Cultures clash, but love conquers, with some fascinating twists and plenty of intimate details.
A recounting of the author’s courtship of his wife-to-be in the ancient Vietnamese city of Hue.
In the fall of 1992, shortly after graduating from the Iowa Writer’s Workshop, Sullivan went to Vietnam with an assignment from Bicycling magazine to write about biking from Saigon to Hanoi. He was looking for local color to flesh out the piece when he first encountered Thuy in her exotic native city. She wanted to learn English; his interest was caught and held from his initial vision of her traditionally dressed in a graceful ao dai. Since Sullivan is the kind of writer who spends a lot of time in his own head, readers are privy to every twist and turn as he accepts, ponders, rejects, and finally embraces the notion that boy has met girl and destiny waits. It was clear from the outset that their relationship would be complicated. Thuy’s family had very traditional values and beliefs—her mother, for instance, insisted that she tightly braid her long hair before going out in the evening so that “ghosts will not fly in there”—and she respected them. The US trade embargo on the reunited country’s communist government worked against Jim in subtle ways. It was a 19th-century courtship; Thuy’s initial refusal to even shake his hand put physical contact well back on the calendar. When the first kiss finally arrived, Sullivan writes, “A tiny gasp escaped between us. It could have been her; it could have been me.” But there were other persistent gentlemen callers, and one of them, a Hue police officer assigned to monitor foreign travelers, took Jim’s success personally. The ensuing complications afforded the author a Kiplingesque take on the community of marginally depraved Western expats going to seed in Bangkok, where he waited in agony for bribes and paperwork to interact.
Cultures clash, but love conquers, with some fascinating twists and plenty of intimate details.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-312-42237-7
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Picador
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2003
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A standout immigrant coming-of-age story.
In her first nonfiction book, novelist Grande (Dancing with Butterflies, 2009, etc.) delves into her family’s cycle of separation and reunification.
Raised in poverty so severe that spaghetti reminded her of the tapeworms endemic to children in her Mexican hometown, the author is her family’s only college graduate and writer, whose honors include an American Book Award and International Latino Book Award. Though she was too young to remember her father when he entered the United States illegally seeking money to improve life for his family, she idolized him from afar. However, she also blamed him for taking away her mother after he sent for her when the author was not yet 5 years old. Though she emulated her sister, she ultimately answered to herself, and both siblings constantly sought affirmation of their parents’ love, whether they were present or not. When one caused disappointment, the siblings focused their hopes on the other. These contradictions prove to be the narrator’s hallmarks, as she consistently displays a fierce willingness to ask tough questions, accept startling answers, and candidly render emotional and physical violence. Even as a girl, Grande understood the redemptive power of language to define—in the U.S., her name’s literal translation, “big queen,” led to ridicule from other children—and to complicate. In spelling class, when a teacher used the sentence “my mamá loves me” (mi mamá me ama), Grande decided to “rearrange the words so that they formed a question: ¿Me ama mi mamá? Does my mama love me?”
A standout immigrant coming-of-age story.Pub Date: Aug. 28, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-4516-6177-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: June 11, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
