Review: Loveboat, Taipei (Loveboat, Taipei #1) by Abigail Hing Wen

For fans of Crazy Rich Asians or Jane Austen Comedy of Manners, with a hint of La La Land

When eighteen-year-old Ever Wong’s parents send her from Ohio to Taiwan to study Mandarin for the summer, she finds herself thrust among the very over-achieving kids her parents have always wanted her to be, including Rick Woo, the Yale-bound prodigy profiled in the Chinese newspapers since they were nine—and her parents’ yardstick for her never-measuring-up life.

Unbeknownst to her parents, however, the program is actually an infamous teen meet-market nicknamed Loveboat, where the kids are more into clubbing than calligraphy and drinking snake-blood sake than touring sacred shrines.
Free for the first time, Ever sets out to break all her parents’ uber-strict rules—but how far can she go before she breaks her own heart? ~ Goodreads

Source: Libby/Audio

Review: Surprisingly, I enjoyed the hell out of this one. I say surprisingly because it’s filled with drama of all kinds – romantic, friendships, family – lots and lots of drama!

Eighteen year old Ever Wong just wants to dance. She’s a good student and a good kid but her Chinese parents, who emigrated to the US to give Ever a better life, feel like she’s squandering opportunities and turning her back on her Chinese culture in pursuit of a career in dancing rather than in medicine.

They send her to Chien Tan, an elite program, in Taiwan to study Mandarin and other cultural classes pre-chosen by them to turn things around. Unbeknownst to them – the school has the nickname of the loveboat because of all the wild antics and hookups the teens engage in. So they basically take a really good kid and throw her in to the pit of teens gone wild. lol

Ever engages in increasingly risky endeavors as a way of fighting back against her parents constraints and it all starts to come crashing down on her.

I’m sure this could be a bit much for some readers. Ever makes a few doozy mistakes and doesn’t always treat people fairly but the teens in Loveboat, Taipei are so authentically written. There is not one thing that happened in this book that I haven’t seen happen during my teen years. As messy as it was – it did not feel over-the-top to me.

The friendships, hook-ups are high drama and I had issues with each and every character at one point or another but they are dealing with pretty intense things (depression, learning disabilities just to name a few) and I think they did great for teens trying to learn and grow. Every single one grew over the course of the book and I’d be happy to read more about any of them.

The kids come from varying backgrounds but all are burdened by expectations and responsibilities they are trying to navigate with little support from the adults around them. But Wen doesn’t create cartoon villain parents. They are written with both flaws and heart. They do pressure their kids but they have also made enormous sacrifices and it was nice to see Ever and her parents navigation of those issues written in a compassionate way.

And watching Ever stumble but find her way back and grow into an even stronger, kinder young woman – who believes in herself but honors her parents was a joy to read. It's been a while since I finished a book with a huge smile on my face but Loveboat, Taipei did just that.

* I listened to the audio of this, narrated by Emily Woo Zeller and she was fantastic!