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BEIJING COMRADES

A riveting, if slightly dated, look at China’s gay male community.

When cultural attitudes favor heterosexuality over homosexuality, gay youth often grow into troubled adults.

Chen Handong, a rich, well-connected Beijing businessman, is known for getting what he wants—at work as well as at play. In fact, both men and women gravitate to him, and he has no trouble attracting sexual partners for short flings and longer-term hookups. But when he meets handsome Lan Yu, a 16-year-old college student, he is immediately smitten. Lan Yu is initially wary of the older man—Handong is 27 when they first meet in 1987—and it takes some wooing to get him into Handong’s bed. Once enticed, however, he enters into a decadelong, on-again, off-again liaison that brings the pair great joy as well as great agitation and pain. As the story unfolds, the shifting social and political mores of urban China come into sharp focus, and student uprisings, including the Tiananmen Square massacre, the rise of the entrepreneurial community, and the unraveling of communist values, become important backdrops to the story. So does the underground gay scene, with clubs and dance halls hidden from public view but an open secret among those in the know. Similarly, homophobia and the pressure on youth to marry and have children are palpable and cause Handong to enter into a tempestuous, if short-lived, marriage to materialistic Lin Ping. There is melodrama here, but the novel—first published online in 1998 by a still pseudonymous author, then made into a movie by Taiwanese director Stanley Kwan in 2001, and subsequently rewritten and expanded by the author—captures the reality of a homophobic society and the pressures placed on gay men (and presumably women) to deny their essence and live less-than-fully-realized lives.

A riveting, if slightly dated, look at China’s gay male community.

Pub Date: March 15, 2016

ISBN: 978-1-55861-907-4

Page Count: 404

Publisher: Feminist Press

Review Posted Online: Jan. 9, 2016

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2016

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MAGIC HOUR

Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.

Sisters work together to solve a child-abandonment case.

Ellie and Julia Cates have never been close. Julia is shy and brainy; Ellie gets by on charm and looks. Their differences must be tossed aside when a traumatized young girl wanders in from the forest into their hometown in Washington. The sisters’ professional skills are put to the test. Julia is a world-renowned child psychologist who has lost her edge. She is reeling from a case that went publicly sour. Though she was cleared of all wrongdoing, Julia’s name was tarnished, forcing her to shutter her Beverly Hills practice. Ellie Barton is the local police chief in Rain Valley, who’s never faced a tougher case. This is her chance to prove she is more than just a fading homecoming queen, but a scarcity of clues and a reluctant victim make locating the girl’s parents nearly impossible. Ellie places an SOS call to her sister; she needs an expert to rehabilitate this wild-child who has been living outside of civilization for years. Confronted with her professional demons, Julia once again has the opportunity to display her talents and salvage her reputation. Hannah (The Things We Do for Love, 2004, etc.) is at her best when writing from the girl’s perspective. The feral wolf-child keeps the reader interested long after the other, transparent characters have grown tiresome. Hannah’s torturously over-written romance passages are stale, but there are surprises in store as the sisters set about unearthing Alice’s past and creating a home for her.

Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.

Pub Date: March 1, 2006

ISBN: 0-345-46752-3

Page Count: 400

Publisher: Ballantine

Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2005

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THE CATCHER IN THE RYE

A strict report, worthy of sympathy.

A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.

"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….

A strict report, worthy of sympathy.

Pub Date: June 15, 1951

ISBN: 0316769177

Page Count: -

Publisher: Little, Brown

Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951

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