Coffee & Kung Fu

Rating:
Summary: I didn't really like it
Review: I thought that the writing style was ok, but the characters just didn't seem very real to me. Especially the main character -- I couldn't connect with her. I wouldn't recommend it.

Rating:
Summary: incredible read
Review: This book brought to mind "Girls Poker Night" by Josie A. davis and the works of Jennifer Belle. You have to love a heroine who, on Thanksgiving, tells her family "Happy kill an Indian and take his land because God told you to Day."

Nicci Bradford works as a marketing copyeditor in Boston (as she puts it, of all the cold gray cities she could move to, I move to Boston".) Boston is in stark contrast to the city of her childhood -- Manila in the Philippines, which teems with life on the street and in the air. I drew a comparison of her description of Mainla with my own memories of Karachi and, being a former Bostonian as well, knows exactly what she's talking about. It's night and day, and she doesn't know where she fits.

Nicci says the main question in life is asking yourself "Is this life good enough for the next 70 years?" She gets muddled in this question when her coworker's husband comes on to her and she knees him in the groin, she starts an affair with a hot client, befriends an employee at the local coffee shop as well as two homeless men, and reconnects with a childhood friend from Manila. Nothing is easy or cut-and-dried, but the sheer reality and humanity of it all will keep you drawn in.

Throughout it all, Nicci tries to apply the lessons she has learned from her beloved Kung Fu movies, particularly those starring Jackie Chan. She relates what Jackie learns in each film and tries to apply it to her own. She notes that she often fails but then, life is not a movie.

Rating:
Summary: Entertaining but inconsistent
Review: This book had some great points: I sympathized with Nicci's mixed feelings about going home again, isolation in a new, big city, and her relationships with her family members. I thought the relationship with her grandfather was very well written, touching and realistic. There were some genuinely funny parts, situations everyone can relate to (horribly boring mandatory office parties, confusion over guys, and dealing with too many forks at dinner!) and some parts that made me cry.

While some of the kung fu vignettes seemed relevant and important to include, as the book went on they seemed increasingly tacked on and disconnected from the point of the story. I know that her love of those movies was supposed to set Nicci apart from the typical chick-lit heroine, but several just seemed like an afterthought, inserted in after the author remembered that the title of the books included kung fu. Also, too much focus on Rob, not enough character development of Ethan, and too many sub-plots took away from the general flow of the narrative and left a lot of questions that could've been answered with more succinct writing.