A sweeping tale of complicated romances and new beginnings hampered by uneven writing.
A Chinese woman seeks love and opportunity amid the economic boom of the 1980s in this novel about yearning ambition.
Kathy Liao, a 27-year-old secretary at a textile mill in the city of Chengdu, is as restless as China itself as it transitions from Maoism to nascent capitalism. She ditches her handsome but stolid fiance at the altar, then marries a sweet-tempered engineer but eventually decides that he’s too mediocre. Leaving him and their daughter behind, she lights out in 1988 for the city of Haikou on the island province of Hainan, where the first of China’s Special Economic Zones has been set up to incubate a market economy. Kathy loves the brilliant sunshine, subtropical temperatures, gorgeous coastlines, and abundant economic opportunities and promptly starts a career as a newspaper reporter. She also begins a passionate affair with a handsome—and sensitive—entrepreneur named Lee Yeifong, but he proves as disappointing as other men. It turns out he has a wife and child on the mainland, and he ends up abandoning Haikou. Taking yet another swerve, Kathy drops journalism to become a PR rep for HYK, a real estate developer that’s planning to build the Yangpu free-trade zone beside Haikou’s port. She thinks it’s her dream job, but she runs afoul of Wu Ling, a domineering secretary with mysterious ties to Communist Party officialdom and organized crime. As their petty feud heats up and economic sanctions following the Tiananmen Square massacre endanger the Yangpu project, Kathy feels that her job and even her life are in jeopardy and starts wondering if she should make the biggest leap of all by moving overseas.
Nash, who grew up in China and immigrated to London in 1990, pens a rich portrait of China’s economic miracle and its energetic but ugly business culture. Her Haikou is full of bustle and promise but also pervasive corruption and nepotism under the thumb of the “princelings,” the children of powerful party leaders who leverage their family clout to gain control of the new private economy. Kathy herself vividly embodies the era’s tensions between hope and insecurity and between romantic ideas of self-fulfillment and the hard pragmatism needed to survive and succeed. Unfortunately, this potentially engrossing saga is ill served by the author’s clumsy prose. There is a gleaming lyricism in some of her passages—“The sky was a dark velvety blue with the creamy disc of the moon hanging in the night, clear and far away,” Kathy observes during a beach idyll with Lee—but much of the text reads like it’s been Google-translated from the Chinese. (“They had reluctantly given up the expectation of a strong competitive edge of their youngest child, taking her to the have a series healthy checks, and being told that Miss Lin had been congenital deficiency, the luck of concentration had been an inborn weakness as the result of the toxins her mother being exposed during her pregnancy…while the Cultural Revelation had been on the full swing.”) Some of Nash’s locutions about Kathy are so off-kilter that they achieve a kind of surreal poetry—“ ‘What’s a sophistry!’ She sniffed his far-fetched tone with a beam”—but readers will have to work hard to make sense of the book.
A sweeping tale of complicated romances and new beginnings hampered by uneven writing.Pub Date: March 10, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-95-130270-2
Page Count: 474
Publisher: Diamond Media Press Co.
Review Posted Online: May 13, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Fans of Stockett’s bestselling debut will love this engaging follow-up.
Stockett heads to Mississippi for another historical novel about feisty women.
This time, perhaps recalling criticisms of cultural appropriation in The Help (2009), she sticks to feisty white women, with one exception. The setting is Oxford in 1933. For two miserable years, 11-year-old Meg has lived in “the Orphan,” a county asylum for parentless girls. Chairlady Garnett—a villain so one-note she’d twirl a mustache if she had one—makes it her mission to ostracize the older girls she deems unadoptable, stigmatizing them as offspring of the “feebleminded” mothers who abandoned them. She particularly has it in for smart, sassy Meg, who refuses to believe her mother’s mysterious disappearance was deliberate. Elsewhere in Oxford, Birdie Calhoun comes to visit her sister Frances, who married a wealthy banker, to ask for money on behalf of their mother and grandmother back in Footely. Frances isn’t thrilled by this reminder of her impoverished small-town origins. But she’s trying to climb up in Oxford society by volunteering at the Orphan, the asylum’s books need to be done before the state inspector shows up in a few weeks, and Birdie is a bookkeeper. Having neatly arranged to keep Birdie in town and draw these two storylines together, Stockett goes on to spin a compulsively readable yarn with enough plot for a half-dozen novels. Birdie and Meg become friends, Meg is adopted despite Garnett’s best efforts, Meg’s mother turns up at the Orphan demanding to know where her child is—and that’s less than a quarter of the way through a long, winding narrative that keeps piling on more dramatic developments until all loose ends are neatly, if hastily, wrapped up in the final pages. Stockett might be making a point about Southern women facing facts and standing up for themselves, but mostly this is just a satisfyingly twisty tale that should make a great miniseries.
Fans of Stockett’s bestselling debut will love this engaging follow-up.Pub Date: May 5, 2026
ISBN: 9781954118812
Page Count: 656
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: Feb. 2, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2026
BOOK REVIEW
An affecting portrait of a prickly woman.
A lifetime’s worth of letters combine to portray a singular character.
Sybil Van Antwerp, a cantankerous but exceedingly well-mannered septuagenarian, is the titular correspondent in Evans’ debut novel. Sybil has retired from a beloved job as chief clerk to a judge with whom she had previously been in private legal practice. She is the divorced mother of two living adult children and one who died when he was 8. She is a reader of novels, a gardener, and a keen observer of human nature. But the most distinguishing thing about Sybil is her lifelong practice of letter writing. As advancing vision problems threaten Sybil’s carefully constructed way of life—in which letters take the place of personal contact and engagement—she must reckon with unaddressed issues from her past that threaten the house of cards (letters, really) she has built around herself. Sybil’s relationships are gradually revealed in the series of letters sent to and received from, among others, her brother, sister-in-law, children, former work associates, and, intriguingly, literary icons including Joan Didion and Larry McMurtry. Perhaps most affecting is the series of missives Sybil writes but never mails to a shadowy figure from her past. Thoughtful musings on the value and immortal quality of letters and the written word populate one of Sybil’s notes to a young correspondent while other messages are laugh-out-loud funny, tinged with her characteristic blunt tartness. Evans has created a brusque and quirky yet endearing main character with no shortage of opinions and advice for others but who fails to excavate the knotty difficulties of her own life. As Sybil grows into a delayed self-awareness, her letters serve as a chronicle of fitful growth.
An affecting portrait of a prickly woman.Pub Date: May 6, 2025
ISBN: 9780593798430
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Feb. 15, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2025
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