China Takes a Wrong Turning?

I'll confess to only having got part way through this which is unusual for me but that felt like enough. It's not the worst book I have ever read by any means but what started in a promising way quickly descended into something completely different to what I would have expected from this author. It felt poorly thought out and meandering rather than the tight kind of story line which might have developed well in such a short audio book.

In addition I didn't take very well to Frow's narration style which felt fairly wooden and passionless.

By all means try this one if you want to but this feels like a significant departure in style for Mieville so if you do spend a credit on it don't expect to have "China in your hands".

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5 people found this helpful

Audiobook production could be clearer

This is just a comment on the audiobook, not the story itself.
It's written in lots of short segments/chapters, which jump around between times and places. I imagine (but can't say for sure) that in the book they're separated by a page break or a symbol. However, in the audiobook, it flows really quickly between the segments. I found that a few times this was quite disorienting and difficult to follow. All it would take is a couple of extra seconds between each segment, just to help understand when it's a new bit if you aren't looking at the screen.
Perhaps this is an intentional, stylistic choice by China Mieville, but I would have liked something to help me to tell, simply and quickly, that it was a new segment and the location or time might suddenly change.

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1 person found this helpful

Not what I expected

This book isn't at all what I expected from listening to the excerpt. I feel as if it was a long prologue for a larger book, that till now hasn't materialized It has an explanation as to where the census taker has come from and delivers a Childs view of what is happening and the naivety through isolation comes across. I felt it is a story that could have been told in a 500 word essay and am therefore left unsatisfied. I don't think I'll be purchasing another book by this author. The narrator was good and would listen to him again.

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