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A review by girlglitch
Gold Boy, Emerald Girl by Yiyun Li
3.0
Gold Boy, Emerald Girl is a collection of short stories set in twenty-first century China.
The opening story, Kindness, is really a novella in itself, and this is the most accomplished piece of the collection: lonely and quietly tragic, but also defiant. Muyan is a desperately solitary girl and although two women war to take her under their wings, she refuses to be shaped by someone else's mould. She is perhaps not happy, but she is her own person, and she is free. She makes a world 'that would accommodate her loneliness' and this theme is rehashed in the rest of the stories.
There are occasional glimmers of hope, but on the whole Gold Boy, Emerald Girl is relentlessly bleak - not so much celebrating those who strike their own paths, but posing the question: is it worth it?
The opening story, Kindness, is really a novella in itself, and this is the most accomplished piece of the collection: lonely and quietly tragic, but also defiant. Muyan is a desperately solitary girl and although two women war to take her under their wings, she refuses to be shaped by someone else's mould. She is perhaps not happy, but she is her own person, and she is free. She makes a world 'that would accommodate her loneliness' and this theme is rehashed in the rest of the stories.
There are occasional glimmers of hope, but on the whole Gold Boy, Emerald Girl is relentlessly bleak - not so much celebrating those who strike their own paths, but posing the question: is it worth it?