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There are currently 31 member reviews
for The Funeral Cryer
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Becky S
Yawn
I was eager to read this book and find out more about the profession of being a funeral cryer in the Asian culture, but this book was disappointing. I found the writing style to be very dry and the characters one dimensional and nothing that I found I could relate to. The “plot twist” at the end came out of nowhere and didn’t make any sense to me and then the story just ended. This one just wasn’t for me!
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Rebecca
Disappointing
I was really looking forward to reading this book. I know nothing about the profession of Funeral Cryer and I was hoping to learn more. I was so disappointed. The entire book is the funeral cryer (the reader never learns her name) musing and whining about her job, her life, her horrid husband and his possible affair and her fantasies about another man over and over. The dialogue is stiff and unnatural and the writing is jarring. I enjoyed reading about when she would perform at a funeral but those passages were few and far between. I wanted to root for the funeral cryer because her life seemed so dismal but I couldn’t find the energy. I really would not recommend this book to anyone.
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Cathryn C. (Gaithersburg, MD)
So Disappointing! A Thin Plot, One-Dimensional Characters, and a Stilted, Jarring Writing Style
With stilted, almost awkward writing, a thin plot, and one-dimensional characters, this dark and sorrowful book by Wenyan Lu is a disappointment because it has the potential to be so much more.
Taking place in modern-day China but in a remote, rural village that hangs on to the old customs, this is the story of a middle-aged woman who is never named. None of the characters is named except for a few who are given nicknames. The woman is married to a man she refers to as "the husband," and they have one grown daughter, who lives in Shanghai. It is a loveless marriage, bordering on abusive. The husband is unemployed. She works as a funeral cryer. It is her job to lead the mourners in crying. Meanwhile, she suspects her husband, who spends his time playing mahjong, of having an affair with a woman named Hotpot, while she herself is making eyes at the local barber. Because of her job as a funeral cryer, she is thought to bring bad luck and to smell of the dead. She experiences discrimination from others' superstitions about death—so much so that she is refused admittance to her father's nursing home and is ostracized by those in the village.
The underlying theme of the book is death and dying—our fears, anxieties, and trepidations. Being surrounded by death weighs on the woman, and eventually she decides to live a better life. Even though the novel was leading up to this all along, her change of heart is quite sudden, so it feels forced and implausible.
The writing style is characterized by short, jarring sentences and abrupt paragraph changes, while the dialogue is stilted and boring and often doesn't serve to move the story forward, focusing on the mundane aspects of life.
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