star or a four star book, but the ending pushed it up to a four. A fairly simple story, straightforwardly told but manages to be suprising because it feels so honest. The characters are cursed with the same bloody minded awkwardness as real people and their actions equally unpredictable.

It is in a sense I guess an anti love story but it's one with a glimmer of hope. I spent most of the book feeling that the main charcter was horribly grieved and that the book was unnecesarily moralising, her fate seemed way out of proportion to her "crime". Inddeed I was reticent about agreeing that it was a crime, guilty as she was of perhaps being trivial and superficial but it was society that forced her into a loveless marriage.

However the ending was suprising and poignant and managed to lift the book and one could almost say that the book had a slightly feminist tilt.

Still a bit of a shame that a book about China features no real chinese characters but it's pretty much highlighted from the beginning that the Chinese are the frightening "other" to the English inhabitants and the book plays off ot as well as half condemning it.