Let’s brainstorm reasons you could forgive a hero who spends most of the book planning to murder the heroine. 1) The hero is a time traveler and knows the heroine will murder someone else. 2) There is a hostage. 3) The heroine is Hitler in drag. In The Undertaking of Lily Chen, the hero is supposed to murder the heroine so she can be a ghost bride for his dead brother.

Yeah. Not good enough for me, either.

Deshi Li’s brother Wei, a bachelor, dies in an accident, for which Deshi is blamed. His traditional parents demand that Deshi find Wei a corpse bride, a deceased single woman to be “married” to Wei in the afterlife. Deshi contracts with a shady underworld figure and travels with him to rural China, where he can’t seem to find an appropriate existing corpse. The next logical step is to make one himself.

Lily Chen’s parents are pressuring her to marry, or perhaps just prostitute for, the man who holds the lease on the family farm. Lily escapes with Deshi, who is then torn between killing her to be his brother’s bride and marrying her himself.

It’s supposed to be a kind of road romance, and while there was plenty of road, the romance was lacking. I definitely felt like the author heard about corpse brides and thought “Hey, that would be a good premise for a book” without remembering that most of the book takes place after the premise is introduced. Too many pages were spent on visuals (at one point, three full sheets on the ghost of Wei) and not enough spent on developing the relationship. It had one of those thunderbolt “Oh, wow, I love you!” moments utterly lacking in credible buildup.

I can’t call Deshi a hero. He’s just the male protagonist. I couldn’t even tell if Deshi believed in ghost brides, or if he just didn’t want his parents to get mad at him for showing up at the funeral without a body. If he does believe in them, he’s basically forcing a woman to go along with his own beliefs. If he doesn’t believe in them, his motivation for murder is even less compelling. This is not a wishy-washy Hamlet type of murder planning, either – at one point, Deshi is charging with a knife, and only dumb luck keeps Lily alive. There is nothing romantic about any of this.

The art is… interesting. Lily Chen is full-color, and the backgrounds are gorgeous watercolors reminiscent of old Chinese art, which the author apparently studied before writing this book. But I didn’t like the character art at all. American graphic novel protagonists are often ugly to me, and the characters in Lily Chen are nothing short of grotesque. If you want to be polite, they look vaguely Cubist; if you want to be blunt, they look like family portraits drawn by kindergarteners. This must be deliberate, since Novgorodoff is clearly talented, but I can’t figure out why. They just looked goofy and gross.

If you want to see pretty landscapes and interesting things being done with pagination and layout, you might enjoy flipping through this graphic novel. If you want to read a romance, or even a believable narrative, look for a different book.