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THE DISTANT LAND OF MY FATHER

Name: THE DISTANT LAND OF MY FATHER
Author: Bo Caldwell
ISBN: 0-8118-3240-6

A NOVEL OF SHANGHAI

by Bo Caldwell ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 1, 2001

An elegant, refined story of families, wartime, and the mystique of memory.

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A daughter tries to understand her father’s long absences from her life in this effective and accomplished debut.

Cleaning out her father’s scruffy bachelor apartment after his funeral, Anna Schoene discovers his copiously detailed journals. They transport this 30-year-old mother of two from Southern California back to her childhood in Shanghai, where she lived with her mother and father just before WWII. Born in China, the son of missionaries, Joseph Schoene is at once flamboyantly American yet fiercely committed to the land of his birth. The charismatic, dashing chief of a quasi-legal import/export business in Shanghai, he means the world to his more proper American wife and adoring daughter. Enraptured with the city’s sights and smells, he imparts this love to Anna: “My father handed Shanghai down to me as though it were an inheritance, a family treasure meant only for me.” But encroaching Japanese soldiers and floods of refugees make the city less and less tenable until, on the eve of war, Anna and her mother board a ship for America. Joseph resolutely stays behind, insisting that it will all blow over. But soon occupying Japanese troops throw him into a prison camp, where he barely survives. Meanwhile, in California, Anna and her mother are adjusting to a quieter life of school, laundry, and sunshine. Caldwell’s prose is remarkably even and detailed; she seamlessly weaves together Anna’s own memories with those of her father, gleaned from the journals. Many of the Shanghai scenes are undeniably reminiscent of J.G. Ballard’s Empire of the Sun, but the voice is Caldwell’s own. Anna’s emotionally reticent narration can seem almost stuffy, but it helps keep this from descending into the mawkishness common in such father-daughter tales. And the vivid evocation of Shanghai’s potent sights, sounds, and smells has all the excitement you could want.

An elegant, refined story of families, wartime, and the mystique of memory.

Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2001

ISBN: 0-8118-3240-6

Page Count: 384

Publisher: Chronicle Books

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2001

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

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SUMMER ISLAND

by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 1, 2001

The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with...

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Talk-show queen takes tumble as millions jeer.

Nora Bridges is a wildly popular radio spokesperson for family-first virtues, but her loyal listeners don't know that she walked out on her husband and teenaged daughters years ago and didn't look back. Now that a former lover has sold racy pix of naked Nora and horny himself to a national tabloid, her estranged daughter Ruby, an unsuccessful stand-up comic in Los Angeles, has been approached to pen a tell-all. Greedy for the fat fee she's been promised, Ruby agrees and heads for the San Juan Islands, eager to get reacquainted with the mom she plans to betray. Once in the family homestead, nasty Ruby alternately sulks and glares at her mother, who is temporarily wheelchair-bound as a result of a post-scandal car crash. Uncaring, Ruby begins writing her side of the story when she's not strolling on the beach with former sweetheart Dean Sloan, the son of wealthy socialites who basically ignored him and his gay brother Eric. Eric, now dying of cancer and also in a wheelchair, has returned to the island. This dismal threesome catch up on old times, recalling their childhood idylls on the island. After Ruby's perfect big sister Caroline shows up, there's another round of heartfelt talk. Nora gradually reveals the truth about her unloving husband and her late father's alcoholism, which led her to seek the approval of others at the cost of her own peace of mind. And so on. Ruby is aghast to discover that she doesn't know everything after all, but Dean offers her subdued comfort. Happy endings await almost everyone—except for readers of this nobly preachy snifflefest.

The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with syrupy platitudes about life and love.

Pub Date: March 1, 2001

ISBN: 0-609-60737-5

Page Count: 336

Publisher: Crown

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2001

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

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LAST ORDERS

by Graham Swift ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 5, 1996

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Britisher Swift's sixth novel (Ever After, 1992 etc.) and fourth to appear here is a slow-to-start but then captivating tale of English working-class families in the four decades following WW II. When Jack Dodds dies suddenly of cancer after years of running a butcher shop in London, he leaves a strange request—namely, that his ashes be scattered off Margate pier into the sea. And who could better be suited to fulfill this wish than his three oldest drinking buddies—insurance man Ray, vegetable seller Lenny, and undertaker Vic, all of whom, like Jack himself, fought also as soldiers or sailors in the long-ago world war. Swift's narrative start, with its potential for the melodramatic, is developed instead with an economy, heart, and eye that release (through the characters' own voices, one after another) the story's humanity and depth instead of its schmaltz. The jokes may be weak and self- conscious when the three old friends meet at their local pub in the company of the urn holding Jack's ashes; but once the group gets on the road, in an expensive car driven by Jack's adoptive son, Vince, the story starts gradually to move forward, cohere, and deepen. The reader learns in time why it is that no wife comes along, why three marriages out of three broke apart, and why Vince always hated his stepfather Jack and still does—or so he thinks. There will be stories of innocent youth, suffering wives, early loves, lost daughters, secret affairs, and old antagonisms—including a fistfight over the dead on an English hilltop, and a strewing of Jack's ashes into roiling seawaves that will draw up feelings perhaps unexpectedly strong. Without affectation, Swift listens closely to the lives that are his subject and creates a songbook of voices part lyric, part epic, part working-class social realism—with, in all, the ring to it of the honest, human, and true.