Kanon goes to China with stirring results.
In the aftermath of Kristallnacht, German resistance fighter Daniel Lohr escapes to Shanghai only to be surrounded by a different brand of violence.
Daniel, who’s half-Jewish, is among a shipload of European Jews who jump at the chance to relocate to Shanghai, even if it means surrendering all their money and worldly goods to the Nazis. As unlikely a destination as it is, it’s the only port that doesn’t require an entrance visa. Daniel, whose Jewish father was killed by the Nazis, goes to work for his uncle Nathan, who runs a successful casino in a dangerous part of Shanghai in advance of the anticipated Japanese occupation. Daniel is quickly indoctrinated into the Chinese gang warfare being waged over control of the clubs when Nathan is shot and wounded. Soon enough, Daniel is as enmeshed in the killing culture as anyone, committing bad acts when not diplomatically making nice to bad sorts—chief among them Colonel Yamada, slimy head of Kempeitai, the Japanese gestapo. When Daniel sees Leah, his shipboard romance, in the forced company of Yamada, you know a violent reckoning awaits. As in his spy novels (The Berlin Exchange, 2022; Istanbul Passage, 2012), Kanon demonstrates a mastery of closed-in drama. Such is the jabbing understatement of the dialogue—what’s withheld matters more than what’s said—that it holds you in suspense as much as any action scene. Though the author’s use of the Holocaust as a mere backdrop to the story may leave some readers uneasy, the contrast between his impeccable control and the nightmarish chaos of this time and place gives things a powerful edge.
Kanon goes to China with stirring results.Pub Date: June 25, 2024
ISBN: 9781668006429
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: April 20, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2024
Fans of Stockett’s bestselling debut will love this engaging follow-up.
Stockett heads to Mississippi for another historical novel about feisty women.
This time, perhaps recalling criticisms of cultural appropriation in The Help (2009), she sticks to feisty white women, with one exception. The setting is Oxford in 1933. For two miserable years, 11-year-old Meg has lived in “the Orphan,” a county asylum for parentless girls. Chairlady Garnett—a villain so one-note she’d twirl a mustache if she had one—makes it her mission to ostracize the older girls she deems unadoptable, stigmatizing them as offspring of the “feebleminded” mothers who abandoned them. She particularly has it in for smart, sassy Meg, who refuses to believe her mother’s mysterious disappearance was deliberate. Elsewhere in Oxford, Birdie Calhoun comes to visit her sister Frances, who married a wealthy banker, to ask for money on behalf of their mother and grandmother back in Footely. Frances isn’t thrilled by this reminder of her impoverished small-town origins. But she’s trying to climb up in Oxford society by volunteering at the Orphan, the asylum’s books need to be done before the state inspector shows up in a few weeks, and Birdie is a bookkeeper. Having neatly arranged to keep Birdie in town and draw these two storylines together, Stockett goes on to spin a compulsively readable yarn with enough plot for a half-dozen novels. Birdie and Meg become friends, Meg is adopted despite Garnett’s best efforts, Meg’s mother turns up at the Orphan demanding to know where her child is—and that’s less than a quarter of the way through a long, winding narrative that keeps piling on more dramatic developments until all loose ends are neatly, if hastily, wrapped up in the final pages. Stockett might be making a point about Southern women facing facts and standing up for themselves, but mostly this is just a satisfyingly twisty tale that should make a great miniseries.
Fans of Stockett’s bestselling debut will love this engaging follow-up.Pub Date: May 5, 2026
ISBN: 9781954118812
Page Count: 656
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: Feb. 2, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2026
BOOK REVIEW
A flawed but necessary read about a dark moment in American history.
See’s latest novel exposes a forgotten, ugly chapter in LA history—the brutal 1871 massacre of 18 Chinese immigrant men and boys.
In July 1870, two Chinese women arrive in Lo Sang, a dusty frontier town known by its white and Hispanic residents as Los Angeles. Seventeen-year-old Dove, the bound-footed daughter of an imperial scholar fallen on hard times, is the new second wife of Old Man Sing, a merchant in the tiny Chinese community on Calle de los Negros. Barefoot, dark-skinned Petal, sold into servitude to a Gold Mountain tong by her desperately poor peasant father, is destined for the Midnight Garden, a bawdy house owned by Headman Sam. Witnessing the newcomers’ arrival is Moon, the wife of a successful doctor of traditional Chinese medicine. Unlike Petal and Dove, she speaks English, and she assists her husband in his clinic. The three alternating narratives—Petal tells her story as she lives it in 1870; an elderly Moon recalls past events from 1926; and Dove’s tale is recounted in a distant third-person voice—create a portrait of a tiny immigrant community surrounded by a hostile culture and ruled by rival tongs. It’s a shootout between these disputing factions that sets off the horrifying events of Oct. 24, 1871, when a mob of about 500 white and Latine residents torture and lynch their Chinese victims. Although meticulously researched, See’s novel feels curiously flat. Despite continual descriptions of gunfights breaking out, Los Angeles never fully comes to life as a rough-and-tumble Wild West town. While the author’s female protagonists, inspired by historical figures, are well drawn (kudos to the feisty and determined Petal), most of her male characters—Chinese, Anglo, and Mexican—are as flat and indistinguishable as cardboard. Another drawback is See’s stilted and stylized dialogue, typical of historical fiction but wearying to the modern reader.
A flawed but necessary read about a dark moment in American history.Pub Date: June 9, 2026
ISBN: 9781982117054
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 4, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2026
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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