Young leads from the heart (her father served as a model for Pao) to celebrate a resilient world that tourists never see....
Against a backdrop of Jamaican history, a likable Chinese-Jamaican runs rackets in this eye-opening, rambunctious debut.
Pao is just a kid when he arrives in Kingston, Jamaica, in 1938. His father has been killed by European soldiers dismembering China, but in Jamaica he finds a surrogate father in Zhang, his father’s best friend. Zhang shakes down the Chinatown merchants; Pao becomes his apprentice. He takes to Jamaican street culture like a duck to water, acquiring his own loyal lieutenants, black kids useful as muscle; he cuts his first deal, distributing navy surplus, with a corrupt U.S. sergeant. In 1945, Zhang retires, and 21-year-old Pao becomes the new lord of Chinatown. His smooth ascent distinguishes him from the conventional racketeer who must claw his blood-soaked way to the top. What energizes him as a fictional creation is the voice Young has given him: hip and effervescent. But this Mr. Nice Guy will get his comeuppance in his personal life. Extending his reach beyond Chinatown, Pao offers protection to a brothel and becomes romantically involved with Gloria, its black madam; but when it comes to marriage, he passes over his true love to land a bigger fish: Fay Wong, daughter of a wealthy supermarket owner. The marriage is a disaster. Spoiled, hoity-toity Fay never accepts being married to a hoodlum, and eventually stuns Pao by abducting their two children and stealing away to England. This is the most intense episode among a slew of scandals. White people are almost invariably bad news. There’s the British army major who impregnates a 12-year-old Jamaican girl and becomes a major source of hush money. Add to the mix the references to some 40 years of Jamaican politics, and the quotations from Pao’s mentor, the military strategist Sun Tzu, and you have a novel that is cluttered but never dull.
Young leads from the heart (her father served as a model for Pao) to celebrate a resilient world that tourists never see. You’ll enjoy the view.Pub Date: July 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-60819-507-7
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: June 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
Doerr captures the sights and sounds of wartime and focuses, refreshingly, on the innate goodness of his major characters.
Doerr presents us with two intricate stories, both of which take place during World War II; late in the novel, inevitably, they intersect.
In August 1944, Marie-Laure LeBlanc is a blind 16-year-old living in the walled port city of Saint-Malo in Brittany and hoping to escape the effects of Allied bombing. D-Day took place two months earlier, and Cherbourg, Caen and Rennes have already been liberated. She’s taken refuge in this city with her great-uncle Etienne, at first a fairly frightening figure to her. Marie-Laure’s father was a locksmith and craftsman who made scale models of cities that Marie-Laure studied so she could travel around on her own. He also crafted clever and intricate boxes, within which treasures could be hidden. Parallel to the story of Marie-Laure we meet Werner and Jutta Pfennig, a brother and sister, both orphans who have been raised in the Children’s House outside Essen, in Germany. Through flashbacks we learn that Werner had been a curious and bright child who developed an obsession with radio transmitters and receivers, both in their infancies during this period. Eventually, Werner goes to a select technical school and then, at 18, into the Wehrmacht, where his technical aptitudes are recognized and he’s put on a team trying to track down illegal radio transmissions. Etienne and Marie-Laure are responsible for some of these transmissions, but Werner is intrigued since what she’s broadcasting is innocent—she shares her passion for Jules Verne by reading aloud 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. A further subplot involves Marie-Laure’s father’s having hidden a valuable diamond, one being tracked down by Reinhold von Rumpel, a relentless German sergeant-major.
Doerr captures the sights and sounds of wartime and focuses, refreshingly, on the innate goodness of his major characters.Pub Date: May 6, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4767-4658-6
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: March 5, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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