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THE FORTUNES

Davies’ nuanced contemplation of how America has affected the Chinese (and vice versa) forces the reader to confront what is...

A four-part suite of astute, lyrical, and often poignant stories poses incisive questions about what changes—and what does not—when people from another culture become Americans.

You could, if you wished, refer to this blend of historically inspired narratives as The Birth of a Chinese-American Nation, as Davies (The Welsh Girl, 2007, etc.) encompasses whole eras of history, transition, and even consciousness in the four stories that make up this novel. The first, set in the mid-19th century, focuses on Ling, whose fastidious and imperturbably dogged performance as manservant to rail magnate Charles Crocker inspires "Mister Charley" to consider hiring a vast workforce of Chinese immigrants to help lay down tracks for the first transcontinental railroad. (“A model of industry,” Crocker says of Ling to a pair of Siamese twins. “Were it not for his shining example, we…should never have thought to hire so many thousands of your countrymen.”) The second story belongs to Anna May Wong, the glamorous, mordantly witty movie star, as she makes her only visit across the Pacific to her family’s Chinese homeland in the mid-1930s after losing the coveted lead role in the movie version of The Good Earth to Luise Rainer. The book becomes more impassioned in the third section, which uses the fatal 1982 beating of Vincent Chin near Detroit by an autoworker and his stepson who had mistaken him for Japanese as an inquiry into the nature of racism itself. The last story, set close to the present day, is about a biracial Chinese-American author named John who sets off with his wife, Nola, for mainland China for the purpose of adopting a child—which gently but resolutely brings this neatly woven portrait full circle.

Davies’ nuanced contemplation of how America has affected the Chinese (and vice versa) forces the reader to confront what is both singular and similar about all cross-cultural transactions.

Pub Date: Sept. 6, 2016

ISBN: 978-0-544-26370-3

Page Count: 282

Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Review Posted Online: June 21, 2016

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2016

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WHITE TEETH

There isn’t much of a plot here, the book being swept along by a series of sometimes hilarious, oft-times clever,...

An impressively witty satirical first novel, London-set, chronicling the experiences of two eccentric multiracial families during the last half of the 20th century.

When Archie Jones’s suicide attempt on New Year’s Day 1975 is stymied by a finicky butcher (who frowns upon such things taking place in a car parked illegally in front of his establishment, especially when he’s awaiting an early morning delivery), his life is changed forever. Lamenting the break up of his marriage, the distraught and disoriented Archie—a middle-aged Brit who fancies himself in the direct-mail business but actually spends his life folding papers—then wanders into an end-of-the-world party where he meets his next wife. Jamaican Clara Bowden is 19 to Archie’s 47, at six feet tall she towers over him, and she’s missing all her upper teeth, the result of a motorcycle mishap. Nonetheless, six weeks later the mismatched pair are married and living near Archie’s WWII buddy Samad Iqbal, a Bengali Muslim. And so begins Smith’s frenetic, riotous, unruly tale, which hops, skips, and jumps from one end of the century to the other while following the Jones and Iqbal broods. Archie and Clara have a daughter, Irie, whose name translates into ``no problem'' (although she has plenty of them); Samad, who is head waiter at an Indian restaurant, has twin sons, Millat and Magid. When they’re nine, their father separates the boys, sending Magid back to Bangladesh to be raised the old-fashioned way, far from the corruption of postwar London, filled with its mods and rockers and hippies and Englishmen and other bad influences—including Samad himself, who has been lusting after his twins’ schoolteacher.

There isn’t much of a plot here, the book being swept along by a series of sometimes hilarious, oft-times clever, occasionally tedious riffs on everything from race relations through eugenics and on to religion, but 25-year-old Smith is a marvelously talented writer with a wonderful ear for dialogue.

Pub Date: May 1, 2000

ISBN: 0-375-50185-1

Page Count: -

Publisher: Random House

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2000

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SUCH A FUN AGE

Charming, challenging, and so interesting you can hardly put it down.

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The relationship between a privileged White mom and her Black babysitter is strained by race-related complications.

Blogger/role model/inspirational speaker Alix Chamberlain is none too happy about moving from Manhattan to Philadelphia for her husband Peter's job as a TV newscaster. With no friends or in-laws around to help out with her almost-3-year-old, Briar, and infant, Catherine, she’ll never get anywhere on the book she’s writing unless she hires a sitter. She strikes gold when she finds Emira Tucker. Twenty-five-year-old Emira’s family and friends expect her to get going on a career, but outside the fact that she’s about to get kicked off her parents’ health insurance, she’s happy with her part-time gigs—and Briar is her "favorite little human." Then one day a double-header of racist events topples the apple cart—Emira is stopped by a security guard who thinks she's kidnapped Briar, and when Peter's program shows a segment on the unusual ways teenagers ask their dates to the prom, he blurts out "Let's hope that last one asked her father first" about a Black boy hoping to go with a White girl. Alix’s combination of awkwardness and obsession with regard to Emira spins out of control and then is complicated by the reappearance of someone from her past (coincidence alert), where lies yet another racist event. Reid’s debut sparkles with sharp observations and perfect details—food, décor, clothes, social media, etc.—and she’s a dialogue genius, effortlessly incorporating toddler-ese, witty boyfriend–speak, and African American Vernacular English. For about two-thirds of the book, her evenhandedness with her varied cast of characters is impressive, but there’s a point at which any possible empathy for Alix disappears. Not only is she shallow, entitled, unknowingly racist, and a bad mother, but she has not progressed one millimeter since high school, and even then she was worse than we thought. Maybe this was intentional, but it does make things—ha ha—very black and white.

Charming, challenging, and so interesting you can hardly put it down.

Pub Date: Jan. 7, 2020

ISBN: 978-0-525-54190-5

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Putnam

Review Posted Online: Oct. 13, 2019

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2019

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