Mike Fu

I'll be honest: Masquerade was a disappointment. The publisher's description calls it "a queer coming-of-age mystery about a lovelorn bartender and his complex friendship with a volatile artist.... Over the course of a single summer, Meadow [the main character] must contend with a possibly haunted apartment, a mirror that plays tricks, a stranger speaking in riddles at the bar where he works, as well as a startling revelation about a former lover. And when Selma [the volatile artist] show more vanishes from her artist residency, Meadow is forced to question everything he knows as the boundaries between real and imagined begin to blur."

There's lots that sounds promising there: interesting people, multiple and varied locations, the possibility of something unearthly. Others' reviews of the work noted that it was very slow to start, but there were also a lot of positive comments about how the novel winds up. I agree with the first of those two, but not with the second. I really pushed myself to finish this one because I had faith that if enough other readers had found it ultimately worthwhile, then I would too—but I didn't.

It seems that the reader is intended to find the novel transformational, changing the life path of the central character. But the transformation didn't transform. As far as I could tell, the central character remained exactly who he was from the novel's start: an intelligent, hopeful individual too willing to let the world outside him determine his destiny, rather than making a determination of his own.

I received a free electronic review copy of this title; the opinions are my own. show less