An engaging and thoughtful coming-of-age tale.
Two royal siblings—turned into rabbits—search for a unicorn spirit to reverse the spell, discovering who they are in the process.
In the prologue, Naso, the jerboa mouse who narrates this debut novel, explains that a human palace’s mural depicts “an odd-looking, skinny rabbit with a crown…holding a sword in the air. That is the Rabbit Princess.” The main story, told in present tense, concerns how she came to be. In the opening chapters, the widower Emperor lives with his two children, the Princess Annie, 12, and her younger brother, Crown Prince Pika, 10, in a great palace. There, the spoiled children, especially Annie, “torment the staff all day long.” When she has a young boy thrown in jail for failing to kowtow, it’s the final straw, inciting the villagers to rebel. The Emperor and his general are sentenced to execution, and Shaman Wu turns the children into their favorite stuffed animals, banishing them to the Snow Forest. Annie is now a skinny, yellow rabbit, and Pika, a short, chubby white one. They meet a friend in Naso, who explains that a “heartless and unforgiving” tiger spirit named Moyen rules a massive kingdom, excepting Cloud Mountain and Dragon Desert. Qilin, a unicorn and “the mother of all spirits,” lives in the Desert and could help the rabbits, but Moyen has war on his mind and special plans for Annie. The siblings have some animal and spirit allies, but the journey won’t be easy. Nevertheless, with courage, new fighting skills, and especially hope, the rabbits might be able to find the unicorn—and their purpose. In his book, Chen offers a well-written fable about growing up through confronting shortcomings and learning to be of service to others. The siblings’ transformations into living stuffed animals is a neatly symbolic way of showing how they’ve become alienated from their human nature. Annie has the longest way to go in dropping her selfish ways and accepting her metamorphosis as a path toward self-knowledge. At first, jailed with her brother, her insight stretches only as far as her immediate family. In a “moment of pure clarity,” she realizes “she just wants her family safe.” Later, she earns respect by her focus on healing and helping other animals. In addition, the novel’s setting is intriguing, with its mix of more modern culture (for example, the stuffed animals) and figures from Chinese legend (the unicorn). While often ruminative about subjects like moral choices and the nature of evil, the story also delivers exciting action scenes and bold descriptions; Moyen’s “stark yellow eyes look like dead demons burning.” Episodes of animals killing one another might be tough for tenderhearted readers to take. The author’s economic black-and-white sketches help readers visualize the siblings’ alterations and nicely capture the various animals’ personalities, such as a panda’s searching look.
An engaging and thoughtful coming-of-age tale.Pub Date: Jan. 2, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-73271-890-6
Page Count: 164
Publisher: Osani Studios, Inc.
Review Posted Online: July 9, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.
Life lessons.
Angie Malone, the youngest of a big, warm Italian-American family, returns to her Pacific Northwest hometown to wrestle with various midlife disappointments: her divorce, Papa’s death, a downturn in business at the family restaurant, and, above all, her childlessness. After several miscarriages, she, a successful ad exec, and husband Conlan, a reporter, befriended a pregnant young girl and planned to adopt her baby—and then the birth mother changed her mind. Angie and Conlan drifted apart and soon found they just didn’t love each other anymore. Metaphorically speaking, “her need for a child had been a high tide, an overwhelming force that drowned them. A year ago, she could have kicked to the surface but not now.” Sadder but wiser, Angie goes to work in the struggling family restaurant, bickering with Mama over updating the menu and replacing the ancient waitress. Soon, Angie befriends another young girl, Lauren Ribido, who’s eager to learn and desperately needs a job. Lauren’s family lives on the wrong side of the tracks, and her mother is a promiscuous alcoholic, but Angie knows nothing of this sad story and welcomes Lauren into the DeSaria family circle. The girl listens in, wide-eyed, as the sisters argue and make wisecracks and—gee-whiz—are actually nice to each other. Nothing at all like her relationship with her sluttish mother, who throws Lauren out when boyfriend David, en route to Stanford, gets her pregnant. Will Lauren, who’s just been accepted to USC, let Angie adopt her baby? Well, a bit of a twist at the end keeps things from becoming too predictable.
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.Pub Date: July 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-345-46750-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2004
An unusual and mesmerizing novel, gracefully written and deeply disturbing.
In her first novel to be published in English, South Korean writer Han divides a story about strange obsessions and metamorphosis into three parts, each with a distinct voice.
Yeong-hye and her husband drift through calm, unexceptional lives devoid of passion or anything that might disrupt their domestic routine until the day that Yeong-hye takes every piece of meat from the refrigerator, throws it away, and announces that she's become a vegetarian. Her decision is sudden and rigid, inexplicable to her family and a society where unconventional choices elicit distaste and concern that borders on fear. Yeong-hye tries to explain that she had a dream, a horrifying nightmare of bloody, intimate violence, and that's why she won't eat meat, but her husband and family remain perplexed and disturbed. As Yeong-hye sinks further into both nightmares and the conviction that she must transform herself into a different kind of being, her condition alters the lives of three members of her family—her husband, brother-in-law, and sister—forcing them to confront unsettling desires and the alarming possibility that even with the closest familiarity, people remain strangers. Each of these relatives claims a section of the novel, and each section is strikingly written, equally absorbing whether lush or emotionally bleak. The book insists on a reader’s attention, with an almost hypnotically serene atmosphere interrupted by surreal images and frighteningly recognizable moments of ordinary despair. Han writes convincingly of the disruptive power of longing and the choice to either embrace or deny it, using details that are nearly fantastical in their strangeness to cut to the heart of the very human experience of discovering that one is no longer content with life as it is.
An unusual and mesmerizing novel, gracefully written and deeply disturbing.Pub Date: Feb. 2, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-553-44818-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Hogarth
Review Posted Online: Oct. 19, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2015
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