The review below is what I wrote for ‘The Black Tides of Heaven. I’m pasting it here because I felt the same about both books. I’d intended to also read ‘The Descent of Monsters’ and ‘The Ascent to Godhood’, but by the end of ‘Red Threads’, I decided I didn’t care enough to want to continue ...


While I loved reading about the world created by the author, I found myself oddly uninterested in the characters and their fates. I’m still trying to figure out why IDGAF about what happened to any of them, especially once the twins grew up.

I listened to Black Tides of Heaven and Red Threads of Fortune on Scribd. Both books were narrated by Nancy Wu who did a great job until she decided to give one of the characters the sort of cliched Chinese accent you might hear in old Hollywood films that feature white actors doing yellow face. I have no idea why Wu thought the accent was needed. It made me cringe and I wonder if I would have enjoyed the books more if I’d read rather than listened to the books.

Another thing I found strange was hearing Hokkien expletives and Malay words used in the story. They felt jarring in this world that I’d come to think as separate from the one we inhabit, but I dare say that’s me being nit picky.