PRO CONNECT
Catherine Aerie, a graduate from the University of California, Irvine with a master degree in finance, grew up in China as the daughter of a Shanghai architect. She was inspired to write The Dance of the Spirits while researching a family member’s role in the Korean War, deciding to revive an often neglected and overlooked setting in fiction and heighten the universality of resilient pursuit of love and liberty. Her debut novel was finished after about two years of research. She currently resides in southern California.
“…fleeting but intense…keeps readers on their toes…An often engaging tale of a flickering moment of love during a forgotten war.”
– Kirkus Reviews
Adversaries in the Korean War find love in Aerie’s debut novel.
The story starts in the middle of a firefight, with “bullets and shells shrieking,” bombs “flinging metal shrapnel around and throughout the air,” and “wave after wave of Chinese soldiers in dry-leaf-colored uniforms” overrunning American lines. Although the scene is a touch overwritten, it does create a sulfurous, desperate atmosphere; anywhere would be better than here, in this vicious, geopolitically drenched bloodbath conducted by puppet masters from afar. Out of the rubble, two characters emerge: an American officer, Wesley Palm, and a Chinese military doctor, Jasmine Young. Their paths cross again and again, as each, at different times, becomes a prisoner of war, with the other lending a helping hand when most needed. In the intimacy of the war, these coincidences don’t feel forced, nor even particularly fated—it’s just the way things went; without such fortuity, Aerie suggests, nobody would have gotten out of there alive. Readers will likely find Palm a decent, very human person, but Young has more complexity and vibrancy, with Aerie providing a wealth of information about her pampered youth, the disintegration of her family, her failed attempt at fleeing the revolution, the reasons why she volunteered, and how she got in hot water with her officers. As the war rages around them, Palm and Young fall in love (they “imbibed and floated in the wine of joy,” she writes), but their romance is ill-starred and open to tragedy. Aerie keeps readers on their toes with the twists that are all too common during wartime, and balances her relatively weak portrayal of Communist hacks with fleeting but intense moments of camaraderie between grunts, male and female, in the cold rain and snow.
An often engaging tale of a flickering moment of love during a forgotten war.
Pub Date: Sept. 22, 2013
ISBN: 978-0989690928
Page count: 336pp
Publisher: Aurora
Review Posted Online: Oct. 31, 2013
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