Eurocentric and Bias

This author could not work out whether Jennifer's parents were ethnic Vietnamese or ethnic Chinese (born in Vietnam). It took me 5 minutes researching on the Chinese language Internet to discover that they are ethnic Chinese people living in Vietnam who spoke both Vietnamese and Cantonese (implying their Chinese ancestry is from hhe Guangdong area of Mainland China). They left Vietnam in 1979 because of the Border War between China and Vietnam which caused ethnic tension between the two ethnic groups. They wanted to eventually return to Vietnam and in no way supported the US invasion of that country. The author is wrong to imply that they left Vietnam to escape the Socialist government. Furthermore, just as the author cannot get the ethnicity of Jennifer's parents correct., he resorts to various stereotypical devices to fill the glaring holes in a book where none of the main four characters chose to collaborate with him!

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5 people found this helpful

Too much time spent on uninteresting statistics

I dont think its relevant where the parents came from and where they went to school or what type of car they drove. The history just goes on and on ! . not a great read. Very boring could have been so much shorter.

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3 people found this helpful

Want to, but just can't get into it

This has all the aspects of an absolutely fascinating story, it is such a rare and unlikely case, that despite having heard several podcasts about it, I wanted to dig deeper in and really get behind the story. However, I am four hours into twelve hours, and so far there has been nothing elucidating at all that I haven't already gleaned from a one hour podcast.
It is a very true reconstruction of the facts (I assume, I cannot fact-check the facts, but I mean it is a literal timeline telling) with a straight forward linear style, but so far devoid of analyses or information beyond. There is background on the male perpetrators, and many details of of courtcases, whereby there are so many names used that it is hard to keep track of who is who - who is a lawyer who is a suspect etc that one easily blurs them together, and this again is simply factual, there is no explanation of WHY they did it.
It is possible that the author will get to the motivations once they are all in prison and the story is told, but the initial first third of the book hasn't been compelling enough to motivate further listening, and I really, really want to like it and be sucked in.
My jury is still out, but without getting to grips with this woman and what her life was, there can be no understanding of why it happened, and if all you need is the story on face value as it unfolded, you don't need a twelve hour book for that.

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