A modestly engaging, well-researched historical novel of Communist China that fails to fulfill its potential.
A once-wealthy family living in 1950s Maoist China attempts to escape to Hong Kong.
It’s the summer of 1957, and 12-year-old Ah Liam Ong is a devoted follower of Chairman Mao and China’s Communist Party. When his severe teacher, Comrade Ang, offers him the opportunity to apply for the Party’s Youth League, Ah Liam rashly submits a story of his once-wealthy grandmother smashing a portrait of the Chairman. The Party’s subsequent investigation couldn’t have come at a worse time. Ah Liam’s father, Ah Zhai, who lives in Hong Kong, has faked a mortal illness to get his family permits to travel—and escape—to Hong Kong. As a result of the increased scrutiny on the family, however, Ah Zhai’s wife, Seok Koon, can only obtain permits for herself, her mother-in-law, and one child. Suddenly, San San, at 9 the youngest member of the family, has been left behind on Drum Wave Islet while her family sails for Hong Kong. After trying to escape with trusted neighbors, San San finds herself on the run from the authorities and confronted with the grim realities of Communist China. Meanwhile, Seok Koon desperately tries to rescue her daughter, all while struggling with her relationship with her estranged husband, and Ah Liam falls in with like-minded leftist students at his new school. This sophomore effort from Chen, a native of Singapore, toggles among the members of the Ong family over the course of their journeys. The novel’s setting is broad and rich as a result of this polyphonous approach, and Chen is clearly fascinated by the historical period. But the sheer number of characters and subplots can also make the novel feel strained and disjointed. The characters are not given equal page time, and as a result, those who appear less often lack development and complexity. San San’s story is particularly action-packed and by far the most gripping. Despite the benefits of polyphonic storytelling, it’s hard not to think that a novel focused solely on San San might have been more compelling.
A modestly engaging, well-researched historical novel of Communist China that fails to fulfill its potential.Pub Date: March 20, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5420-4970-2
Page Count: 299
Publisher: Little A
Review Posted Online: Dec. 23, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
A tour de force.
In 1974, a troubled Vietnam vet inherits a house from a fallen comrade and moves his family to Alaska.
After years as a prisoner of war, Ernt Allbright returned home to his wife, Cora, and daughter, Leni, a violent, difficult, restless man. The family moved so frequently that 13-year-old Leni went to five schools in four years. But when they move to Alaska, still very wild and sparsely populated, Ernt finds a landscape as raw as he is. As Leni soon realizes, “Everyone up here had two stories: the life before and the life now. If you wanted to pray to a weirdo god or live in a school bus or marry a goose, no one in Alaska was going to say crap to you.” There are many great things about this book—one of them is its constant stream of memorably formulated insights about Alaska. Another key example is delivered by Large Marge, a former prosecutor in Washington, D.C., who now runs the general store for the community of around 30 brave souls who live in Kaneq year-round. As she cautions the Allbrights, “Alaska herself can be Sleeping Beauty one minute and a bitch with a sawed-off shotgun the next. There’s a saying: Up here you can make one mistake. The second one will kill you.” Hannah’s (The Nightingale, 2015, etc.) follow-up to her series of blockbuster bestsellers will thrill her fans with its combination of Greek tragedy, Romeo and Juliet–like coming-of-age story, and domestic potboiler. She re-creates in magical detail the lives of Alaska's homesteaders in both of the state's seasons (they really only have two) and is just as specific and authentic in her depiction of the spiritual wounds of post-Vietnam America.
A tour de force.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-312-57723-0
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Oct. 30, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2017
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