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TWO SWORDMASTERS

Engaging storytelling in a vivid setting.

The fates of a pair of Chinese master martial artists and the women who love them play out in this two-part historical novel.

Inspired by the 2000 film Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (based on the work of Chinese author Wang Dulu), this book offers two interconnected stories about star-crossed lovers in a 19th-century world of Chinese martial arts, intrigue, and cultural constraints. In “Chiang Shiao-ho and a Willow Tree,” young Chiang rises from humble beginnings to fame as a master martial artist. He is determined to kill his father’s murderers and his childhood foes, including the dangerous patriarch of a feared martial arts school. Chiang’s desire for revenge is complicated by his love for the patriarch’s granddaughter, who has sworn to protect her grandfather with her life. Yu’s (Chinese Mosaic, 2018, etc.) second tale, “Lee Mo-bai and a Living Widow,” takes place many years later. The orphaned son of a wealthy man (Chiang’s sworn brother), Lee is an expert in the literary and martial arts. He diverges from his reluctant path to civil service when he becomes the protector of Yu Ceo-lian, a young woman traveling to meet her betrothed for the first time. The bridegroom-to-be disappears, leaving her, as tradition dictates, to be a “living widow” for life. Although loving Lee, she takes her fate into her own hands, becoming adept at martial arts and seeking to avenge the death of her father. Lee, meanwhile, earns influential friends and powerful enemies. Despite inadvertent repetition, abrupt scene shifts, and distracting grammatical and English usage hitches (“I did not teacher you all my skills”; “He knew he will win”), these stories are rich in character and shaped by both thoughtful moral dilemmas and hyper-dynamic action. While the dual epilogues are anticlimactic, the two moving tales are skillfully propelled by acts of treachery, honor, and duty; the suspenseful appearance of legendary martial arts masters; and the author’s pointed examination of the tragic consequences of endless cycles of revenge and the cultural subordination of women.

Engaging storytelling in a vivid setting.

Pub Date: March 29, 2018

ISBN: 978-1-984516-91-6

Page Count: 366

Publisher: XlibrisUS

Review Posted Online: Jan. 4, 2019

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A LITTLE LIFE

The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.

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Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.

Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.  

The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.

Pub Date: March 10, 2015

ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8

Page Count: 720

Publisher: Doubleday

Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015

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THE CATCHER IN THE RYE

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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