Larry Feign

The Flower Boat Girl is the story of Shek Yang who rises from being sold into the sex trade as a young girl to becoming the most powerful female pirate known to sail the South China Sea. In 1801, Yang has finally bought her freedom but is soon kidnapped by a brutal pirate gang and forced to marry their leader. She needs to be scrappy to survive her circumstances and she carves out a role against the resistance of powerful pirate leaders, including her husband's male concubine. Eventually, show more Yang has to choose between power over the pirates and love. The novel is based on a true story.

I rarely review a book that I did not finish but this one requires comment. The author uses crude and course descriptions of Yang's sex acts with men. You know that a man wrote a book when this type of language is used. Women just don't use certain descriptions. I am surprised that the author chose a woman as his main character because it is hard for men to accurately write about women and vice versa. I made it to page 70. There was no explanation of how Yang got into various situations, just one nasty sex act after another. How is the reader to know what the story is about when you go from one rape to another? The reader at least needs to know something about the main character other than she is being raped by many men over 70 pages. In those 70 pages she was still a sex slave, I presume. There is no way to tell from these pages where we are in the plot.

I am surprised that the book has had many good reviews, half of them from women. At a minimum I would call this novel soft core porn. Skip it. show less

Larry Feign had a great run with his 'World of Lily Wong' cartoon strip, and he's back here with a compilation of mostly-light, and sometimes funny articles on expat life in Hong Kong.

Feign writes well, and there are some insightful and amusing passages here.

But even in fewer than 150 pages, Feign's jokes and tropes are frequently repeated. He also has troubles with tone: hyperbole predominates (e.g. the air conditioning in Hong Kong buses is set at -20 degrees C!!), which works all right show more for some of the humorous essays, but which undermines his attempts to address more serious topics such as Hong Kong's pollution problems and its historical heritage. show less

This is a fairly funny comic strip set in pre-1997 Hong Kong, which I bought there during my trip to meet Nancy. Lily Wong, like most other Hong Kongians, is trying desperately to emigrate before the Chinese take over in 1997. This is partly a political strip about that impending takeover.

I got this book in Hong Kong while meeting Nancy. It's a collection of strips centering around pre-1997 Hong Kong politics and events (1997 was the year Hong Kong was handed over to China). A little too "black-and-white", and you have to be up on the scene to get some of these, but a nice look at Hong Kong and the tensions and apprehension over the looming 1997.