A young costumier goes on a temporary assignment to make outfits for a circus in Vladivostok. Which she does. And then she goes home and makes costumes for other people someplace else.
I know it sounds like I’m exaggerating but really: NOTHING HAPPENS IN THIS NOVEL. It’s such a zero of a book. The characters are all personality vacuums who do nothing, nobody has any motivation to do anything - and consequently nobody does anything - and there isn’t even an attempt at a plot or story or theme or point. The whole thing is a forgettable flatline through and through.
Elisa Shua Dusapin’s prose is as bland as the “content” of the novel. I was reading one page after another flabbergasted at what I was and wasn’t seeing. I felt her last novel, The Pachinko Parlour, was empty but she’s reached a new level of mindless, imagination-free vapidity with Vladivostok Circus. I’m done with this author - she is awful and so are her utterly crap novels.
Read the ingredients label on a box of food instead - there’s more going on there than on any single page in this book.
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