A highly entertaining page-turner that has a propensity for melodrama and cliché.
A rural Chinese villager becomes a nanny by day and cocktail waitress by night after illegally immigrating to the U.S. in a bid to reclaim her stolen daughter.
Month after month, Jasmine tries to find work in Manhattan's Chinatown, but her lack of documentation compels most aboveboard employers to turn her away. She owes an astronomical sum to the snakeheads—human smugglers—who ferried her to New York. If she doesn’t repay them by a certain date, they’ll force her into prostitution. Overhearing Jasmine petition the manager of a teahouse for a job, a customer offers a cryptic referral: Ask for Aunt Glory at Opium. Opium turns out to be a seedy Asian strip club, Aunt Glory its ruthless proprietress. While Jasmine is repulsed by the nature of the work, she has no choice but to sign on. Her reasons for fleeing China become clear as her backstory is revealed. She is not only escaping her abusive husband, Wen, but also searching for their only child, a daughter taken from Jasmine at birth. Mindful of China’s one-child policy, Wen arranged for the baby to be spirited out of the country in an under-the-table adoption and told Jasmine the baby had died, all because he wanted a son. By snooping through Wen’s email account, Jasmine discovered the truth, identified the adoptive parents as New York City couple Brandon and Rebecca Whitney, and resolved to track down her daughter whatever the cost. Knowing Brandon and Rebecca are in search of live-in help, Jasmine successfully infiltrates the family. She balances her duties with her shifts at Opium, often sneaking back into the Whitney home through a skylight so as not to arouse suspicion. Her plan is to disappear with her daughter after making enough money to both repay the snakeheads and start a new life. But the household is soon victimized by a series of thinly veiled threats, suggesting that someone has cottoned on to Jasmine’s secret. Chapters end on cliffhangers that keep the narrative moving forward. Unfortunately, some of the plot points recall the overwrought beats of a soap opera, such as Jasmine’s will-they, won’t-they relationship with her childhood best friend and a violent confrontation that serves as the novel's climax. Jasmine herself embodies the rom-com trope of the stunning female main character who somehow doesn’t know she’s beautiful.
A highly entertaining page-turner that has a propensity for melodrama and cliché.Pub Date: Oct. 10, 2023
ISBN: 9780063031463
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 13, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2023
Answers are hard to come by in this twisting tale designed to trick and delight.
Three siblings on very different paths learn that their family home may be haunted by secrets.
Eldest daughter Beth is alone with her fading mother as she takes her final breath and says something about Beth’s long-departed brother and sister, who may not have disappeared forever. Beth is still reeling from the loss of her mother when her estranged siblings show up. Michael, the youngest, hasn’t been home since their father’s disappearance seven years ago. In the meantime, he’s outgrown his siblings, trading his share of the family troubles for a high-paying job in San Jose. Nicole, the middle child, has been overpowered by addiction and prioritized tuning out reality over any sense of responsibility, much to Beth’s disgust. Though their mother’s death marks an ending for the family, it’s also a beginning, as the three siblings realize when they find a disturbing videotape among their parents’ belongings. The video, from 1999, sheds suspicion on their father’s disappearance, linking it to a long-unsolved neighborhood mystery. Was it just a series of unfortunate circumstances that broke the family apart, or does something more sinister underlie the sadness they’ve all found in life? In chapters that rotate among the family’s first-person narratives, the siblings take turns digging up stories and secrets in their search for solace.
Answers are hard to come by in this twisting tale designed to trick and delight.Pub Date: April 30, 2024
ISBN: 9798212182843
Page Count: 270
Publisher: Blackstone
Review Posted Online: Feb. 3, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.
Another sweltering month in Charlotte, another boatload of mysteries past and present for overworked, overstressed forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan.
A week after the night she chases but fails to catch a mysterious trespasser outside her town house, some unknown party texts Tempe four images of a corpse that looks as if it’s been chewed by wild hogs, because it has been. Showboat Medical Examiner Margot Heavner makes it clear that, breaking with her department’s earlier practice (The Bone Collection, 2016, etc.), she has no intention of calling in Tempe as a consultant and promptly identifies the faceless body herself as that of a young Asian man. Nettled by several errors in Heavner’s analysis, and even more by her willingness to share the gory details at a press conference, Tempe launches her own investigation, which is not so much off the books as against the books. Heavner isn’t exactly mollified when Tempe, aided by retired police detective Skinny Slidell and a host of experts, puts a name to the dead man. But the hints of other crimes Tempe’s identification uncovers, particularly crimes against children, spur her on to redouble her efforts despite the new M.E.’s splenetic outbursts. Before he died, it seems, Felix Vodyanov was linked to a passenger ferry that sank in 1994, an even earlier U.S. government project to research biological agents that could control human behavior, the hinky spiritual retreat Sparkling Waters, the dark web site DeepUnder, and the disappearances of at least four schoolchildren, two of whom have also turned up dead. And why on earth was Vodyanov carrying Tempe’s own contact information? The mounting evidence of ever more and ever worse skulduggery will pull Tempe deeper and deeper down what even she sees as a rabbit hole before she confronts a ringleader implicated in “Drugs. Fraud. Breaking and entering. Arson. Kidnapping. How does attempted murder sound?”
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.Pub Date: March 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-3888-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
© 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
