--see review in vol 1 and vol 5--

Unsurprisingly, it gets a lot more exciting when things start falling apart for the Jias. I still think everyone is too hard on Xi-feng. For one, she's sick all the time and no one else can do her job properly. She also has the gall to make the hard decisions and be a snake when no one else will.
But also how could they just let Dai-yu die alone and act all shocked about it? Everyone knew she was dying and they specifically avoided her anyway. ( )

The plot moves along a bit more briskly now that we're outside the dilatory dreamscape of Cao's authenticated 80 chapters. Whoever wrote, arranged, or otherwise cobbled together the material in Book IV, I think they did a pretty good job of it. The chapters leading up to Bao Yu's wedding in particular are really propulsive in a way we haven't hitherto seen. The other major event here is the hopeless liability Xue Pan being arrested for murder for the second time, necesitating masses more silver to be disbursed in bribes. Looking forward to everything coming completely unglued in the last installment. ( )

More readable than the last (perhaps because of the change in translator). I found it faster and easier to plow through than all the other books aside from the first. The story is a little more linear and a little more faster paced, though sometimes this comes at a cost.

A lot of the intrigue and dialogue is rather flat in comparison to the earlier installments. There are certain lazy dialogue sequences that don't use dialogue tags and instead simply name the speaker followed by a colon (Bao-yu: blah blah blah, etc.) that were either due to the new translator or the fact that Gao E wasn't a good writer. In either case it's a pretty massive downgrade from the other books.

There's a greater emphasis on the paranormal and it's done to good effect. I also appreciate the shift in focus towards the men of the family. Whether or not this is due to Gao E I don't know, but it's refreshing to see that side of the story finally given its due. ( )

The fourth volume of The Story of the Stone continues to tell the winding tale of the Jia family in Imperial China: their changing fortunes, focusing on the love between Jia Baoyu and his orphaned cousin, Lin Daiyu. The backdrop to this is the everyday material and literary life of a wealthy family in the Qing Dynasty.

This is the first volume not completed by Cao Xueqin; instead it was carefully edited together by Gao E. Though fragmentary, Gao E has managed to continue the story without too many glaring editorial errors and those that remain are not serious impediments to reading. Whether or not Gao E wrote the remaining 40 chapters or that they were edited together from Cao's notes is a discussion for redologists and not for this reviewer.

The translator also changes: David Hawkes is replaced by John Minford. Minford continues to ably translate this daunting novel and he deals well with textual errors, which understandably begin to multiply.

All that remains is to progress on to the fifth and final novel. ( )