Off the Books - Soma Mei Sheng Frazier

 Soma Mei Sheng Frazier's Off the Books is one of those novels I never found myself getting fully comfortable with despite Frazier managing to keep me interested enough in its plot to want to see how it would all turn out in the end. 

The novel's main character, Mei, is a Chinese American woman who has recently dropped out of Dartmouth to return to her Oakland home. She has no real idea about the rest of her life but is soon working as a limo driver who can be depended upon to keep her mouth shut about her passengers and where she takes them. As a result, Mei becomes the go-to driver for a many of the area's sex workers. It is Mei's uncle who eventually comes up with a plan to have Mei go indie by driving the clients he chooses for her in her own vehicle, effectively cutting out the middleman and even more effectively protecting the privacy of her clients. 

That's how Mei meets Henry, a handsome Chinese American burdened with a huge suitcase who wants to be driven across the country to New York. Henry is a strange one. He has enough money to stay in the most luxurious hotels along the route but he and Mei often stay in some of the rattiest hotel rooms imaginable. And Henry appears to be in no big hurry to get to New York. Instead, he peppers the trip with frequent rest stops during which he disappears to lug his big black suitcase out of the car in private over and over again.

Before long, Mei is wondering just what can be in the suitcase - especially after she begins to suspect that whatever is inside might be alive. And when she finally does learn the "truth," she stays more confused than ever about why Henry really wants to go to New York.

The plot of Off the Books is clever enough, and each of its main characters has more good moments than bad ones, but I found myself in a struggle to really care much what happened to any of them despite the danger that they often appear to be in. Mei and Henry never seemed real enough for me to feel empathy for them despite their plight. 

I blame that partially on Frazier's prose style, one in which she jumps from present to past and back again in almost every chapter, all the while inserting whole sentences in Chinese without ever making very clear what was being said between various characters. There are a lot of things to like about the book: the quirky characters met on the long road trip, the hook about what could possibly be in the humongous suitcase Henry continuously wrestles with, the good natured humorous jabs that Mei's uncle often takes at her, etc. But I could never get past that point in a novel where the reading stops feeling like a chore and becomes a treat to look forward to. I always notice when that "click" happens for me; this time it never did.