This sympathetic account of a silver-screen legend flies admirably between triumph and tragedy but struggles to soar.
A pioneering Chinese American actress reflects on her life in Hollywood and the prejudice she faced throughout her career in this biofiction.
As a child coming of age in early-20th-century Los Angeles, Anna May Wong longed to be an actress—and she made it happen. This would have been unimaginable if it weren’t true, considering that Wong rose to fame in an era of the Chinese Exclusion Act, anti-miscegenation laws, and morality codes in the United States. As the book begins, Wong is traveling by train from California to New York in 1960, near the end of her life, and she's reading over three notebooks in which she's chronicled her stardom, dazzling social life, complicated family life, activism, and struggles with racism, misogyny, alcohol, and health. There's no doubt that the breadth of Wong’s life is worthy of artistic treatment, and she’s inspired many Asian American writers, including novelist Peter Ho Davies and poet Sally Wen Mao. The U.S. Mint released an Anna May Wong quarter in 2022. Tsukiyama presents Wong as a complex, savvy, iconoclastic artist caught between cultures as she surfs the tides of history. The novel demonstrates how Wong courageously weathered the industry's transition from silent films to talkies to the advent of television as well as her tumultuous times, from the Roaring ’20s through the aftermath of World War II. She had fascinating friendships with the likes of Josephine Baker and Marlene Dietrich and experiences working across America, Europe, and Asia. But in offering so much painstaking, historically accurate detail, Tsukiyama sacrifices story. For readers familiar with Wong’s biography, the book reads too much like an elevated Wikipedia entry. Swaths of the novel are repetitive, summarizing previous events as if they were weekly series recaps or emphasizing Wong’s struggles as a third-generation Chinese American woman without imagining any more of her internal landscape.
This sympathetic account of a silver-screen legend flies admirably between triumph and tragedy but struggles to soar.Pub Date: June 20, 2023
ISBN: 9780063213753
Page Count: 352
Publisher: HarperVia
Review Posted Online: April 11, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Fans of Stockett’s bestselling debut will love this engaging follow-up.
Stockett heads to Mississippi for another historical novel about feisty women.
This time, perhaps recalling criticisms of cultural appropriation in The Help (2009), she sticks to feisty white women, with one exception. The setting is Oxford in 1933. For two miserable years, 11-year-old Meg has lived in “the Orphan,” a county asylum for parentless girls. Chairlady Garnett—a villain so one-note she’d twirl a mustache if she had one—makes it her mission to ostracize the older girls she deems unadoptable, stigmatizing them as offspring of the “feebleminded” mothers who abandoned them. She particularly has it in for smart, sassy Meg, who refuses to believe her mother’s mysterious disappearance was deliberate. Elsewhere in Oxford, Birdie Calhoun comes to visit her sister Frances, who married a wealthy banker, to ask for money on behalf of their mother and grandmother back in Footely. Frances isn’t thrilled by this reminder of her impoverished small-town origins. But she’s trying to climb up in Oxford society by volunteering at the Orphan, the asylum’s books need to be done before the state inspector shows up in a few weeks, and Birdie is a bookkeeper. Having neatly arranged to keep Birdie in town and draw these two storylines together, Stockett goes on to spin a compulsively readable yarn with enough plot for a half-dozen novels. Birdie and Meg become friends, Meg is adopted despite Garnett’s best efforts, Meg’s mother turns up at the Orphan demanding to know where her child is—and that’s less than a quarter of the way through a long, winding narrative that keeps piling on more dramatic developments until all loose ends are neatly, if hastily, wrapped up in the final pages. Stockett might be making a point about Southern women facing facts and standing up for themselves, but mostly this is just a satisfyingly twisty tale that should make a great miniseries.
Fans of Stockett’s bestselling debut will love this engaging follow-up.Pub Date: May 5, 2026
ISBN: 9781954118812
Page Count: 656
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: Feb. 2, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2026
BOOK REVIEW
An affecting portrait of a prickly woman.
A lifetime’s worth of letters combine to portray a singular character.
Sybil Van Antwerp, a cantankerous but exceedingly well-mannered septuagenarian, is the titular correspondent in Evans’ debut novel. Sybil has retired from a beloved job as chief clerk to a judge with whom she had previously been in private legal practice. She is the divorced mother of two living adult children and one who died when he was 8. She is a reader of novels, a gardener, and a keen observer of human nature. But the most distinguishing thing about Sybil is her lifelong practice of letter writing. As advancing vision problems threaten Sybil’s carefully constructed way of life—in which letters take the place of personal contact and engagement—she must reckon with unaddressed issues from her past that threaten the house of cards (letters, really) she has built around herself. Sybil’s relationships are gradually revealed in the series of letters sent to and received from, among others, her brother, sister-in-law, children, former work associates, and, intriguingly, literary icons including Joan Didion and Larry McMurtry. Perhaps most affecting is the series of missives Sybil writes but never mails to a shadowy figure from her past. Thoughtful musings on the value and immortal quality of letters and the written word populate one of Sybil’s notes to a young correspondent while other messages are laugh-out-loud funny, tinged with her characteristic blunt tartness. Evans has created a brusque and quirky yet endearing main character with no shortage of opinions and advice for others but who fails to excavate the knotty difficulties of her own life. As Sybil grows into a delayed self-awareness, her letters serve as a chronicle of fitful growth.
An affecting portrait of a prickly woman.Pub Date: May 6, 2025
ISBN: 9780593798430
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Feb. 15, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2025
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