A well-researched and capably written depiction of the Rape of Nanjing and its effects on victims and survivors.
American and Chinese academics face the horrors of invasion in the early days of World War II.
In this debut historical novel, Zheng draws on his experiences as a researcher at MIT to create Chinese-born Calvin Ren and Massachusetts native John Winthrop, who meet as engineering students in Cambridge. They reunite in Calvin’s hometown of Nanjing to work on China’s nascent military aircraft program. Although John leaves behind a fiancee when he travels to China, he becomes close to Chen May, a teenage acquaintance of Calvin’s. She practices her English with John while he shops for antiques in the market. Their relationship never moves beyond friendship and a few kisses, but John is the one May turns to when nearly all her relatives are killed during the Rape of Nanjing by Japanese forces. They lose touch when he returns to the United States, but May survives the war and pursues justice for her city in the aftermath, while John’s legacy provides education for future generations of Chinese girls. An author’s note explains that Zheng wrote the novel in response to a lack of awareness of the Rape of Nanjing, and an appendix provides resources for further reading on the subject. The novel is solidly grounded in historical research, and notable figures, including Chiang Kai-Shek and his wife, Soong Mayling, make frequent appearances. The book also creates a vivid portrait of 1930s urban China, with its blend of traditional practices and Western influences, and Zheng leaves the reader with clear images of the wine houses, steamed rolls, and everyday objects that make up his characters’ lives. The book excels in dramatic and panoramic moments, like the chaotic evacuation of Nanjing after the attack. The storyline is at times too sprawling, filled with the back stories of characters who do little to drive the plot but serve as victims of Japanese cruelty, but on the whole the book effectively puts a human face on one of World War II’s noteworthy tragedies.
A well-researched and capably written depiction of the Rape of Nanjing and its effects on victims and survivors.Pub Date: Sept. 7, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-944347-00-0
Page Count: 376
Publisher: Killian Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 31, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Whitehead continues the African-American artists' inquiry into race mythology and history with rousing audacity and...
What if the metaphorical Underground Railroad had been an actual…underground railroad, complete with steam locomotive pulling a “dilapidated box car” along a subterranean nexus of steel tracks?
For roughly its first 60 pages, this novel behaves like a prelude to a slave narrative which is, at once, more jolting and sepulchral than the classic firsthand accounts of William Wells Brown and Solomon Northup. Its protagonist, Cora, is among several African-American men and women enslaved on a Georgia plantation and facing a spectrum of savage indignities to their bodies and souls. A way out materializes in the form of an educated slave named Caesar, who tells her about an underground railroad that can deliver her and others northward to freedom. So far, so familiar. But Whitehead, whose eclectic body of work encompasses novels (Zone One, 2011, etc.) playing fast and loose with “real life,” both past and present, fires his most daring change-up yet by giving the underground railroad physical form. This train conveys Cora, Caesar, and other escapees first to a South Carolina also historically unrecognizable with its skyscrapers and its seemingly, if microscopically, more liberal attitude toward black people. Compared with Georgia, though, the place seems so much easier that Cora and Caesar are tempted to remain, until more sinister plans for the ex-slaves’ destiny reveal themselves. So it’s back on the train and on to several more stops: in North Carolina, where they’ve not only abolished slavery, but are intent on abolishing black people, too; through a barren, more forbidding Tennessee; on to a (seemingly) more hospitable Indiana, and restlessly onward. With each stop, a slave catcher named Ridgeway, dispensing long-winded rationales for his wicked calling, doggedly pursues Cora and her diminishing company of refugees. And with every change of venue, Cora discovers anew that “freedom was a thing that shifted as you looked at it, the way a forest is dense with trees up close but from outside, the empty meadow, you see its true limits.” Imagine a runaway slave novel written with Joseph Heller’s deadpan voice leasing both Frederick Douglass’ grim realities and H.P. Lovecraft’s rococo fantasies…and that’s when you begin to understand how startlingly original this book is.
Whitehead continues the African-American artists' inquiry into race mythology and history with rousing audacity and razor-sharp ingenuity; he is now assuredly a writer of the first rank.Pub Date: Sept. 13, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-385-53703-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: April 12, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2016
PROFILES
SEEN & HEARD
A promising debut that’s awake to emotional, political, and cultural tensions across time and continents.
A novel of sharply drawn character studies immersed in more than 250 hard, transformative years in the African-American diaspora.
Gyasi’s debut novel opens in the mid-1700s in what is now Ghana, as tribal rivalries are exploited by British and Dutch colonists and slave traders. The daughter of one tribal leader marries a British man for financial expediency, then learns that the “castle” he governs is a holding dungeon for slaves. (When she asks what’s held there, she’s told “cargo.”) The narrative soon alternates chapters between the Ghanans and their American descendants up through the present day. On either side of the Atlantic, the tale is often one of racism, degradation, and loss: a slave on an Alabama plantation is whipped “until the blood on the ground is high enough to bathe a baby”; a freedman in Baltimore fears being sent back South with the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act; a Ghanan woman is driven mad from the abuse of a missionary and her husband’s injury in a tribal war; a woman in Harlem is increasingly distanced from (and then humiliated by) her husband, who passes as white. Gyasi is a deeply empathetic writer, and each of the novel’s 14 chapters is a savvy character portrait that reveals the impact of racism from multiple perspectives. It lacks the sweep that its premise implies, though: while the characters share a bloodline, and a gold-flecked stone appears throughout the book as a symbolic connector, the novel is more a well-made linked story collection than a complex epic. Yet Gyasi plainly has the talent to pull that off: “I will be my own nation,” one woman tells a British suitor early on, and the author understands both the necessity of that defiance and how hard it is to follow through on it.
A promising debut that’s awake to emotional, political, and cultural tensions across time and continents.Pub Date: June 7, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-101-94713-5
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: March 1, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
SEEN & HEARD
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