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Customer Reviews:
Avg. Customer Rating: 4.0 / 5.0
Difficult to engage with In 'Empress Orchid', Orchid herself was a young woman - naive, impressionable, and with good intentions. Min portrayed her protagonist's desperation very well, and in that novel Orchid's methods of surviving in the Forbidden City were justified - she was dealing with a hostile court, a weak husband, and a spoiled son. But in 'The Last Empress', things go a little downhill. While Orchid was a layered and difficult character in the first book, she came across as being genuinely good at heart - in this... more info
Goodbye To All That Fascinating subject but clunkily written and ponderously repetitive. Nothing flows - the dialogue is glitchy and unreal and the narrative constantly repeats the same thoughts. Perhaps the Empress was incapable of original thought but her life was actually a lot more interesting than found here. I THINK the reader is supposed to empathise with the subject but there is neither sufficient character nor depth of background to make this Empress real. She just plods on, thinking the same old things, doing the... more info
Another masterpiece from Anchee Min! It's been a few years since I first read Anchee Min's first book on the life of China's Empress Dowager Tz'u-Hsi which blew me away.
I wasn't even aware that Anchee Min was even working on a second and final instalment of Tz'u-Hsi's life until i was browsing the isles of WHSmiths and came across "The last empress". I quickly ordered the book from Amazon (much cheeper) and waited impatiently for its arrival. As soon as "The last empress" arrived I dives straight in and was not... more info
excellent book I read her previous book empress orchid and was moved by it , she makes you feel like you are there... so when I saw this one i couldn't resist and I haven't been able to put it down I am sad its ended... Really great books recommended to everyone
