Book review

If the final days of Twitter gave me anything, it was translated Chinese novels. I’ve found some really good ones, like “Dao of a Salted Fish,” and I’ve found some really bad ones which I hastily did not finish (DNF).

And then there are ones like “Farmer’s Pampered Wife: Farming Crops to Raise a Bun” or “农门娇宠：养个包子来种田” as it is likely better known as.

And it was so long. And there was SOOOOO much needless family drama that didn’t really offset the lack of action. And I really wanted to like it after putting so much effort into reading the 537 (five HUNDRED and thirty-seven!!!) chapters.

But…

Oh my god, dudes. Oh. My. God.

It started off interesting enough with a modern woman waking up in the body of a peasant woman in old timey China. And she was really ugly with a starved body and a giant facial birthmark and horrific body odor that makes herself vomit to smell it and the previous owner had done horrible things like helping her mother and sister be abused by their terrible grandmother and that side of the family and cheating on her hunter husband (who she forced to marry her!) with the local man-floozy and poisoning her toddler with chili peppers to damage his vocal cords so he isn’t able to talk anymore. Just, from the descriptions, an all-around UGLY person.

And the modern woman has to deal with that level of HISTORY while being back in historical times where it seems pretty legal to beat a woman just because. Like, she’s almost murdered by the townspeople MULTIPLE times, as in, more than once and no less than ten times. Like, EVERYBODY hated that lady.

And she’s dealing with all that past history she’s figuring out as she goes along, while trying to take care of a traumatized child and living in a peasant hut with a husband that DOES NOT like her or trust her.

So she starts by cooking delicious foods. And she’s lucky enough to find a rare and precious scorpion to sell for a LOT of money. And she gets rid of the horrific armpit stench by cutting something that the translation only showed as ASTERISKS and putting it on her pits, but it was so astringent that she had to fight to keep from screaming at the pain.

But she solves the stench problem and begins to fix the no food/poverty problem. And her life starts to get better. And she goes to town and makes a deal with the apothecary guy to sell herbs and to sell a “miraculous” herbal diet recipe that she collects royalties on. Because she knows a bit of herbal dietary lore and acupuncture because she’s moderately amazing.

And the town doctor–who seems to disappear later on–helps her with a method to cure her giant facial birthmark which involves a scar reducing cream AND A SNAKE BITE. Like, she has to let a poisonous snake bite her directly on the face. Which causes part of her face to rot and she drains it by poking needles and starts wearing a veil around all the time, so nobody realizes when she starts getting more and more and MORE pretty.

And then a restauranteur comes to town and she joins the cook-off he hosts to find chefs for his restaurant. But she doesn’t become a chef, she instead sells recipes to him that he uses and she makes a lot of money. And throughout it all her dad’s mother and his family cause her all kinds of grief. Like, the horrible cousin that moves to town spends her whole portion of the story trying to get mc KILLED by various means and is all around awful.

And throughout it all, mc is upbeat and somewhat enthusiastic. No matter the trouble that finds her, she’s able to pivot things to her advantage. And her husband is gradually falling in love with her and helps her more and more and…

And that’s when the melodrama starts.

Like, she starts her own restaurant and her and her husband build a two-story house. And the apothecary guy is murdered so she helps the son. And the floozy guy that the previous body’s owner was cheating with turns out to be a really rich guy with a wife and multiple women he cheats with, which really brings into question why he bothered with the smelly lady in the first place??? And like, he has thug boys and people have to be scared of him, but earlier her husband punched the guy a bunch of times and she fed him wine with chili peppers and caused his lips to swell up to the point she was accused of poisoning him and…

Like, after the building of the house arc, it seems the author decided to take things in a whole new direction. And rather than creating new characters, just recycled the ones already in place to fill new roles. Because that floozy man seemed like a poor layabout dude, but suddenly he has a manor house and the kind of wealth where he can kill whoever he wants and only needs to pay off the local officials, no big deal.

And like, the dad’s family… Suddenly the sister-in-law has a secret lover whose identity we never find out, even after her loser gambler husband who rapidly went downhill throughout the story killed the guy and cut off his genitals.

