Tan examines the tension behind the facade of the moneyed lifestyle in a still-evolving post-Mao Shanghai, where everyone...
Like the Emerald City in Oz, contemporary Shanghai provides the backdrop for an examination of the clash between old and new lifestyles and values in Tan’s debut novel.
Upon moving back to mainland China after more than 20 years in America, the Zhens finds themselves ill at ease in their new opulent and coddled setting. Husband Wei becomes unhappy with his work for a multinational advertising firm, while the previously industrious Lina settles into the unfamiliar role of taitai, a housewife with no housewifely duties and an infinite amount of time to devote to shopping and gossipy meals. Karen, their adolescent daughter, spends most of the year at an American boarding school in order to enjoy the purported advantages of “American privilege.” Wei and Lina are strangers to Shanghai themselves, having shared modest beginnings in Suzhou, a silk-farming town. The silent witness to the Zhens’ quietly uncomfortable household is Sunny, an observant housekeeper from rural Hefei. When the balance of the Zhens’ carefully calibrated domesticity is disrupted by the reappearance of Wei’s long-out-of-touch brother, Qiang, the assumptions that underpin the family’s fragile equilibrium are tested. In the Zhen household, Tan brings us a microcosm of the conflicts among China’s larger populations: residents versus expatriates, wealthy versus poor, urban and commercial versus rural and agrarian. Humming quietly beneath the surface of the day-to-day microdrama in the Zhens’ home is the motif of the disappearance of Lina’s talismanic ivory bracelet, the story of which reflects the rivalries between more than one set of characters in this portrait of people learning how to live after a period of immense repression.
Tan examines the tension behind the facade of the moneyed lifestyle in a still-evolving post-Mao Shanghai, where everyone seems to be an expat in their own country.Pub Date: July 10, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-316-43718-9
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: April 16, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2018
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles...
Sisters in and out of love.
Meghann Dontess is a high-powered matrimonial lawyer in Seattle who prefers sex with strangers to emotional intimacy: a strategy bound to backfire sooner or later, warns her tough-talking shrink. It’s advice Meghann decides to ignore, along with the memories of her difficult childhood, neglectful mother, and younger sister. Though she managed to reunite Claire with Sam Cavenaugh (her father but not Meghann’s) when her mother abandoned both girls long ago, Meghann still feels guilty that her sister’s life doesn’t measure up, at least on her terms. Never married, Claire ekes out a living running a country campground with her dad and is raising her six-year-old daughter on her own. When she falls in love for the first time with an up-and-coming country musician, Meghann is appalled: Bobby Austin is a three-time loser at marriage—how on earth can Claire be so blind? Bobby’s blunt explanation doesn’t exactly satisfy the concerned big sister, who busies herself planning Claire’s dream wedding anyway. And, to relieve the stress, she beds various guys she picks up in bars, including Dr. Joe Wyatt, a neurosurgeon turned homeless drifter after the demise of his beloved wife Diane (whom he euthanized). When Claire’s awful headache turns out to be a kind of brain tumor known among neurologists as a “terminator,” Joe rallies. Turns out that Claire had befriended his wife on her deathbed, and now in turn he must try to save her. Is it too late? Will Meghann find true love at last?
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles (Distant Shores, 2002, etc.). Kudos for skipping the snifflefest this time around.Pub Date: May 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-345-45073-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2003
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.
Coelho is a Brazilian writer with four books to his credit. Following Diary of a Magus (1992—not reviewed) came this book, published in Brazil in 1988: it's an interdenominational, transcendental, inspirational fable—in other words, a bag of wind.
The story is about a youth empowered to follow his dream. Santiago is an Andalusian shepherd boy who learns through a dream of a treasure in the Egyptian pyramids. An old man, the king of Salem, the first of various spiritual guides, tells the boy that he has discovered his destiny: "to realize one's destiny is a person's only real obligation." So Santiago sells his sheep, sails to Tangier, is tricked out of his money, regains it through hard work, crosses the desert with a caravan, stops at an oasis long enough to fall in love, escapes from warring tribesmen by performing a miracle, reaches the pyramids, and eventually gets both the gold and the girl. Along the way he meets an Englishman who describes the Soul of the World; the desert woman Fatima, who teaches him the Language of the World; and an alchemist who says, "Listen to your heart" A message clings like ivy to every encounter; everyone, but everyone, has to put in their two cents' worth, from the crystal merchant to the camel driver ("concentrate always on the present, you'll be a happy man"). The absence of characterization and overall blandness suggest authorship by a committee of self-improvement pundits—a far cry from Saint- Exupery's The Little Prince: that flagship of the genre was a genuine charmer because it clearly derived from a quirky, individual sensibility.
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.Pub Date: July 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-06-250217-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1993
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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