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Title: Very disappointing
Review: After reading Wagner's other work, and especially after reading Carolyn See's enthusiastic review in the Washington Post, I had high hopes for this book. But The Chrysanthemum Palace was a disappointment, a thin sketch of a story with weak, unlikable characters and a Hollywood backdrop that many writers -- including Wagner himself -- have made much more vivid. At about page 140, I skipped the next 50 pages or so and read the last 15 or 20 pages, none of which made me want to return to the part I passed over.Wagner is a talented writer and adept storyteller, so I'm rather baffled by this tepid effort. Maybe this was just one of those mistakes that writers occasionally make in selling an idea to a publisher, then finding that it really doesn't engage them or that they can't flesh it out well enough in time for a deadline. I still look forward to Wagner's future projects, but this particular book was a waste of my time and money.
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