A nice book, honestly — short, gentle, easy to read in a couple of sittings. Two city boys sent down during the Cultural Revolution, a hidden suitcase of banned Western novels, a local seamstress. The period was clearly awful; Dai Sijie doesn't pretend otherwise.
What stayed with me is the small hope in it — literature slipping through the net and changing at least one life. It's nice to think there might have been positive outcomes like that, here and there, amid so much waste. I found myself hoping the seamstress's life goes well after the last page, even though the book leaves that open.
Maybe it's a bit sentimental for the horrors underneath. I didn't mind. It left me quietly moved rather than lectured.