LOVE AND OTHER MOODS

In Lee’s debut novel, a 20-something woman rediscovers love and a sense of herself while visiting a new city.

When Naomi Kita-Fan’s fiance, Seth Ray, was transferred to Shanghai, she excitedly went with him. She gave up her life in New York City to be with the man she loved, but she was only in her new home for a month before she discovered that he’d been unfaithful to her. The engagement was called off, and Naomi now finds herself heartbroken, unemployed, and alone in a foreign country, sleeping on a sofa bed in a hastily rented studio apartment. She can barely speak Mandarin, but she decides to stay in the city anyway—a metropolis that’s full of beauty and excitement and unlike anywhere she’s ever been before. Before long, she’s standing and looking out at the city from a glass-floored platform with a handsome restaurateur, “beguiled with the verticality of towers, with the kaleidoscopic skyline that resembled Tomorrow Land, everything gleaming and shiny and new, promising a future that was limitless.” Later, she meets Dante Ouyang, a Chinese architect who lived abroad in England until recently, and she feels an immediate connection with him. Naomi’s whirlwind affair with Dante, however, may prove as beguiling—and as full of emotion—as her affair with Shanghai itself. Lee’s prose is wonderfully descriptive, equally attuned to the rhythms of her characters and the city: “Naomi felt like wearing her sunglasses on her walk to work this morning, even though there were no sun rays….The sky was a dreary gunmetal hue, the fog of pollution looming ominously, lingering at eye level and in her nostrils.” Naomi is a complex and compelling creation, and the supporting cast members—including her friends Joss and Tay—are all richly detailed. The book effectively marries her youthful self-exploration with the exploration of an urban environment with which many readers may be unfamiliar. The conclusion is satisfying, but readers will likely be left with a profound desire to see the real-life Shanghai.

A spirited, resonant love story about new loves and new beginnings.