Transportive armchair travel if you’re willing to follow along just for the sights.
A young Vietnamese native returns to her motherland looking for answers only to find that the past does not yield its secrets easily.
In the early 1990s, Maia Trieu, a 23-year-old Vietnamese expat, is on a mission to her native country, seemingly charged by the collective diaspora to do one thing: help the Independent Vietnam Coalition contact her great aunt. The expats believe that Maia’s relative, a former military commander, is capable of instigating insurgency in the Central Highlands. While that might be Maia’s primary agenda, one she has even received a grant for, she is also in Vietnam to seek answers: What prompted her mother to stay behind in Vietnam while Maia escaped along with her dad? Who is left of her family who might have the answers and the closure she craves? In this haunting if meandering debut, Maia travels the countryside following the trail of breadcrumbs on the way to her mission: “ ‘Whatever you do,’ the Coalition instructed, ‘be at the foot of the Vong Phu Mountain on the first night of the full moon.’ ” Along the way, Maia attracts a ragtag group of fellow travelers, including an American journalist whose brother served in Vietnam. Lam blends the past with the present, fluidly teasing out strands of narrative, but at times the plot is as hazy as the smoky, incense-filled air in the temples that Maia visits. The meditative novel functions best as travelogue and food diary: “The smell of deep-fried shrimp and mung bean patties from a bánh cuốn stall filled the air. The vendor in a lilac đồ bộ waved customers to her footstools and knee-high tables as she served plates of steamed rice rolls filled with pork mince and wood ear mushrooms, garnished with blanched bean sprouts, fresh mint leaves, and chili fish sauce.” Generous doses of folklore—the tale of Hòn Vộng Phu, a wife who turns into stone waiting for her husband’s return, is a recurring theme here—and poetry add ballast to an otherwise cloudy narrative.
Transportive armchair travel if you’re willing to follow along just for the sights.Pub Date: Sept. 17, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-59709-464-1
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Red Hen Press
Review Posted Online: July 14, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2019
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.
Sisters work together to solve a child-abandonment case.
Ellie and Julia Cates have never been close. Julia is shy and brainy; Ellie gets by on charm and looks. Their differences must be tossed aside when a traumatized young girl wanders in from the forest into their hometown in Washington. The sisters’ professional skills are put to the test. Julia is a world-renowned child psychologist who has lost her edge. She is reeling from a case that went publicly sour. Though she was cleared of all wrongdoing, Julia’s name was tarnished, forcing her to shutter her Beverly Hills practice. Ellie Barton is the local police chief in Rain Valley, who’s never faced a tougher case. This is her chance to prove she is more than just a fading homecoming queen, but a scarcity of clues and a reluctant victim make locating the girl’s parents nearly impossible. Ellie places an SOS call to her sister; she needs an expert to rehabilitate this wild-child who has been living outside of civilization for years. Confronted with her professional demons, Julia once again has the opportunity to display her talents and salvage her reputation. Hannah (The Things We Do for Love, 2004, etc.) is at her best when writing from the girl’s perspective. The feral wolf-child keeps the reader interested long after the other, transparent characters have grown tiresome. Hannah’s torturously over-written romance passages are stale, but there are surprises in store as the sisters set about unearthing Alice’s past and creating a home for her.
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.Pub Date: March 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-345-46752-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2005
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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