Cup of Light Book

Lia Frank travels to Beijing to appraise a hoard of old Chinese porcelain, about to be sold to a foreign buyer. The plot is fractured along narrative fault lines including Lia, her soon-to-be love interest Michael, the Chinese businessman Gao Yideng brokering the deal, Potter Yu who makes the best fakes in China, middleman Pao, smuggler Bai, Curator Li, and historical interpolations involving the tracing of the hoard's journey through time. Oh yes, and then there is the buyer, a billionaire Chinese American and his wife who are having difficulty conceiving a child and I presume are sublimating that inability by paying $125 million for all this porcelain. And I'm not sure I got them all.

For me the problem lies in the fact that I don't end the book feeling like I really know any of these people, and what I do know sometimes isn't all that interesting. Lia's preoccupation with clothes and looking feminine, where'd that come from and who cares? Michael's research into lead poisoning of children in China could have been an entirely different novel, instead of truncated and jammed in here. Why is Pao so addicted to horse racing and what does that have to do with the price of Chenghua chicken cups on the world antique porcelain market? Yu the Potter I would have loved to have spent more time with but he comes and goes in a flash, existing mostly so Lia and Bai can meet up in his showroom and not know who each other are and what they are both up to. Jack and Anna Yang, difficult to work up any sympathy for them, they can afford IVF or hell, just buy a child for probably a lot cheaper than $125 million.

An unconvincing, uninvolving, almost even deliberately distancing novel. I almost gave it two stars, but the descriptions of the porcelain deserve better. They really are lovely. So three.