An ambitious portrait of the struggle to thrive in the Chinese equivalent of the “American Wild West.”
These three novellas are a magical and gritty tour through life in Shenyang’s Yanfen Street shantytown, set against the backdrop of Mao’s China.
Shifting continuously among the perspectives of multiple characters and sometimes reaching across generations, Shuang blurs the boundaries among memory, imagination, and historical events. In the first novella, The Aeronaut, flashily dressed Li Mingqi courts the daughter of his father’s former mentor at a Communist leaflet printing firm, who still resents his one-time apprentice for outshining him. Mingqi’s visit sets off a series of events that force him to reckon with his father’s death and its rippling effects on the family. The narrator of the second novella, Bright Hall, is a young man still suffering from his mother’s abandonment when he was a boy. When he and his cousin Gooseberry, a dancer, chase down the suspect in the murder of an illegal preacher, their escapade leads them onto a frozen lake and into a dreamlike interrogation with a monster fish of biblical proportions. The final novella, Moses on the Plain, follows the aftermath of a string of taxi robberies and the people who are intertwined with them, including a young girl who has a fascination with fire and whose family falls into ever more dire financial circumstances. Shuang reaches the height of his literary powers when magical realism breaks through into the everyday lives of the characters, revealing the emotional and political stakes of their actions and desires. Patient and attentive readers willing to follow Shuang through the twists and turns of the characters’ shifting narratives will be rewarded with a surreal portrait of how history is made and remembered—expanding and contracting like an Escher cityscape.
An ambitious portrait of the struggle to thrive in the Chinese equivalent of the “American Wild West.”Pub Date: April 19, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-250-83587-1
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Metropolitan/Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: April 12, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2022
An uncompromising message, delivered via a gripping story with two engaging heroines.
An undergraduate at Brown University unearths the buried history of a Latine artist.
As in her bestselling debut, Olga Dies Dreaming (2022), Gonzalez shrewdly anatomizes racial and class hierarchies. Her bifurcated novel begins at a posh art-world party in 1985 as the title character, a Cuban American land and body artist, garners recognition that threatens the ego of her older, more famous husband, white minimalist sculptor Jack Martin. The story then shifts to Raquel Toro, whose working-class, Puerto Rican background makes her feel out of place among the “Art History Girls” who easily chat with professors and vacation in Europe. Nonetheless, in the spring of 1998, Raquel wins a prestigious summer fellowship at the Rhode Island School of Design, and her faculty adviser is enthusiastic about her thesis on Jack Martin, even if she’s not. Soon she’s enjoying the attentions of Nick Fitzsimmons, a well-connected, upper-crust senior. As Raquel’s story progresses, Anita’s first-person narrative acquires a supernatural twist following the night she falls from the window of their apartment —“jumped? or, could it be, pushed?”—but it’s grimly realistic in its exploration of her toxic relationship with Jack. (A dedication, “In memory of Ana,” flags the notorious case of sculptor Carl Andre, tried and acquitted for the murder of his wife, artist Ana Mendieta.) Raquel’s affair with Nick mirrors that unequal dynamic when she adapts her schedule and appearance to his whims, neglecting her friends and her family in Brooklyn. Gonzalez, herself a Brown graduate, brilliantly captures the daily slights endured by someone perceived as Other, from microaggressions (Raquel’s adviser refers to her as “Mexican”) to brutally racist behavior by the Art History Girls. While a vividly rendered supporting cast urges Raquel to be true to herself and her roots, her research on Martin leads to Anita’s art and the realization that she belongs to a tradition that’s been erased from mainstream art history.
An uncompromising message, delivered via a gripping story with two engaging heroines.Pub Date: March 5, 2024
ISBN: 9781250786210
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: Nov. 18, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
A sugarcoated take on midcentury suburbia.
A lively and unabashedly sentimental novel examines the impact of feminism on four upper-middle-class white women in a suburb of Washington, D.C., in 1963.
Transplanted Ohioan Margaret Ryan—married to an accountant, raising three young children, and decidedly at loose ends—decides to recruit a few other housewives to form a book club. She’s thinking A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, but a new friend, artistic Charlotte Gustafson, suggests Betty Friedan’s brand-new The Feminine Mystique. They’re joined by young Bitsy Cobb, who aspired to be a veterinarian but married one instead, and Vivian Buschetti, a former Army nurse now pregnant with her seventh child. The Bettys, as they christen themselves, decide to meet monthly to read feminist books, and with their encouragement of each other, their lives begin to change: Margaret starts writing a column for a women’s magazine; Viv goes back to work as a nurse; Charlotte and Bitsy face up to problems with demanding and philandering husbands and find new careers of their own. The story takes in real-life figures like the Washington Post’s Katharine Graham and touches on many of the tumultuous political events of 1963. Bostwick treats her characters with generosity and a heavy dose of wish-fulfillment, taking satisfying revenge on the wicked and solving longstanding problems with a few well-placed words, even showing empathy for the more well-meaning of the husbands. As historical fiction, the novel is hampered by its rosy optimism, but its take on the many micro- and macroaggressions experienced by women of the era is sound and eye-opening. Although Friedan might raise an eyebrow at the use her book’s been put to, readers will cheer for Bostwick’s spunky characters.
A sugarcoated take on midcentury suburbia.Pub Date: April 22, 2025
ISBN: 9781400344741
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Harper Muse
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2025
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