A fictionalized memoir that is equal parts charming and dull.
A Hong Kong prep school student grows along with his peers in Hung’s autobiographical novel.
Fifteen-year-old James has already led a migratory life. When he was young, his family fled Communist mainland China for the safety of Hong Kong, then spent five years in Malaysia. Now they have returned to Hong Kong, and James finds himself enrolled at the prestigious La Salle College prep school. He arrives in the middle of the school year, his Chinese rusty, and his tuition waived on the understanding that he will run for the track team. His classmates are an assortment of students from all walks of life—Michael Sze, a native Hong Konger who becomes James’ social guide; Juan Chu Trujillo, who is Mexican and Chinese on both sides, and whose sister Julia becomes an object of James’ affection; Danny Tong, who experiences racism for his partial Jamaican heritage. The novel follows the students through the upper forms and into post-school life. The LaSalle Old Boys—as alumni are known—keep in touch, even as they disperse across the globe. Many, like James, end up in the U.S. and Canada. As James builds a family and a career as a surgeon in California, he always looks forward to high school reunions so he can check in on the developments of the LaSalle class of ’64. Hung’s prose is clean and leisurely, recounting the many characters and their particularities with the polite curiosity of an alumni newsletter: “Our most famous old boy was Phillip Chan, who became a popular TV star as a detective and later a movie star. He appeared in a few Hollywood movies, usually playing the role of a Hong Kong police inspector.” As a work of fiction, the book leaves a lot to be desired. There is no real plot or narrative tension, only updates on this person or that, all of which Hung relates as if it happened long ago. The book is more valuable for the portrait it paints of Hong Kong in the 1960s—a melting pot of cultures, settling refugees, and immigrants from across the world that’s fending off the looming menace of mainland China.
A fictionalized memoir that is equal parts charming and dull.Pub Date: May 25, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-73-535521-4
Page Count: 328
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: July 29, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.
A young woman’s experience as a nurse in Vietnam casts a deep shadow over her life.
When we learn that the farewell party in the opening scene is for Frances “Frankie” McGrath’s older brother—“a golden boy, a wild child who could make the hardest heart soften”—who is leaving to serve in Vietnam in 1966, we feel pretty certain that poor Finley McGrath is marked for death. Still, it’s a surprise when the fateful doorbell rings less than 20 pages later. His death inspires his sister to enlist as an Army nurse, and this turn of events is just the beginning of a roller coaster of a plot that’s impressive and engrossing if at times a bit formulaic. Hannah renders the experiences of the young women who served in Vietnam in all-encompassing detail. The first half of the book, set in gore-drenched hospital wards, mildewed dorm rooms, and boozy officers’ clubs, is an exciting read, tracking the transformation of virginal, uptight Frankie into a crack surgical nurse and woman of the world. Her tensely platonic romance with a married surgeon ends when his broken, unbreathing body is airlifted out by helicopter; she throws her pent-up passion into a wild affair with a soldier who happens to be her dead brother’s best friend. In the second part of the book, after the war, Frankie seems to experience every possible bad break. A drawback of the story is that none of the secondary characters in her life are fully three-dimensional: Her dismissive, chauvinistic father and tight-lipped, pill-popping mother, her fellow nurses, and her various love interests are more plot devices than people. You’ll wish you could have gone to Vegas and placed a bet on the ending—while it’s against all the odds, you’ll see it coming from a mile away.
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2024
ISBN: 9781250178633
Page Count: 480
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 4, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2023
PERSPECTIVES
BOOK TO SCREEN
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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PERSPECTIVES
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