Gorgeous prose and unforgettable characters combine to make a literary masterpiece.
An epic novel brings complex 20th-century Korean history to life.
In this extraordinary historical novel, debut author Kim weaves together the story of friends and rivals trying to survive and thrive from the era of the Japanese occupation of Korea to the political purges of the mid-20th century. The book begins with a Korean hunter encountering a tiger in the snow when he is captured by a lost squad of Japanese soldiers. With its near-mythic evocations of several kinds of beasts, the prologue establishes the themes of the book. The majority of the novel follows Jade, whose impoverished farming family sends her as a young girl to work as a servant for a courtesan. Jade observes the rivalries of other girls in training, particularly Luna, the spoiled favored daughter of the head of the household, and Lotus, the spirited but plainer younger sister. Thanks to her intelligence and resourcefulness, Jade will grow up to become a celebrated courtesan and movie star in Seoul, where she and the two sisters end up as adults. Together they encounter various men, including the revolution-minded MyungBo, an intellectual fighting for Korean independence; the ever loyal JungHo, the leader of a street gang of orphaned boys; the slick and wealthy patron SungSoo; and the ambitious rickshaw driver HanChol. Jade, Luna, and Lotus fall in love with men from very different backgrounds, but their love and loyalty are not always returned. Kim shows clearly how patriarchy harms these resourceful women in one of the novel's major themes. Late in the book a Japanese general will remark, "How such enormous beasts have flourished in this little land is incomprehensible." He is referring to tigers, but he might as well be talking about the humans who fight here, too.
Gorgeous prose and unforgettable characters combine to make a literary masterpiece.Pub Date: Dec. 7, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-06-309357-7
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Aug. 4, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2021
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
A heroine who plays the hand she’s dealt—nothing more, nothing less.
A fictional biography of one of North Carolina’s first female African American real estate entrepreneurs.
Josephine Leary’s home life is at the center of this novel, while her real estate investment business is conducted mainly offstage. The main conflict is with her husband, Archer, aka Sweety, making for a somewhat pedestrian tale of occasional domestic strife. Although he seemed to appreciate Jo’s business acumen before they married, Sweety needles her about her work outside the home, which is, at first, mainly in their family business, a barbershop in Edenton, North Carolina. Sweety resents the fact that Jo has her own money—derived from income properties she began buying with a wedding gift of $500 from her father, a White former Confederate officer—and when she spends it on their family, for example buying a new buggy, buying their rental house, and buying their barbershop, he feels shamed as a man. Which does not prevent him, as Josephine’s first-person narration reminds us often, from splurging on expensive whisky. Jo, her grandmother, mother, and brother were all formerly enslaved on plantations in North Carolina. Now (the narrative spans the 1870s to the early 1890s), they are all doing well in Edenton, a prosperous community that appears relatively free of racial strife. Jo is never fazed by the racism she does encounter, not to mention the sexism. A White seller refuses to deal with her on her first property purchase, until "his greed outweighs his prejudice." She dismisses racial slurs by White women as a product of poor upbringing. The worst racist aggression—three drunken former Confederates disrupt church Juneteenth festivities with a wagonload of rotten tomatoes—is investigated by the local sheriff only at the behest of Sweety, who passes for White. Although Jo’s achievements are certainly worthy of being celebrated, her relatively obstacle-free path to prosperity, as well as her fictional doppelgänger’s total lack of vulnerability, saps the narrative of tension. We’re left with a pleasant panorama of middle-class small-town life in the late 19th century.
A heroine who plays the hand she’s dealt—nothing more, nothing less.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-9821-6368-6
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Oct. 12, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2021
Fans of historical fiction, women’s fiction, and mystery novels will be equally dazzled.
In this multigenerational novel inspired by Piazza’s own family, two women tell a story that begins in Sicily a hundred years ago and leads to a return in the present day.
The first narrative belongs to Sara Masala, a Philadelphia chef whose husband has just filed for divorce and full custody of their daughter; on top of that, her once-thriving restaurant has gone bankrupt and her great-aunt Rosie has died. It had always been Rosie’s dream to visit her birthplace in Sicily and take Sara with her, but now Sara will be making the trip solo—Rosie booked and paid for a nonrefundable ticket and hotel room for her. Although it seems impossible for Sara to leave right now, Rosie threw in one more twist—leaving Sara a deed to a plot of land that belonged to Rosie’s mother, Serafina. If Sara sells it, she can use the money to save her restaurant and, hopefully, her family. Sara makes the journey to the ancient mountain town of Caltabellessa and is taken under the wing of Giusy, the innkeeper and town gossip. As a child, Sara was always told that Serafina had died from the flu before she could make it to America. Giusy rips that idea apart when she drops the bomb that Serafina was actually murdered. As Sara digs into century-old secrets, her presence becomes a growing threat to the town’s carefully protected way of life. Interspersed with Sara’s journey is a secondary narrative belonging to Serafina, who provides context with Caltabellessa’s history and the challenges faced by women in early-20th-century Sicily. Serafina’s story is the beating heart of this novel, an honest look into the sacrifices of a young mother: “I barely had time to remember all the things I once wanted, all the lives I hoped to lead, but sometimes the desire all flooded back and I felt a small death.” This novel almost feels like two books in one, but the stories are inextricably bound, most effectively through the way Piazza writes about the universal experience of what it means to be a woman and a mother.
Fans of historical fiction, women’s fiction, and mystery novels will be equally dazzled.Pub Date: April 2, 2024
ISBN: 9780593474167
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: Jan. 20, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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