An observant and emotionally authentic novel of homecoming.
In Wu’s novel, memories and revelations mark a woman’s trip to her native China.
Chinese-born Mei is a driven scientist who works for a pharmaceutical startup in Cambridge, Massachusetts; she’s unhappily married to an Italian American man, with whom she raises snarky, 12-year-old twins. Mei can’t say no when one of her aunts asks her to help facilitate the marriage of the family’s only male heir, Mei’s cousin Binbin, “whom we protected like an endangered panda”: “We all understood his destiny: before exhaling his last breath, [Binbin] must produce a male progeny against all odds.” To seal the deal with his betrothed, Binbin must take ownership of his late grandparents’ apartment; the hitch is that Grandpa’s death certificate is nowhere to be found, so all other potential beneficiaries must relinquish their claims to the apartment by signing waivers before a local notary. This setup takes Mei back to her hometown of Nanjing, where, through adult eyes, she reevaluates family anecdotes, her own childhood and coming of age, her beloved Grandpa and Grandma, and her “take-charge mother.” She also comes to understand how the lives of her parents, grandparents, and extended family members were shaped by Japan’s invasion of China and the Nanjing Massacre of 1937; the purges, property seizures, and reeducation camps of the Cultural Revolution under Mao Zedong; and Nixon’s 1972 visit to China. Mei’s struggle to belatedly reconcile her past life in China with her assimilation in the United States also spurs her desire to archive her grandfather’s wealth of lore, including the story that gives this novel its name. Wu’s debut novel effectively presents one woman’s compelling personal story and how it’s been shaped by history. Its characters are memorable, and Mei’s introspective narration gives the work a distinctive voice. The presentation of a revelation affecting Mei’s marriage borders on the melodramatic. However, this is offset by the striking sensory quality of Wu’s narrative throughout, as when an “odor of over-ripe fruit” sparks Mei’s “olfactory memory—a strange, illogical library,” and she describes the dialect in her father’s hometown of Suzhou as “so soft—as if every harsh sound had been muffled by cotton candy.”
An observant and emotionally authentic novel of homecoming.Pub Date: April 19, 2025
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 388
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 12, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Uneven but fitfully amusing.
Betrayed by her husband, a severely depressed young woman gets drawn into the over-the-top festivities at a lavish wedding.
Phoebe Stone, who teaches English literature at a St. Louis college, is plotting her own demise. Her husband, Matt, has left her for another woman, and Phoebe is taking it hard. Indeed, she's determined just where and how she will end it all: at an oceanfront hotel in Newport, where she will lie on a king-sized canopy bed and take a bottle of her cat’s painkillers. At the hotel, Phoebe meets bride-to-be Lila, a headstrong rich girl presiding over her own extravagant six-day wedding celebration. Lila thought she had booked every room in the hotel, and learning of Phoebe's suicidal intentions, she forbids this stray guest from disrupting the nuptials: “No. You definitely can’t kill yourself. This is my wedding week.” After the punchy opening, a grim flashback to the meltdown of Phoebe's marriage temporarily darkens the mood, but things pick up when spoiled Lila interrupts Phoebe's preparations and sweeps her up in the wedding juggernaut. The slide from earnest drama to broad farce is somewhat jarring, but from this point on, Espach crafts an enjoyable—if overstuffed—comedy of manners. When the original maid of honor drops out, Phoebe is persuaded, against her better judgment, to take her place. There’s some fun to be had here: The wedding party—including groom-to-be Gary, a widower, and his 11-year-old daughter—takes surfing lessons; the women in the group have a session with a Sex Woman. But it all goes on too long, and the humor can seem forced, reaching a low point when someone has sex with the vintage wedding car (you don’t want to know the details). Later, when two characters have a meet-cute in a hot tub, readers will guess exactly how the marriage plot resolves.
Uneven but fitfully amusing.Pub Date: July 30, 2024
ISBN: 9781250899576
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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
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