SHANGHAI GIRLS is a novel to wrench your heart out of your chest. Whether that action is out of empathy or frustration depends on what section you're reading.

This is the second See novel I've read, and I was more than willing to become lost in it from the get-go. See's descriptions of 1940s Shanghai welcomed me with sparkling prose, sympathetic, vivacious characters, and a mood perfectly balanced between May & Pearl's youthful, beautiful glamor and the gloom/doom of poverty and upcoming war.

As a reader, I thoroughly enjoyed this Shanghai section, their journey to/in Angel Island, and their first days in Los Angeles. And then the 1950s happened.

During this second half of the novel, See changed her writing style, or it seemed like she did to me. One chapter was called "Snapshots" and I thought, "Okay, so this is where we're going to get little vignettes and then go back to the normal time continuity." I was wrong. Even after that chapter, it seemed like See fast-forwarded to important historical events. Instead of following the characters' journeys, I was reading how they reacted to different governmental laws and national changes. The storytelling lost its organic nature, and instead I just saw how much research See did.

I don't know: it was like the life went out of it, like See wasn't excited about her work anymore. That may be partly because of Pearl, who lets her worries consume her, but I kept wondering why, if See wasn't excited, she continued the story. Maybe she didn't know if she wanted to write a sequel yet, and wanted to cram in as much history as possible. Maybe she lost steam, but had a word count to fulfill. It was weird.

Overall, despite this weirdness, I enjoyed the book as a whole and want to read the second book about Joy. The characters still have a lot of life in them and maybe the change of POV character and setting will bring back the spark See had in the first half of SHANGHAI GIRLS.