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Thoughts about She Belongs to Me, a modern-day arranged marriage novel about a piano tuner (Jiang Ci) and the CEO of a jewelry company (Lu Xingxue):
For the most part, I feel like this book could have been a lot shorter and more focused. It started out really cute! But the longer you go, the more you realize there aren't any follow-throughs for any of the character moments as soon as they're completed, which was frustrating for me.
I love that both of the leads are competent, successful in their respective fields, and emotionally intelligent—they belong in the "wholesome and mature" category of romance where episode after episode of conflict is resolved quickly by a power couple. Unfortunately, these episodes don't really build up to any discernible shape, only a series of starts and stops. Scenes are perfunctory, abruptly ended as soon as their purpose is served, and there's no sense of continuity or thematicness, and consequently, no chemistry and momentum. I felt like I was reading a series of OC snippets, where I was expected to already know and ship the leads; Jiang Ci is said to be a prodigious piano tuner whose hobby is scuba diving, but you don't really see any of this affect her worldview in any way. Everything felt so artificial, including the leads' past traumas.
The character I ended up loving the most was the morally dubious second lead, Wen Nian—Jiang Ci's childhood friend and Lu Xingxue's love rival—because the author actually made the effort to set up her place in the story and bring out her complexities. She even had a full arc! The rest of the side characters were just props that disappeared, which, again, was frustrating, because I was expecting some closure about Wan Wen (Lu Xingxue's friend and lawyer), Wang Yuanyuan (Lu Xingxue's cousin), and the stepsister who appeared a lot and whose name I have now forgotten. I did like how Jiang Ci comes out of the novel with a family that wanted her and openly acknowledged her place in it.
Overall, a 2/5 read for me. I wish they'd just cut out a lot of the middle bits, to be honest. And I wanted more of piano tuner!Jiang Ci! I feel like the point made at the beginning, where students sigh dreamily about the power and precision of Jiang Ci's wrists, should have come up again haha.
Anyway, I made a vocabulary log for this book. Text-only vocabulary list with accompanying journal doodles under the cut. :)
Chapters 1 and 2
Chapters 3 and 4
Chapter 5
Misc.
Also made a graphic (out of the journal drawings):
Novel raws | JJWXC:
https://www.jjwxc.net/onebook.php?novelid=3531308
English fantranslation | Novel Updates:
https://www.novelupdates.com/series/she-belongs-to-me
Translation status: complete. Chapters 1-40 are edited machine translation, and Chapters 41–57 are (as far as I know) human translation.
Audio drama | Fanjiao:
https://s.rela.me/c/1SqTNu?album_id=387
(I subbed some clips here)
