This richly painted literary novel brings a Portuguese doctor to 19th-century China to find a cure for syphilis.
In 1898, Doctor Antonio Maria is one of Portugal’s best doctors, but when his widowed father becomes desperately ill with syphilis Doctor Maria will do anything, go anywhere to find a cure to save his father’s life. With reason to believe the Chinese have a cure, he leaves his fiancée behind and sails to China, devoting himself to learning medical secrets from a man named Xu. The trouble is that Doctor Maria must live in China for four seasons and learn the ways of qi before Xu will teach him what he wants to know. In the meantime he falls in love with Fumi, a mysterious woman with close ties to the Empress Dowager. Will he find the cure in time to return home and save his father? Or find it and return to Portugal before the West-hating Boxers kill him and all the other foreigners? Does Xu even know the cure, or is he simply stringing Doctor Maria along for his own purposes? Can he meet the Empress and enlist her help? People are not who they seem as Doctor Maria immerses himself deeply in a strange and complex culture. Readers will get vicarious pleasure as he learns an array of sexual positions from Fumi. Occasional passages are briefly confusing as the narrative dips in and out of nightmares, but ultimately they help the story. For a man with an urgent mission, Doctor Maria seems incredibly patient, even distracted, as he navigates the ways of a world in which he is often the unwelcome outsider. Many people suffer losses in this novel, a deeply satisfying tale mixing history, cultural clashes, violence and love. Fortunately, it’s the readers who win.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-59020-708-6
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Overlook
Review Posted Online: Sept. 1, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.
Sisters work together to solve a child-abandonment case.
Ellie and Julia Cates have never been close. Julia is shy and brainy; Ellie gets by on charm and looks. Their differences must be tossed aside when a traumatized young girl wanders in from the forest into their hometown in Washington. The sisters’ professional skills are put to the test. Julia is a world-renowned child psychologist who has lost her edge. She is reeling from a case that went publicly sour. Though she was cleared of all wrongdoing, Julia’s name was tarnished, forcing her to shutter her Beverly Hills practice. Ellie Barton is the local police chief in Rain Valley, who’s never faced a tougher case. This is her chance to prove she is more than just a fading homecoming queen, but a scarcity of clues and a reluctant victim make locating the girl’s parents nearly impossible. Ellie places an SOS call to her sister; she needs an expert to rehabilitate this wild-child who has been living outside of civilization for years. Confronted with her professional demons, Julia once again has the opportunity to display her talents and salvage her reputation. Hannah (The Things We Do for Love, 2004, etc.) is at her best when writing from the girl’s perspective. The feral wolf-child keeps the reader interested long after the other, transparent characters have grown tiresome. Hannah’s torturously over-written romance passages are stale, but there are surprises in store as the sisters set about unearthing Alice’s past and creating a home for her.
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.Pub Date: March 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-345-46752-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2005
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