Gold Boy, Emerald Girl

Nine stories, one mood: Li's tone barely shifts from narrator to narrator, and critics say “all the stories here sound alike” by the midpoint. Kindness runs so long and so well at the front of the book that the eight shorter stories after it read as a step down rather than a sustained climb. House Fire, about a crew of women running an amateur anti-infidelity crusade who get thrown by a timid man asking for their own help, cuts off before it resolves, which one reader compares to “watching leaves fall from trees in autumn” with no shape to the fall. Another admits outright “why I hate short story when I am left in a cliffhanger.” A notice sums up the trap: “Trapped by her own skill, eh?”