Women of Good Fortune
by Sophie Wan
I loved this book.
(I’m pretty sure every book review I publish is going to start this way - I’m not about to share bad books with you!)
Women of Good Fortune was a cross between Ocean’s 8 and Sex in the City set in Shanghai. I really hope it gets made into a film.
Firstly, I love an ensemble cast. I will take 8 co-leads over one star any day. This book also has many other elements going for it: a heist, a wedding, a bad boy turned good, a wrong guy who might just turn out to be the perfect guy after all - it’s all here.
Underneath all that superficial rom-com stuff is a deep, deep reckoning with identity, autonomy, and the roles women are expected to play in societies shaped by patriarchy and tradition. It’s so much easier to see it when it’s not your own culture, but its just as applicable outside China.
What this book really boils down to is a feminist meditation on the costs of obedience, and the small rebellions women stage in their own lives: walking away from relationships that other people think we should be grateful for, unapologetically putting our career ambitions before domestic ones, refusing to pretend we aren’t aware of how our looks are measured and appraised at every step of our lives.
None of these women are even close to an archetypal feminist - their choices are always messy, incomplete, or compromised. But this novel doesn’t ask its characters to be perfect, and neither does feminism.
Aside from gender, other elements of identity are woven throughout the book. How much of who we are is shaped by our parents’ expectations, by the city we’re born in, by how others see our beauty, education, or class?
What this book excels at is honing in on the tensions between who we are, who we want to be, and who the world expects us to be.