Rich People Problems
by Kevin Kwan
In Rich People Problems, Kevin Kwan continues the saga of the uber-rich Young/Shang/Leong families that he began in Crazy Rich Asians. I’m not talking statement handbag wealth here, but statement private jet. These are the sort of people who can afford and are silly enough to indulge in plastic surgery for their pet fish. But rather than marriage as in his previous books, this time the battlefield rages over a death. The matriarch of the Young family is dying and the extended family and their cronies are circling her deathbed, knives (diamond encrusted, of course) drawn.
I love a good satire and Kevin Kwan is a very clever writer. His characters leap from the page with all their hilarious antics. Even the more sympathetic characters seem blithely unaware of the excessive nature of their lives. No peeve is too petty. No excess is too great. Yet while the author invites us to laugh at them, he also makes them all too human, so that we are drawn into their dramas and dragged at breakneck speed through every twist and turn of the plot, laughing all the way.
I can’t imagine what he will think of next!
Carol Jones 