THE MANOR OF DREAMS

A Chinese American Upstairs, Downstairs meets Fall of the House of Usher meets young queer love.

Li’s adult fiction debut revolves around the death of an Oscar-winning Chinese actress named Vivian Yin. When asked to attend the reading of the will, Nora Deng, the granddaughter of Yin’s long-dead housekeeper and groundskeeper, is shocked to learn that Vivian made a last-minute change to the document, leaving her stately but spooky California home not to her own descendants but to Nora’s mother, Elaine Deng. WTF? Lucille Wang, Vivian’s daughter, is having none of it. Though the lawyer reports that her mother told him, “My daughters can’t have this house. It will ruin them,” Lucille is certain that Elaine forced Vivian to change her will, then killed her. She prevails on Elaine to let her; her troubled sister, Rennie; and her daughter, Madeline, stay in the house for a week to get Vivian's things together and “process" what's happening. Despite her intense hatred of the Yins, Elaine agrees, though she says she and Nora will be staying there, too. (One of many things not to think about too hard.) As that week rolls forward, a parallel timeline in the past unfolds the story of Vivian Yin’s life and marriage, revealing her to be both the victim and perpetrator of long-buried misdeeds. Though, in the present, the two families couldn’t be more at odds, Nora Deng and Madeline Wang discover they feel a connection to one another, one which only the reader knows is eerily predestined. And let’s not forget the immense, overgrown, long-untended garden, a very serious little shop of horrors. Is there too much stuffed into this novel? Are there a number of dubious plot elements? Are there any truly credible characters? Picky, picky, picky.

Packed with gothic plot, gushing blood, choking clods of dirt, and angry ghosts—a smorgasbord for devotees.