The Chens remain unlikeable and plummet further as the story goes on, and Trudy, though but a memory, is an enigma.īecause the different aspects are so disjointed it’s easy enough to close the book at the end.

Will’s aura is enticing and his distance and pain understandable, but maybe he could have handled things differently. It takes a while to warm to her and even then sometimes you want to change your opinion, but you can’t because you know that she knows of her flaws and that she’s struggling to work through them. Claire begins a possible racist and ends as perhaps the most open-minded of the lot. Where Claire was the only character available for comment there is now a crowd of willing participants.īy themselves the characters are fabulous. From era-driven the narrative nose-dives straight into the characters, suddenly they are everything and the war is still important but more the cause, it’s no longer in the spotlight. The information is fascinating and horrid in it’s own right but as the focus is on the war you can’t help but feel disconnected from the characters for whom there are parties and a little love but not much else to recommend them to your memory. However, unlike Hislop, who used a number of characters to explain different situations, Lee has focused on specific features, she mentions the bombing but focuses on the predicament of the civilians, for the most part the foreigners (Americans, Britons, Europeans) who were stuck in Hong Kong when the Japanese took over. Lee has written her book akin to the way Victoria Hislop did a year earlier in The Return, it’s very much a case that the characters serve a purpose as vehicles – they are simply there to aid the explanation of the wretchedness of the war. A big factor in this is that it is mostly era-driven.

It isn’t until much later on that it begins to show promise. But speed-reading isn’t so much a positive thing with this book – you find yourself reading it quickly because there’s nothing to peak your interest. As the story unravels we are introduced to another tale – Trudy Liang ten years earlier, a beautiful woman who once called Will her lover.īefore reading The Piano Teacher I’d gone for a good few months without historical fiction and the setting of this book and the summer-read aspects meant that I read it incredibly fast. But Will is constantly distant and there’s something amiss about the Chen family. At one of these parties she meets Will, an Englishman employed by her own employers, and the two begin an affair. She starts to become acquainted with the community yet always remains on the outside. War affects everyone involved in different ways, and sometimes it doesn’t just stop with those around at the time.Ī few years after WW2, Claire moves with her husband (a marriage of convenience) to Hong Kong, setting herself up as a piano teacher for a local family.

The piano teacher lee