Rating: WARTY!
From an advance review copy for which I thank the publisher.
I found this book to be highly dissatisfying. I imagine it was not designed as an ebook, but that's all a reviewer like me ever has to judge it by, and it was less than stellar. It was also quite confusing and left me in the dark much of the time. Some of the text was misleading. For example, at one point when discussing the front entrance to the Forbidden City, the text mentions the "U-shaped Noon Gate" but all of the gates in the illustration are rectangular! The previous illustration had U-shaped gates (or more accurately, n-shaped!), so i couldn't tell if the text was wrong, the illustration was wrong, or if I was simply misunderstanding what was being said, or what. I'd specify a page number, but there were no page numbers in the book, which was another problem, at least for reviewing purposes.
Note that the book was 'adapted' whatever that means (I assume because of the fact that Chinese and English texts flow in different ways, but I may be wrong about that), by Yan Liu, and translated by Crystal Tai, so it's entirely possible that something got lost long the way. The illustrations by the author are meticulous and colorful, but they're very busy and it's often hard to distinguish exactly what's being talked about. Plus I have no idea what gender the author is. It's irrelevant to the review, except in that I can't use 'he' or 'she' to I'll stick with 'they' or something equally neutral.
There was a guide in the back of the book which highlighted greyscale drawings with colors to indicate specific parts of earlier illustrations. If only those had been included along with the text, it would have been a big improvement! It didn't help to have them in the back - and especially not in an ebook because unlike with a print book, it's a nightmare trying to go back and forth in a ebook and keep your place readily.
Some of the illustrations were oddly chopped-up, too. For example, regarding the aforementioned Forbidden City issue, this was also where it looked like one image had become trapped behind another, so maybe the text was right, but the image it referred to had become hidden behind the next image or mangled or something. But there were other issues, and again the transition point seemed to be they Forbidden City page.
Initially (and I was reading this in Adobe Digital Editions on an iPad FYI) there was one page per screen, but in landscape mode, it was possible to slide the image across and see a seamless 'full-page spread' as it were, whereas other images had a vertical white line down the screen marking the page transition. Right after the Forbidden City page though, the layout changed so that double page spreads were included on one screen, making them much too small in portrait mode, and comfortably visible only in landscape.
Again, this is not a problem you would have with a print edition, but publishers insist on sending out only ebook version for review unless you happen to be a top tier reviewer. What this means is that books can get electronically-mangled and publishers all-too-often fail to make sure the book is readable. This clearly happened here, but even ignoring all of that, the book as still confusing and sometimes indecipherable, and frankly I disagreed with the premise that Beijing - even ancient Beijing - is symmetrical. At least if it is, the author failed to convince me! I found the book not acceptable, and I cannot commend it as a worthy read.
