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Title: These Violent Delights
Author: Chloe Gong
Sub-genre: Historical fantasy
This is going to be a hard review to write. I’ve been looking forward to this book for a long time, so much so that I wasn’t even annoyed when I found it was going to be in the next Owl Crate after I’d already ordered a copy. I thought this might be one of those books I’d be okay having multiple copies of. But, overall, this book just fell so far from my (admittedly high) expectations.
Juliette Cai is the daughter of one of Shanghai’s most notorious gangsters. Set to inherit the “throne” from her father, Juliette is struggling to prove herself, especially in comparison to her volatile cousin Tyler. Juliette spent years in New York, but has returned to Shanghai with one goal: make her father and the gang see her worth as a leader. Roma Montagov is set to inherit the Russian gang who have taken up residence in Shanghai. His relationship with his father seems stilted, but Roma is in a good position to inherit unless he really messes things up. When a mysterious illness and an even more mysterious monster start haunting the city, Roma and Juliette have to set aside the differences of their two gangs to work together. They also have to find a way to work around their feelings for each other. Since the two had a brief fling years ago before betraying each other, they know how to hurt the other and aren’t afraid to do so. But will their work together also reveal those long buried feelings aren’t so buried after all?
Alright. Let’s start with the good here. If it wasn’t clear by the names, this book is a retelling of Romeo and Juliet. I am here for all Shakespeare retellings, but in particular, any that focus on R and J. I have a special connection to the play as it is one of the first I directed on my own, and I’ve even written my own retelling. I loved all the R and J easter eggs hidden in the text, I thought those were nice touches. I also liked a lot of the prose in the book. There were some truly beautiful phrasings and descriptions that I really enjoyed.
Unfortunately, I had a lot of issues with the book as a whole. For one, the characters of the two leads, Roma and Juliette. While I liked most of the side characters, I had a lot of problems with the young lovers. For one, they aren’t really lovers. I’m all for retellings being the author’s own interpretation, but you can’t sell Romeo and Juliet and have there be no love between the two. For all its faults (and there are many), R and J has some of the swooniest moments between two characters in literary history. There was none of that in this book. The two leads are also extremely inconsistent and (I hate this word) unlikeable. I’m all for badass heroines who fight their way out of dire situations, but Juliette is a straight up cold-hearted murderer and I found it very hard to root for her. There’s also some very basic inconsistencies. For example, on one page it says Juliette is content to walk in silence, then a few paragraphs later talks about how much she can’t stand it when no one is talking and has to fill the silence with conversation. By the end of the book, I still didn’t know who these two were and what really drove them.
I also felt like the plot was really trying to do too much. Two rival gangs in 1920’s Shanghai presents plenty of conflict on its own. There’s the rise of communism, colonization, and plenty of economic challenges touched on; I would have loved to have seen any of those be a focus of the plot. Instead, we have this weird monster and illness stealing the focus of what (in my opinion) are much more interesting problems. I don’t think there needed to be a monster in order to bring the characters together. I will say there is a bit of surprise at the end that I liked because I didn’t see it coming, so I was excited about that. But overall, the plot felt muddled and underdeveloped because there was just too much going on.
I feel like I will probably be in the minority when it comes to my thoughts on this one, but I really was so bummed that it didn’t meet my expectations. There were too many issues for me to be able to really get into the story, and overall, it was a letdown.
Overall Rating: 3 stars