To be honest, this book was kind of disappointing. Grace D. Li is an excellent writer, and I loved all of her lovely descriptions and dialogue, but the story itself didn’t hold my interest. The idea behind this book is that a group of bright college kids are hired to steal back five pieces of Chinese art from European and American museums and return them to China. The fact that these kids were supposed to be super smart and still decided to go through with this plan seemed unrealistic to me, but I was willing to set reality aside for the sake of the book. 

The story seemed advertised as a heist novel to me, but very little of it focused on the actual heists, and most of it was conversations that I had to skim just to finish the book. The random time skips made it feel, to me, like big chunks of the plot and the character's development were missing. I also didn’t like the characters very much. Don’t get me wrong, I love a good group-of-pretentious-students, dark-academia-type story, but the characters all had very similar personalities and inner monologues, which made the multiple POVs (and all the drama) repetitive and confusing. 

I feel like all of this is a lot of critiques, so I want to reiterate: this is not a bad book! If you like this kind of story, it might be for you! It just was not my cup of tea.