Second Sister by Chan Ho-Kei translated into English by Jeremy Tiang is an impecable cyber crime novel focused on teenage bullying I ever read. Probably, one of those few books that I find flawless in construction, while raising very important contemporary topics.
When a young teenage girl Au Siu-Man threw herself to death, cyber bullying seemed to be the reason that convinced her to take her own life. But as her older sister Au Nga-Yee, a bookish librarian without too much knowledge about the everyday life of young people nowadays, decides to track a potential source and author of bullying, the mysterious and eccentric cyber investigator N - from Nemesis, the Greek goddess of destiny - will reveal an extraordinary web of intrigues and underage sexual abuse. What Nga-Yee was thinking about her sister is also shredded to pieces, as she has to face how her sister really was in her everyday environment.
Second Sister has, besides a plot with twists that will leave the reader in wonder for over 300 pages, a subrepticious social - anarchist sometimes - message about social justice and capitalist delusion. The human complexity of the characters, whose choices and changes of attitude and mind are reflecting the ways in which human ways may operate sometimes.
It is not an easy book and the directness preparing the revenge for Siu-Man´s death, although ill directed and aborted in the end, do answer at a great extent the purely naturalistic take our simplicity-driven world may follow sometimes.
A read hard to digest but very interesting for anyone with a curious mind aimed to learn a bit more about humanity´s challenges in the e-age.
Rating: 5 stars
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