Will Chen, a senior in art history at Harvard, works at the Sackler Museum part-time. When men in black masks raid the museum and steal some priceless Chinese art, Will is caught in the museum. He sees the thieves and notices a piece left behind. He deftly palms it. This act gets him a call from a group that wants to enlist him to steal several more pieces of Chinese art that were taken from the country during Colonial times and now reside in museums. They want these pieces of China’s heritage returned.
Will agrees and recruits his friends to help: his sister Irene, the conman, Alex, the hacker, Daniel, the thief, and Lily, the getaway driver. These are all college students of Chinese ancestry. Their families have been in the US for varying amounts of time, but the students still struggle with understanding their background.
I thought the best part of the book was character development. These are college kids, they each have issues, goals, and desires. They each are struggling to understand who they are and what it means to be a person of Chinese descent. I thought the author did an excellent job showing each character. They were all distinct and quite different from each other, but believable.
I thought the heist was the weakest part of the novel. It seems unlikely that college students would be recruited for this type of job and the way they plan it using Facebook, Whatsapp, and Google is clever, but doesn’t ring true. However, the pace is fast and with the emphasis on the characters and the background history, the weakness of the heist planning and accomplishment goes unnoticed.
I received this book from Penguin Random House for this review.
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