- #1
The FL is from our times, from a wealthy Chinese family (she is third generation rich), highly educated (Ph.D. Aspirant level, superb piano and violin player, etc.) and she has her own magical space full of every modern product, including meds, tools and weapons, and food you would ever need to feed and support twenty people for decades, yet you cannot say that the FL never suffered. She lived for several years in the Apocalypse before sacrificing herself to save someone and transmigrating into the Great Famine era which to her feels like a big improvement, a very safe place! No zombies is all we need for happiness, don't we?
The original girl, emaciated and weakened from overwork and malnourishment, died from fever, basically, from lack of medical care, after accidentally falling into river. The FL pulls some meds and food from her space and restores her body to health within days.
All of this writer's transmigrated FLs, and I read three of her novels, are similar. They are both good and bad. They do good deeds to good or useful people, they pity the weak, but they do bad or at least questionable deeds to the rest of us as well. Normally, they act as executioners to "bad" people, but they also meddle and lack compassion.
For example, the FL in this novel pays no attention to material goods herself and never experienced hunger; relationships are more important to her. She is very hardworking and has no problem with any kind of work. Work is work, it has to be done, and shoveling pig sh*t pays well (maximum work points per day) and is necessary for the farm animals and farm crops to thrive, so she does it quite happily. Yet she does not understand that most people's psyche, even of very decent people, would warp under influence of extreme poverty and prolongued hunger and other forms of duress - working while starving and dehydrated under blazing sun with heat strokes and sunburns, suffering from the gut wrenching stench of sh*t that triggers involuntary vomiting of the meager breakfast, bloody blisters on hands when working without gloves or necessary tools, etc. This makes people behave in abnormal, crazy and evil ways. Treating people decently is a must.
But the FL still refuses to feed her pregnant stepmother and deliberately starves her stepsister (while secretly feeding her little blood related sister and a dozen of unrelated kind strangers). Both the stepmother and stepsister are not good to her, a lot of which has to do with poverty, with abnormal scarcity of resources, but what does starving them in return has to do with that? Making suffering people suffer even more won't help anyone, it will only breed hatred and resentment, more abnormal psychology, more aberrations and terrible behaviors
In this novel, the FL patiently works on her dad, so that he eats better and pays more attention to his own daughters, not just focusing on the yet unborn son of his. She succeeds but she also drives the wedge between him and his pregnant wife and his step daughter. She does not bring the family together, no one is happy.
The ML is a railroad engineer, a very generous and capable man from a good family. He is so smitten with the FL, he made me laugh and smile several times. To me, he is just a place holder, i.e. Someone has to be the ML in this novel, so he filled that space. His only human and unique characteristic seems to be his big white teeth! Nothing else.
Besides flashing those impressive teeth, all he does is to eat, shop, shovel manure to help the FL, and to love and pamper her. He does not have much of a storyline of his own. In other words, he is a male, but he does not lead. The story is all about the FL, her destiny, her path, her work, her acquaintances, etc.
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