“an underground world of Chinese vigilantes and heroes” – Andy Best’s Parkour Girl and Yellow Fish Car

As you know I don’t do book reviews on this site due to getting paid to do them in other places but I just caught up with Shanghailander Andy Best’s Parkour Girl and Yellow Fish Car on Kindle (for a very reasonable two quid). It came out last year and I should have plugged then but hadn’t read it. Great fun and somewhat different reading for me – that Best is a massive JG Ballard fan and based in Shanghai should be enough to peak the interest of many China Rhyming readers. Andy Best’s web site is here by the way and there’s one for the book too.

Zack Smith is a young American ex-pat in modern day Shanghai. He is frustrated, culture shocked, directionless and even suspects himself of being a bit racist. There seems to be no end in sight to his misery until one day a chance encounter leads him to an underground world of Chinese vigilantes and heroes.

“Parkour Girl and Yellow Fish Car” mixes a solid literary voice and a detailed rendering of modern Shanghai with the action and set pieces of the comic book hero universe.

Follow Zack into the world of Parkour Girl, Yellow Fish Car, Fidel, Brother Power and Hong Ling Jin and more. See the Shanghai of nail houses, Urban Security Officers, the human flesh search engine, Kappa Girl, post-nineties kids and hitmen. Finally, witness the climactic showdown with the criminal underground at a half demolished estate of lane houses that stand at the very line between Shanghai’s past, present and future.

This book contains language, humor and scenes that deal with violence, sex and real life experience.