Jingwen spends her nights as a showgirl at the Paramount, one of the most lavish clubs in Shanghai, competing ruthlessly to charm wealthy patrons. To cap off her shifts, she runs money for her grandmother, the exclusive surgeon to the most powerful gang in the city. A position her grandmother is pressuring her to inherit…

When a series of dancers are targeted—the attacker stealing their faces—Jingwen fears she could be next. And as the faces of the dancers start appearing on wealthy foreign socialites, she realizes Shanghai’s glittering mirage of carefree luxury comes at a terrible price.

Fighting not just for her own safety but that of the other dancers—women who have simultaneously been her bitterest rivals and only friends—Jingwen has no choice but to delve into the city’s underworld. In this treacherous realm of tangled alliances and ancient grudges, silver-armed gangsters haunt every alley, foreign playboys broker deals in exclusive back rooms, and the power of gods is wielded and traded like yuan. Jingwen will have to become something far stranger and more dangerous than her grandmother ever imagined if she hopes to survive the forces waiting to sell Shanghai’s bones.

https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/daughter-of-calamity-rosalie-m-lin/1143881585

https://www.bookbub.com/books/daughter-of-calamity-by-rosalie-m-lin

https://www.kobo.com/gb/en/ebook/daughter-of-calamity-2

This is one of those books that I was just confused by. I don’t mind a genre-mash up- it can keep things fresh but this one just felt a bit disjointed. If it had been a straight forward crime noir or fantasy it may have just worked better for me.

The author certainly conjured up 1920’s Shanghai for me, the descriptions were so in-depth and sensory laden. However I struggled with Jingwen. She went from flapper girl to gangsters moll to demi-goddess. I’m all for a girl seizing her destiny but I felt that she got over every new reveal so quickly. Magic, gods, body part farmers – she seems to get over all these things so fast! I did sometimes wonder if some scenes were just the drugs/alcohol fuelled dreams of the MC’s. Sometimes one sort of drifted into another and I was a bit lost.

Jingwen comes over as naïve and a “good girl” dancer and wants nothing to do with her grandmothers trade but by the end of the book she’s like a Dancers Triad King Pin! The romance element of the storyline could have been removed completely and the storyline still would have worked – for a gangster he took up little room!

I was definitely left dazed and confused. I may have to give this another read in a few months and see if it sits better with me then – I may not just be in the right mindset for this but it was a solid 3.5 stars – I just wished I could have felt more invested in our MC!