A patient, artfully controlled work about memory, regret and love.
A father and son travel to China in an attempt to bridge their 25-year estrangement in Leung’s debut novel (World Famous Love Acts: Stories, 2004).
Westen Chan is eight years old when his American mother Celia is struck and killed by a car near their Los Angeles home. His distraught father, Xin, decides for reasons he keeps secret that Westen should live with his wife’s childless aunt and uncle on their farm in Washington state and be reared as an American. Although the aunt and uncle treat Westen lovingly, he never understands why he had to lose his father after his mother died. As he matures into a sensitive but emotionally reserved man, Westen resists falling in love with anyone until he meets Gideon, an older man who is dying of AIDS. He and Gideon live chastely together until Gideon’s death. Sometime afterward, Westen, now 32, receives a letter from his father inviting him on the trip to his homeland. Their reunion is awkward. As they travel with a small tour group through China, Westen cannot resist expressing his deep resentment, although he knows that is not the sum of his feelings toward his father. Unbeknownst to Westen, Xin is dying and needs to explain why he left Westen behind, but he has trouble conveying his complex motive, which factors in Xin’s own father’s disapproval of his marriage to Celia; Xin’s failure to defend Celia from a rape; and his fear of not protecting Westen in a foreign culture. The story is presented in alternating short chapters from the son’s perspective and the father’s. Each chapter begins with a formal heading (e.g. “The father and son arrive at Confucius’s Temple; the son recalls a trip to Disneyland.”). The effect is that of touring a progression of tableaus, which contrasts powerfully with the roiling feelings father and son are incapable of expressing.
A patient, artfully controlled work about memory, regret and love.Pub Date: June 1, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-307-35164-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Shaye Areheart/Harmony
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2007
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her...
Another middle-aged mom in a muddle.
After years of false starts and big hopes, Elizabeth’s ruggedly handsome husband Jack, a former football star, just landed a spot as a sportscaster on national news. He still loves her, even though much younger women are giving him come-hither looks. Heck, he doesn’t want to betray the love of his life after she helped him kick drugs and stuck by him even when he was a struggling has-been. And won’t it seem hypocritical if he fools around with his sexy assistant while he does in-depth reporting on a rape case involving a famous basketball center? Well, he fools around anyway. Elizabeth, nicknamed Birdie, knows nothing of this, but she withdraws from Jack when her hard-drinking, salt-of-the-earth father has a stroke and dies. Now no one will call her “sugar beet” ever again. Time to return home to Tennessee and contend with Anita, the sort-of-evil stepmother so trashy she wears pink puffy slippers all day long. Naturally, it turns out that Anita actually has a heart of gold and knows a few things about Birdie’s dead mother that were hushed up for years. Mom was an artist, just like Birdie, and an old scandal comes to light as Anita unrolls a vibrant canvas that portrays her secret lover. Perhaps, Birdie muses, her mother died of heartbreak, never having followed her true love or developed her talent. Has she, too, compromised everything she holds dear? Hoping to find out, Birdie joins a support group that promises to reconnect confused women with their passion. She and Jack separate, prompting a how-dare-you fit from their grown daughters. Will Birdie fly her empty nest? Will she go back to college for a degree in art? Will her brooding watercolors ever sell?
Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her previous tales (Summer Island, 2001, etc.).Pub Date: July 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-345-45071-X
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2002
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