This book is about the lives of five young ladies living in an apartment building in Shanghai, you can call it “Sex and the City” and “Gossip Girl”, Chinese style. Their love life, family, career and friendship made for entertaining stories that fill three TV series. Each lady has a distinct personality – Andie is a beautiful yet Asperger like finance genius with a dark family secret. Fang Xiao Qu is a flamboyant rich girl who is super entrepreneurial but with underdeveloped capacities of things cultural and intellectual. Fan Sheng Mei is materialistic and superficial, however she has a heart of gold and struggles the most to support her family’s unrelenting financial demand. The diligent and always positive Guan Guan is very comfortable following rules and living within the box. Xiao Qiu is the most immature and emotional of the bunch who seems to get into trouble often. This is not a book of literary brilliance, but it’s interesting and entertaining. What I like about it is that despite the apparent fairy tales of rich boy meets pretty girl, it also provides reflection on contemporary struggles in everyday Chinese people’s lives – the shame of mental illness, societal worship of money, materialistic view on marriage etc.