book review: The Expatriates by Janice Y.K. Lee
The basics: The Expatriates is the story of the large American expatriate community in Hong Kong, and it's centered around three different women: Mercy, a young Korean-American and recent Columbia graduate adrift in Hong Kong; Hilary, a wealthy housewife struggling to have a baby; and Margaret, a happily married mother of three. My thoughts: Longtime readers of this blog know how much I love to travel vicariously through reading, so I was excited to explore Hong Kong's expatriate community in The Expatriates . The novel certainly delivers on armchair travel, but the reading experience was much deeper and richer than that. It offers so much more than an escapist read set in an exotic world of wealth. The three female narrators are both the heart and backbone of this novel. Each woman is unique, fully realized, and wholly human. I found sympathy with each, but I also found reality in their faults. Although a smaller part of the novel, I found myself enchanted with Lee...