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Book Review: The Naked Wedding and other short stories 📚💖


Book Review: The Naked Wedding  and other short stories (10/10🌟)

I love short stories, especially ones about various types of relationships and so this collections ticked a lot of boxes for me. The seven short stories cover some of the various complexities that can happen in a relationship between a father and son, husbands and wives, business colleagues, exes, friends and technology. Set in Shenzhen, China, each story seems to have a timeless quality to it while at the same time feeling quite modern, as you join each character as they go through their journeys.

Each story seemed to spark a different emotion in me.

"The 27 Club" documents the end of a relationship and so I found the narrator quite relatable. "Kobe Bryant and The Freedom Swimmer" explores the fantasy and lengths that one goes to as a parent and is a story that warmed my heart. Both "Shuang" and the title story almost made me cry (for different reasons), "Li Lei's Big Escape" made me cheer for the main character, "Rhinos" managed to make the sometimes boring topic of competitive characters in a workforce environment both engaging and entertaining, and as a lover of all things whimsical my favourite story is the final one in the collection and it's titled "The Disposable."

Drifting through themes of love, passion, grief and loss the collection is both beautiful and lightweight despite occasionally touching on some heavy topics including suicide and abuse. The collection engages your attention without enabling it to wander off, and considering Lockdown's made a lot of people unable to concentrate on reading for a long time I'd highly recommend this book to anyone whose looking for something to remind them why they loved reading in the first place.


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