An engrossing, taut story that skillfully incorporates a real-life Chinese sociopolitical movement.
A young woman in Shanghai experiences romance and anguish during the Cultural Revolution in this historical novel.
At the start of 1976, Du Chun Ming is already a woman wholeheartedly in love. The 22-year-old first met Fang Si Jun four years ago on the first day of her factory job. Chun Ming lives with her parents, including her engineer father, Jing Zi, who works so much that he aggravates his high blood pressure and heart disease. His job often entails updating Chinese technology, putting him at odds with the ongoing Cultural Revolution that deems modernization as a sign of capitalism. Si Jun’s stance on China’s current sociopolitical state is essentially to keep one’s head down and stay mum. He expresses concern over apparent anti–Cultural Revolution comments Chun Ming’s beloved cousin, Jian Hua, and his girlfriend, Lin Nan, have made. Such statements are especially dangerous when the government is searching for individuals spreading “political rumors.” Jing Zi disapproves of Si Jun’s attitude, as the young man is seemingly only invested in self-preservation. But when the government designates people close to Chun Ming as counterrevolutionaries, lives could be ruined or even lost, and anyone linked by mere association is, in the public’s eyes, equally guilty. Chen’s (Back Bay Investigation, 2019, etc.) love story in a country of social and political unrest is, perhaps unsurprisingly, often dour. Chun Ming, for example, is incessantly distressed about Jian Hua and Lin Nan’s safety; her father’s worsening illness; and whether Jing Zi will support her relationship with Si Jun. Likewise, the Cultural Revolution is an imposing presence, as characters are under constant threat of accusations or someone's misinterpreting a humble utterance or act. The author retains a simplicity that benefits the story, which centers on the political upheaval adversely affecting the protagonist and the relatively few people surrounding her. Concise prose further aids the narrative’s consistent momentum, as the Cultural Revolution, even near its end, continues to devastate citizens’ lives.
An engrossing, taut story that skillfully incorporates a real-life Chinese sociopolitical movement.Pub Date: Oct. 15, 2019
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 170
Publisher: Back Bay Press
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
The emotions run high, the conversations run deep, and the relationships ebb and flow with grace.
When tragedy strikes, a mother and daughter forge a new life.
Morgan felt obligated to marry her high school sweetheart, Chris, when she got pregnant with their daughter, Clara. But she secretly got along much better with Chris’ thoughtful best friend, Jonah, who was dating her sister, Jenny. Now her life as a stay-at-home parent has left her feeling empty but not ungrateful for what she has. Jonah and Jenny eventually broke up, but years later they had a one-night stand and Jenny got pregnant with their son, Elijah. Now Jonah is back in town, engaged to Jenny, and working at the local high school as Clara’s teacher. Clara dreams of being an actress and has a crush on Miller, who plans to go to film school, but her father doesn't approve. It doesn’t help that Miller already has a jealous girlfriend who stalks him via text from college. But Clara and Morgan’s home life changes radically when Chris and Jenny are killed in an accident, revealing long-buried secrets and forcing Morgan to reevaluate the life she chose when early motherhood forced her hand. Feeling betrayed by the adults in her life, Clara marches forward, acting both responsible and rebellious as she navigates her teenage years without her father and her aunt, while Jonah and Morgan's relationship evolves in the wake of the accident. Front-loaded with drama, the story leaves plenty of room for the mother and daughter to unpack their feelings and decide what’s next.
The emotions run high, the conversations run deep, and the relationships ebb and flow with grace.Pub Date: Dec. 10, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5420-1642-1
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Montlake Romance
Review Posted Online: Oct. 13, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2019
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
Tinny perhaps, but still a minutely rendered and impressively steady feminist vision of apocalypse.
The time is the not-so-distant future, when the US's spiraling social freedoms have finally called down a reaction, an Iranian-style repressive "monotheocracy" calling itself the Republic of Gilead—a Bible-thumping, racist, capital-punishing, and misogynistic rule that would do away with pleasure altogether were it not for one thing: that the Gileadan women, pure and true (as opposed to all the nonbelieving women, those who've ever been adulterous or married more than once), are found rarely fertile.
Thus are drafted a whole class of "handmaids," whose function is to bear the children of the elite, to be fecund or else (else being certain death, sent out to be toxic-waste removers on outlying islands). The narrative frame for Atwood's dystopian vision is the hopeless private testimony of one of these surrogate mothers, Offred ("of" plus the name of her male protector). Lying cradled by the body of the barren wife, being meanwhile serviced by the husband, Offred's "ceremony" must be successful—if she does not want to join the ranks of the other disappeared (which include her mother, her husband—dead—and small daughter, all taken away during the years of revolt). One Of her only human conduits is a gradually developing affair with her master's chauffeur—something that's balanced more than offset, though, by the master's hypocritically un-Puritan use of her as a kind of B-girl at private parties held by the ruling men in a spirit of nostalgia and lust. This latter relationship, edging into real need (the master's), is very effectively done; it highlights the handmaid's (read Everywoman's) eternal exploitation, profane or sacred ("We are two-legged wombs, that's all: sacred vessels, ambulatory chalices"). Atwood, to her credit, creates a chillingly specific, imaginable night-mare. The book is short on characterization—this is Atwood, never a warm writer, at her steeliest—and long on cynicism—it's got none of the human credibility of a work such as Walker Percy's Love In The Ruins. But the scariness is visceral, a world that's like a dangerous and even fatal grid, an electrified fence.
Tinny perhaps, but still a minutely rendered and impressively steady feminist vision of apocalypse.Pub Date: Feb. 17, 1985
ISBN: 038549081X
Page Count: -
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: Sept. 16, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1985
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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