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
Categories: HISTORICAL FICTION | GENERAL FICTION
Did you like this book?
Doerr captures the sights and sounds of wartime and focuses, refreshingly, on the innate goodness of his major characters.
19
GET IT
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
Categories: LITERARY FICTION | HISTORICAL FICTION
Did you like this book?
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
Miller makes Homer pertinent to women facing 21st-century monsters.
18
GET IT
A retelling of ancient Greek lore gives exhilarating voice to a witch.
“Monsters are a boon for gods. Imagine all the prayers.” So says Circe, a sly, petulant, and finally commanding voice that narrates the entirety of Miller’s dazzling second novel. The writer returns to Homer, the wellspring that led her to an Orange Prize for The Song of Achilles (2012). This time, she dips into The Odyssey for the legend of Circe, a nymph who turns Odysseus’ crew of men into pigs. The novel, with its distinctive feminist tang, starts with the sentence: “When I was born, the name for what I was did not exist.” Readers will relish following the puzzle of this unpromising daughter of the sun god Helios and his wife, Perse, who had negligible use for their child. It takes banishment to the island Aeaea for Circe to sense her calling as a sorceress: “I will not be like a bird bred in a cage, I thought, too dull to fly even when the door stands open. I stepped into those woods and my life began.” This lonely, scorned figure learns herbs and potions, surrounds herself with lions, and, in a heart-stopping chapter, outwits the monster Scylla to propel Daedalus and his boat to safety. She makes lovers of Hermes and then two mortal men. She midwifes the birth of the Minotaur on Crete and performs her own C-section. And as she grows in power, she muses that “not even Odysseus could talk his way past [her] witchcraft. He had talked his way past the witch instead.” Circe’s fascination with mortals becomes the book’s marrow and delivers its thrilling ending. All the while, the supernatural sits intriguingly alongside “the tonic of ordinary things.” A few passages coil toward melodrama, and one inelegant line after a rape seems jarringly modern, but the spell holds fast. Expect Miller’s readership to mushroom like one of Circe’s spells.
Miller makes Homer pertinent to women facing 21st-century monsters.Pub Date: April 10, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-316-55634-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2018
Categories: LITERARY FICTION | HISTORICAL FICTION
Did you like this book?
PROFILES
© Copyright 2023 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