And then there’s war, and it turns out her husband actually has a secret identity where he was a general that’s been living in hiding for the last three years with the son that’s not really his son. And by the way, she was actually a virgin before they finally made love for the first time in the story. And she finds out that the kid wasn’t hers and…

DRA-A-A-A-A-MA.

The whole time I thought they’d been married for at least 5 years if not longer, but it turns out they’ve only been married for less than three. And NOBODY told her that she was the stepmother to the son and that the previous body owner didn’t trick a single guy into marrying her but a single dad.

And then she’s fleeing with her neighbors and her sister and dad as refugees after her house and restaurant were burned down and her mother was killed. And she’s pregnant and they get robbed by other refugees because they decided for whatever reason to help the loudmouthed cousin who is like “There’s food!” every time she gets a little bite to eat, which results in them getting attacked and losing all their money.

And the restauranteur guy, who has feelings for her, is fleeing with them and he has some money and he must have hidden like 50 buns on his body somewhere and he keeps them alive and pays for the inn when they get to the city and helps them start up their new life. And the apothecary son guy shows up again with the rich girl fiancee that she previously helped, and they all end up living together in a mansion and starting a food stall business where they sell shrimp and crab that are so delicious the emperor himself actually uses them in a banquet to celebrate the return of the victorious general… her husband.

And she gets reunited with her man, and it should be happy forever, but the emperor wants him to marry the scheming girl that shows up multiple times attempting to steal him away. And she has her baby, but it’s a difficult birth and she pierces the veil or whatever and talks with the previous body’s host…

And finds out that the previous host didn’t die, but that they instead switched places. And she has to decide whether she’s going to stay in the past life or return to her previous life, and of course she stays in the past.

But she never asks about the family she was worried about before. And she never thinks that such a horrible person might be doing horrible things in her life. And she’s told that she will eventually start to forget modern stuff as she fully integrates into her new life and…

For reals: She’s going to forget life in the future. But after she wakes up and spends a month being sick in bed, she NEVER ONCE even thinks “Maybe I should write down all the recipes I know and all the other information for when I forget everything.”

She just goes about living her life… and gets kidnapped by the restauranteur who is now working for the bad guy and also turns out to be a bad guy himself. And he drugged her and made everyone think she was drunk and maybe sexually assaulted her? Which brings the previous time when she argued with her husband and got drunk in the guy’s restaurant into question… as well as the paternity of her child? Because she got “drunk” after they argued and spent a night out, and the story is really unclear about the timing of things, but a couple months later she finds out she’s pregnant so…

And throughout the whole story until the last like 50 chapters, the restauranteur guy had been a really great guy. There were even a couple of chapters from his point of view where he reveals that he always thought he was going to end up as a bachelor forever because he’s never had feelings for anyone before he started having feelings for her. And he sacrificed so much to help her and her group to get to the city when he would have had a much easier time alone.

It just feels like the author HAD to make him a bad guy because they realized that readers would advocate for mc leaving her husband for the restauranteur. Like, they have so much more in common and he’s such a helpful and pleasant guy… He HAD to be made into a villain or else mc’s husband just seems like a much lesser dude.

The whole story… Sigh.

I slogged my way to the very end… which turned out to be rushed and hasty to the point of whiplash. It was like, “Drama, drama, DRAMA, the end.” No wrap up. No real conclusion. Just a big dramatic bunch of stuff happening at the beginning of the chapter and THE END at the bottom of the chapter.

It was 537 chapters, and I was left feeling like the author could have squeezed out another chapter or two to make a more satisfying conclusion. Like, there didn’t need to be any added melodrama, just a roundup of events and a bit about what everyone is going to do next.

Because she started a massive restaurant in the city, but the end, which was like four paragraphs, made it seem like she and her husband were going to give everything up and move back to the country?

And like, she spent like 200 chapters pregnant, then she had the baby and… That’s it. I don’t think she ever holds the baby other than that one time. She’s off running around the city and being kidnapped a bunch and going places she’s specifically told not to go… and it never says who’s taking care of the baby for her. Like, she’s got a little maid now, but that kid hangs around her waiting to be told what to do.

I feel like I wasted 537 chapters of my life, lol.

DRAMA!

Pax,

~HarperWCK

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