Disclosure: This was an advanced copy I was given access to on NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. The book is due to come out in UK in November 2026. The review below contains mild spoilers.
Initial thoughts
To the East of the East follows Min-Hui, a Taiwanese woman searching Beijing for her missing husband. While the book promises a poignant reflection on marriage, personal freedom, and the tumultuous geopolitical relationship between Taiwan and the PRC, the execution ultimately fails to land. The novel’s core message becomes entirely lost beneath a convoluted framing narrative, jarring prose, and flat characterisation, and while the momentum picks up marginally in the final 30-40 pages, a reader should not have to endure the vast majority of a book to feel invested.
Structural Framework
I found the narrative structural choices to severely hinder the book’s pacing. The plot is split into three competing threads: Min-Hui’s present journey in Beijing, letters from her missing husband (Chien-I), and excerpts from a novel-in-progress written by Min-Hui herself. The latter focuses on a young Qing emperor and pirate Zhang Zhilong, his prisoner.
Of the three, Chien-I’s letters are the most compelling, though they still suffer from major issues. Min-Hui herself is a passive, flat protagonist whose profound lack of agency makes for a truly frustrating reading experience, especially because there is no growth. Her embedded historical meta-narrative, with the emperor and the pirate, is tedious and poorly constructed, and if I were a generous reader, I might assume the weak prose of these chapters was a stylistic choice to reflect Min-Hui’s own limitations as a writer, but alas, the surrounding text suggests otherwise.
Prose and Translation
I found the writing pretty immature overall, an issue that is most likely compounded by a clunky translation. The prose frequently relies on bizarrely constructed, non-sequitur logic and overly dramatic similes. A few examples:
- She liked the heft of the rice cooker pot, its metallic gleam which made her think of the word cauldron – rice bubbling in a cauldron, as she inhaled its fragrance and decided that life was meaningful whether or not she had a man by her side.
- This was her preferred hang-out, even though she didn’t drink coffee. Just as she liked to buy cups and saucers with cats on them, even though she didn’t have a cat.
- What an odd phrase, “conditional redundancy.” It means to resign with preferential conditions, but her mind went to weather conditions
Other descriptions, like comparing the “musty aroma of rice” to “a caress”, disrupt the immersion. One of my biggest book pet peeves is being treated as if I’m stupid as a reader. Here, too, the author frequently treats the reader with a degree of condescension, inserting ham-fisted exposition to state the obvious. For example, when the pirate merchant is trying to entertain the young emperor with his tales, we are told that “Zhang was well aware his story was bait”. Yes, well, so were we.
Continuity and Exposition Flaws
The book is also undermined by glaring continuity errors and by relying heavily on telling rather than showing. Characters suddenly develop traits out of nowhere. Shangjun’s previously unmentioned swearing and stutter are suddenly introduced late in the book as if they were established patterns. Small inconsistencies, such as Min-Hui saying her husband was strictly allergic to alcohol only to later describe him as someone who “couldn’t hold his liquor”, are less glaring, but bothered me nonetheless.
However, the most egregious thing to me were the author’s intrusions used in an attempt to explain away plot holes or deliver historical lectures. In his letters, Chien-I anticipates the reader’s objections to his seeming inability to call Min-Hui (“I know you’re thinking I could get a phone card. And yes, there are other phones on the island”), but never actually addresses them. More frustratingly, the historical fiction chapters frequently break into didactic addresses to the reader. A more skilled writer would have woven this context naturally into the world-building but instead, the author relies heavily on secondary characters to explicitly spell out the parallels between the historical fiction and Min-Hui’s actual life. Like when she tells Shangjun “You’re not familiar with 17th-century history, are you?” and then proceeds to give context for her novel, very obviously for the readers’ sake. Or when Shangjun interrupts the narrative flow to claim that “The reader will find this hilarious. The writer is telling her own story” (I can attest that I did not, in fact, find it hilarious).
Final Verdict
Ultimately, To the East of the East is a frustrating reading experience. What could have been a nuanced exploration of cross-strait identity and personal grief is instead brought down by structural flaws and erratic inconsistent prose.
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