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Jun. 26th, 2012 10:32 amI meant to write this up before now, but all of you who like romance, or the 1920s, or fearless and witty Malaysian lady writer protagonists who write scathing literary criticism, or in fact all of these things should go read and/or buy Zen Cho's self-published novella The Perilous Life of Jade Yeo.
The author's summary of the story, for the record, is it’s a novella written in diary entries about books and smooches. This is perfectly accurate. I mean it's also about London's fashionable avant-garde literary set of the 1920s, and brilliant and sexy Indian journal editors, and intolerable aunts -- all right, just the one editor and just the one aunt, but they have more than enough personality to make up for it. But mostly it is just adorable. (You guys know I am a hard sell on romance; when I say something is adorable I mean it.) And man, guys, I just really love Jade! I fell in love with her in the very first chapter:
It did sting, though. I know–at least, my mind knows–that she thinks Rose and Clarissa are beautiful because they look English, and anything that is English is good to Aunt Iris. My heart is rather less sensible, and vulnerable to jabs about eyes. When I got home I crept down to the landlady’s drawing room and stared at myself in her full-length mirror to remind myself of how pretty I am.
You can’t ever tell people you think you are pretty. Even if you are pretty you have to flutter and be modest. Fortunately here nobody thinks I am pretty, so my thinking I am pretty is almost an act of defiance; it makes me feel quite noble.
YOU ARE EXTREMELY NOBLE, JADE YEO. <333 I will always think you are pretty!
Zen has been posting it on her journal but I very quickly grew impatient with wanting to know what happened next and went and bought the whole thing to read as an ebook at once for $0.99, which is a course of action I highly recommend and which you can do here at Smashwords or here at Amazon.
The author's summary of the story, for the record, is it’s a novella written in diary entries about books and smooches. This is perfectly accurate. I mean it's also about London's fashionable avant-garde literary set of the 1920s, and brilliant and sexy Indian journal editors, and intolerable aunts -- all right, just the one editor and just the one aunt, but they have more than enough personality to make up for it. But mostly it is just adorable. (You guys know I am a hard sell on romance; when I say something is adorable I mean it.) And man, guys, I just really love Jade! I fell in love with her in the very first chapter:
It did sting, though. I know–at least, my mind knows–that she thinks Rose and Clarissa are beautiful because they look English, and anything that is English is good to Aunt Iris. My heart is rather less sensible, and vulnerable to jabs about eyes. When I got home I crept down to the landlady’s drawing room and stared at myself in her full-length mirror to remind myself of how pretty I am.
You can’t ever tell people you think you are pretty. Even if you are pretty you have to flutter and be modest. Fortunately here nobody thinks I am pretty, so my thinking I am pretty is almost an act of defiance; it makes me feel quite noble.
YOU ARE EXTREMELY NOBLE, JADE YEO. <333 I will always think you are pretty!
Zen has been posting it on her journal but I very quickly grew impatient with wanting to know what happened next and went and bought the whole thing to read as an ebook at once for $0.99, which is a course of action I highly recommend and which you can do here at Smashwords or here at Amazon.
