The waywardness of history and human emotion are impressively detailed in a popular Chinese writer's US debut: a first novel (originally published in Taiwan in the early '90s) that describes the struggle of two families to live and love in modern China. Set in Silver City, a provincial town where salt is mined, the story opens with a mass execution in 1951 by the Communists. Almost all the men of the clan of Li are killed, and with their deaths, the renowned family compound falls into disrepair. Fifteen years later, the destruction is complete when Red Guards destroy its ancient twin arches and locust tree. The author's story of the Li family in the preceding years, and of Li Naizhi, the only Li male who escaped, seamlessly blends period detail (sedan chairs, embroidered clothing of the 1920s, etc.) and historical fact. Li Naizhi escapes because he's a Communist who joined the Party as a teenager—after he saw his high-school principal executed in 1927 for working with peasants. As Li Naizhi advances in the Party, his uncle, the clan's leader, Li Yi, struggles to maintain the family's mines and prevail against the takeover bids of American-educated entrepreneur Bai Rude. The men continue their rivalry until the Communists assume power and Bai Rude and his wife flee China, though his daughter, Bai Quiyaun, stays behind and marries Li Naizhi, her high-school sweetheart. She shares his triumphs (he becomes a minister) and his defeats—namely the reeducation of the Cultural Revolution, which eventually separates them and drives her to suicide. The patriarchs' personal lives are equally complicated, as wives arrange for concubines to provide heirs, then murderously retaliate; and a Li relative becomes both a Buddhist nun and a Communist spy. When Li Naizhi's eldest son, a historian, visits Silver City in the 1980s, little remains of it. An impressively nuanced reminder not only of the terrible toll of Chinese history, but of how fiction can illuminate it with portraits of individuals caught in its currents.
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-8050-4895-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1997
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
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
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