Compelling

Benton Sims is a grieving widower who become an expat in Thailand to escape his past. However, as often happens, he finds himself drawn in to the plight of the Palin tribe and unethical cancer experiments. Using his past skills in government security, he becomes involved in and a member of those same experiments that have had horrible consequences on the participants.

Along the way, Bento, as he is called, has many musings on literature, music, social life and connections with other expats. While this novel is brilliantly written, I found sex with very young people to be not of my taste and unnecessary in this context.

The book is beautifully written with fantastic imagery. Mani has an intelligent writing style that pulls the reader into living the novel rather than just reading it. The story is compelling in that one could see this very thing happening with the big pharma companies so the reader wants to know how Bento uses his skill to divert the catastrophic outcomes. Loss of friends, heartache and then new love give a huge breadth of emotions for the reader to experience as the novel progresses.

Definitely worth the time to explore. It leaves many questions to ponder long after the novel is closed.

There is some fine writing here, as well as a ton of cultural insights. Unfortunately, there is NOT a novel here.

A novel requires either a narrative or characters that engage you and draw you in, preferably both, but sadly neither is found here. What narrative there is feels incoherent and annoying to try to follow, and the characters are vague and impossible to care about. That's a shame, too, because the setting is interesting and well-drawn, and some of the writing is wonderful.

I can't recommend it.