*** WARNING!! This review contains spoilers!! ***
An entertaining read with short episodic chapters. Very easy to imagine this book as a hit streaming TV series! I think being a fan of the British TV show Midsomer Murders, with all their episodes featuring English country estates, helped me to enjoy this book even more, allowing me to easily imagine Greshamsbury Hall and the surrounding village.
Once again, Kwan brings us into the world of the uber rich, only this time, it's not just Asians in Asia, but also half-Asians as well as English landed aristocracy, international investors, and Persian-Iranian-Americans drowning in opulence in Hawaii, Morocco, Los Angeles, and Venice. I kept my phone handy to search up words and references I didn't recognize, from fashion and architecture terminology to famous people and places. This time, part of the fun of all the astonishing over-the-top luxury was the disapproval of the more social justice minded characters.
The narrator including each character's educational pedigree since nursery school with their first appearance was downright hilarious (I was disappointed when this feature dropped away in the LA part of the book), and frequent cheeky footnotes added an additional layer of humor. I actually laughed out loud a couple times.
I had every intention of giving this book 5 stars, until the festivities got to Venice. Everything suddenly got to be a bit much. Not that the characters had been very deep to begin with, but now their actions just felt like plot devices. By this point, the inevitable conclusion was obvious, and I was surprised to find myself losing interest, as the ending was not what I had hoped it would be.
*** Warning: Stop reading here to avoid spoilers!! ***
Even Arabella, as willfully oblivious as she was, should have been able to see that Eden didn't care enough about what other people think to be blackmail-able. And I had high hopes for Martha Dung, but she turned out to be not much more than yet another billionaire with an over-the-top lifestyle, willing to throw money at acquaintances she just met. Mostly, I didn't like how ultimately, it was okay for characters to choose love as long as everyone turned out to be secretly wealthy, thereby making them acceptable. I would have liked to have seen how Bea and Rufus - and all the Greshams, really - would have adjusted to life as "regular people", having to get jobs and live within their means. And in the end, I wanted more for Freddy Farman-Farmihian, who I found to be the most interesting character; I was impressed with how Kwan wrote him to elicit a specific first impression, and then developed him so that my opinion of him took an almost 180-degree turn.
Finally, I think there's a fun reference to a character from Crazy Rich Asians, making this book feel like a spin-off, or at least like it exists in the same universe.
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