audio historical fiction (~13 hrs, multiple narrators), beginning in Honolulu (Oahu), Hawai'i, 1964, and alternating time periods to tell the stories of previous generations back to 1890s Guangdong, Guangzhou/Canton, China (1899-1901 Boxer Rebellion), connecting past to present with tangled mystical threads that connect people to their intended loves and that can also punish them for not honoring those bonds.

I enjoyed this--the storytelling (and excellent narration) pulls you in immediately, and even though I usually struggle a bit when there are more than a handful of characters to keep track of, I'm found the story relatively easy to follow without getting bored. I do agree that it just sort of ends without much happening and I think there was opportunity for a lot more development in the relationships between the women, but overall I liked it. I would read more from this author. ( )

I'm ambivalent about this one.

What I liked: The story centers women's voices. Each woman is a fully realized character with a complete backstory. They're all interesting and the audiobook narrators portraying them were excellent!

What I didn't like: The women's lives revolve around men and the men are kind of flat one-dimensional characters, especially Bohai. I never understood what his deal was.

What I liked: The story stretches from the 1890s to the 1960s, spanning three generations, showing how each woman is impacted by her relationship to her parents -- and also how they're impacted by the Boxer Rebellion and the bombing of Pearl Harbor. The story moves around in time, putting the pieces of the puzzle together in a mostly satisfying way.

What I didn't like: Sometimes the writing was on the florid side and seemed to meander. Some of the revelations were not so satisfying to me and ultimately the story doesn't offer a lot of hope (at least not the way I read it), particularly when it came to the theme of finding your "fated match."

Overall, I was a little disappointed but I still liked it. ( )

So much happens in this family saga, but still not enough in the end. ( )

A multi-generational story of a family which immigrates from China to Hawaii should have been exactly my cup of tea, but this book just didn't come together for me. I don't know if I just wasn't into the story or if it was the writing (also, the novel was very much nonlinear), but I never really got into this story. If you like Hawaii and historical fiction, I hope you would find this book more interesting than I did. ( )

This was a bit of an up and down read for me. The story had lots of potential, and there were moments of wonderful writing; but though there was much to like and appreciate in Wong's debut novel, I found it very inconsistent.

It's a busy story - multi-generational, back and forth in time, a couple of mysteries, and the Chinese (folkloric/legend) belief in the 'red string of fate' serving as, I guess, the anchor and guide through the novel. The red string of fate is a really interesting idea - that one is fated in love to another, through an invisible red string. But bad decisions, choices, and things one does which go against fate causes knots to be created in the string - and these knots have a ripple effect, causing burdens and bad luck down through the generations.

The strengths of the story for me were the settings (in particular, Hawaii - I have not read a lot of fiction set here), the strong female characters, and the span of time and generations. The weaknesses included not quite pulling off this ambitious project and not making best use of characters. (For example, I loved Hong -- her story could be its own novel. She was a strong presence in the story, but as with most of the characters so little makes it to the surface.) The pacing and the ending were also awkward for me, and I also experienced a weird frustration over a typo -- in referencing Amy sewing, the foot pedal was noted as a 'foot petal'.

So, a bit of an uneven experience with this book, but I will check out Wong's next book hoping to find some more of her potential realized. ( )