Ma knows how to twist a plot in unexpected, deeply satisfying directions by writing with compassion, humor, and insight.
This rollicking contemporary picaresque about a young Chinese man’s adventures in 2015 America offers a fresh take on the Chinese immigrant experience while confronting universal issues surrounding family, grief, and how to define success.
Eighteen-year-old narrator Zheng Xue Li, nicknamed Shelley for the poet, is happy with his modest life in Yunnan Province. His English teacher, Miss Chipping-Highworth from Sussex, considers him her star pupil, and he has recently begun a romance with her niece, who's studying in China to avoid family problems. But years ago, Shelley’s widowed, long-suffering father promised his dying wife he’d save their son from their impoverished life as members of a despised branch of the Zheng family; so he has borrowed money to pay Shelley’s way to San Francisco. Shelley arrives with a student visa and three goals: Family, Love, Fortune. His eventful quest follows the path of Western literary heroes like Tom Jones and Huck Finn but also echoes the poor fisherman’s adventures in Shelley’s favorite Chinese tale, shared in full with the reader. Author Ma allows Shelley a comic, mildly satiric tone as he observes American culture with the sharp insights of an outsider who assumes everyone dissembles. Of course, nothing goes as Shelley planned. He quickly discovers the wealthy relatives he expected to pave his way are neither wealthy nor traditionally Chinese. U.S.–born cousin Ted Cheng (Americanized from Zheng), a journalist, and his Jewish wife, Aviva, introduce Shelley to a community that eschews boundaries of race, religion, and sexuality. Of deeper import, they have suffered a shocking tragedy that keeps them from fully embracing Shelley and that undercuts the novel’s surface lightheartedness. While ever optimistic Shelley is more sophisticated than Americans realize, his evolving relationships with Aviva, Ted, and Ted’s estranged father, Henry, force him to reassess his three stated goals as well as his unresolved relationship with his own father.
Ma knows how to twist a plot in unexpected, deeply satisfying directions by writing with compassion, humor, and insight.Pub Date: Jan. 24, 2023
ISBN: 978-1-64009-566-3
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Counterpoint
Review Posted Online: Oct. 25, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2022
BOOK REVIEW
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 tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
Are we not men? We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z(2006).
A zombie apocalypse is one thing. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice—for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you.” Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U.S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs.” Grossness aside, it puts you right there on the scene.
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.Pub Date: June 16, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-2678-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
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