caitri | Jun. 8th, 2020

Every day I'm posting an image of a book I like. Over the weekend I mainlined the Netflix adaptation of Choo's novel, and while I enjoyed the show, it's a different animal from the book. The story is a supernatural murder mystery that takes place in 1890s Malaysia, and one of the things I appreciated about it how the heroine is left to sort of brazen things out when literally every card is stacked against her. (The tv series cleaned up this aspect, making the dad a loving father rather than an absent opium-addict, making the "nice guy" into an actually nice guy, and so on.) The book is upfront about the ways women in society are hemmed in, and then adds (spoiler alert) a dragon spirit, because yay dragons.

Also I was SO BITTER we didn't get to see Er Lang go into dragon form in the tv series!! AND they gave it a cliffie ending because they want a second season instead of tying everything up like the novel does. Sigh.