Fascinating, moving, and marvelously strange: second-novelist Min (Becoming Madame Mao, 2000; a memoir, Red Azalea, 1994)...
A striking story of love and betrayal re-creates the terror and animosities that informed the Chinese Cultural Revolution of the late 1960s.
Min provides a rare insider’s glimpse into daily life under the worst depredations of the Maoist regime. Her narrator is a schoolgirl named Maple, the daughter of a teacher who is suspected of disloyalty to the Party. On account of her father’s politics, Maple is subjected to daily beatings from the school bullies and makes common cause with Wild Ginger, a half-French classmate who is branded a “foreign spy” and abused even worse than Maple. To prove her loyalty, Wild Ginger denounces her mother (who eventually hangs herself) and becomes the most zealous Maoist in the entire village. When she exposes a ring of gangsters who have taken over the local fish markets, Wild Ginger becomes a national hero and is praised by Mao himself. Her parents are posthumously “rehabilitated” and Wild Ginger is on her way to a promising career with the Party. The first complication arrives, however, when Wild Ginger finds herself drawn to Evergreen, a handsome local boy who is the head of the Red Guards at the local school. Ashamed to find that she is prey to the bourgeois vice of romantic love, Wild Ginger tries to forget Evergreen and put her duties to the Party first. But soon the picture becomes even more complex when Evergreen and Maple fall in love and are engaged to marry. When Evergreen is wrongly denounced as a subversive, both he and Maple are sent to prison, and Evergreen is condemned to death. Can Wild Ginger save him? Does she even want to? In a world where “I Am Missing Chairman Mao” is the top hit on the radio, don’t expect the usual reactions.
Fascinating, moving, and marvelously strange: second-novelist Min (Becoming Madame Mao, 2000; a memoir, Red Azalea, 1994) opens the door to a world that is at once terrible and compelling.Pub Date: April 8, 2002
ISBN: 0-618-06886-4
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2002
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
This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana. The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense. This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
Pub Date: June 1, 1985
ISBN: 068487122X
Page Count: 872
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985
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