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
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana. The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense. This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
Pub Date: June 1, 1985
ISBN: 068487122X
Page Count: 872
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
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