Katherine by Anchee Min

[kyuuketsukirui.livejournal.com]

I have not read this, but I'm curious if anyone here has and what your thoughts on it were. I came across it noodling around LibraryThing and it caught my eye because it was tagged as queer and by a PoC author.

Almost all the reviews on Amazon are glowing, but there are two things that make me really reluctant to give it a try. First off, the Chinese names are all translated. I hate this! It's so othering. Almost all names have meanings, even western ones; there's no reason to translate a name other than to make it seem more ~*~exotic~*~. So I'm already iffy just because of that. But it also seems like the plot is that this Mary Sue white girl (dude, she has "cat-like eyes") comes to China and changes the lives of the Chinese people.

I wouldn't even be giving this book a second look if it were by a white author, but I keep thinking, well, the author is Chinese, maybe it's not as horrible as it sounds?