Watching Ocean’s Eleven for tips is ironic and funny, but a Google Doc for planning? Fortunately, rooting for these underdogs is tremendous fun, and the novel has a great sense of humor. More importantly, for such smart people, their approach to the heist is a bit thick. The gang often contemplates their Chinese heritage, but the content of their contemplations rarely evolves, which can make these reflections feel repetitive. Though they don’t overshadow Portrait of a Thief’s strengths, some weaknesses are also evident. In addition to unique skills, each character has a distinct personality, motivations and perspective on being a child of the Chinese diaspora. The close third-person narration centers one of five characters in each chapter: Will his tightly wound but charismatic sister, Irene Daniel, a longtime family friend Lily, a mechanical engineer and occasional street racer and Alex, a software engineer who dropped out of MIT after her parents’ rent doubled. But as this vivid and precisely crafted novel goes on, readers will be fascinated with the characters and their relationships as well as impressed by Li’s multifaceted exploration of Chinese American identity. Chinese billionaire Wang Yuling offers Will $50 million to liberate five sculptures from museums across Europe and America.Ī cinematic heist thriller with a social conscience, Portrait of a Thief is immediately appealing. He’s soon enlisting his sister and friends as his crew and flying first class to Beijing to meet the visionary behind a scheme to reclaim art plundered by Western governments. Instead of revealing everything he knows to the authorities, he grabs a priceless carving for himself, and one of the thieves hands him a business card. When art history student Will Chen witnesses the theft of precious Chinese artifacts from the Harvard museum, it upends his life. With a caper at its center and rebellion in its heart, Li’s debut is like Ocean’s Eleven meets Olga Dies Dreaming, a diaspora story wrapped up in a thriller. Li is an enticing and stimulating escape: a heist novel that follows a group of young Chinese Americans in their quest to return stolen pieces of art to China.
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