This ambitious debut centered in contemporary Beijing delivers an engaging and insightful take on desire, envy, and betrayal.
The rekindled friendship between a young woman who stayed in Beijing and her friend who’s just returned from America heads toward a conflagration as illuminating as it is destructive.
When Ye Lian’s childhood best friend, Luo Wenyu, returns to Beijing after 12 years in the U.S., their reunion forces each to reckon with the ways they’ve envied and disappointed each other. Lian was once obsessed with studying in America but was rejected by every school, whereas Wenyu, ironically, was sent to stay with her parents’ friends in California because of her poor performance in high school. Wenyu, the wilder of the pair, has achieved a glitzier success than Lian’s: She’s a famous YouTube influencer known as Vivian and engaged to a white Silicon Valley tech bro with whom she’s renovating a luxurious summer home in Beijing. Lian, meanwhile, a junior executive at an American college-prep company, seeks to purchase a condominium to live in with Zhetai, her prosaic and dependable boyfriend of eight years. On the brink of committing to a path in life via marriage and real estate, each becomes recklessly involved with another man. Lian and Wenyu’s stories are interwoven with that of Song Chen, Wenyu’s architect; despite his brilliance as a Ph.D. student in mathematics, Chen failed to secure the life he had wanted in America, and now his marriage is falling apart. His story at first seems like an interruption from the main plot but gradually becomes just as compelling, especially after the two storylines collide and the characters’ infidelities are exposed. This moving novel is large in scope, including the experiences of two generations in aiming at the American dream and, in the bittersweet conclusion, projecting into the future. Jia reveals the yearnings and betrayals of her flawed characters with sensitivity, and the hard-won self-understandings they come to in the end are both illuminating and satisfying.
This ambitious debut centered in contemporary Beijing delivers an engaging and insightful take on desire, envy, and betrayal.Pub Date: July 1, 2025
ISBN: 9781963108279
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Tin House
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2025
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
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
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