Siren Queen

I was disappointed in this novel after reading the first three books of Vo's Singing Hills series. Beginning with The Empress of Salt and Fortune, it was gorgeously written and beautifully imagined. While I thought Siren Queen was well written, the imagination was a little flat. The book is a take on '30s era Hollywood, with its young stars and starlets, but infused with real monsters, not just the basic Harvey Weinstein kind. It's narrated by a young, queer, Asian-American woman who will do anything to become a star, even become a monster herself. I think my issue with it was that the narrator had a stoic, disaffected persona. She hardly let anyone get close, even when she fell in love. You might say that that's how she kept going in the harsh world of the Hollywood studio system, but it also prevented me from having much empathy for her. Still, it's a good, brisk read. I finished this book in two days.

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