by Vanessa Hua ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 14, 2018
A 21st-century immigrant story that, while intermittently intriguing, falls short of its potential.
A pregnant Chinese woman goes on the run in America to escape her controlling ex.
Scarlett never imagined she would find herself somewhere like Perfume Bay, a posh private accommodation for expectant Chinese mothers in Los Angeles. But when she gets pregnant with her boss’s baby, and that baby turns out to be a boy, everything in her life changes in an instant. Boss Yeung will take no risks with the son he’s always dreamed of…even if that son is illegitimate. Scarlett, who is used to working in factories and fending for herself, is not prepared for life among the pampered women at Perfume Bay who have come to America to secure citizenship for their children. When she finds out that Boss Yeung wants to pay her to give her baby up to his legitimate family, she finally decides to take her life back into her own hands and escape the claustrophobic Perfume Bay. But she doesn’t anticipate being accompanied by Daisy, a spunky and occasionally obnoxious teenager whose parents sent her away when she got pregnant with her beloved boyfriend’s baby. The two women escape north to San Francisco’s Chinatown neighborhood, where they scrounge together food and money for themselves and their newborns—all while Boss Yeung gets closer and closer to tracking Scarlett down. This debut novel from Hua, who has previously published a collection of short stories (Deceit and Other Possibilities, 2016), paints a vivid picture of Scarlett and Daisy’s unromantic and occasionally squalid, but nevertheless vibrant, life in Chinatown. Scarlett’s fear of being discovered by Boss Yeung never fully dissipates, but it is ultimately overtaken by her fear of being discovered by American authorities who could deport her, and her constant paranoia is palpable. Unfortunately, the novel never fully capitalizes on its strengths. Boss Yeung’s narrative is tedious, and Scarlett’s lacks momentum. And the novel’s saccharine ending undercuts its atmospheric successes.
A 21st-century immigrant story that, while intermittently intriguing, falls short of its potential.Pub Date: April 14, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-399-17878-8
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 14, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2018
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by Cormac McCarthy ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 2, 2006
A novel of horrific beauty, where death is the only truth.
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Pulitzer Prize Winner
National Book Critics Circle Finalist
Even within the author’s extraordinary body of work, this stands as a radical achievement, a novel that demands to be read and reread.
McCarthy (No Country for Old Men, 2005, etc.) pushes his thematic obsessions to their extremes in a parable that reads like Night of the Living Dead as rewritten by Samuel Beckett. Where much of McCarthy’s fiction has been set in the recent past of the South and West, here he conjures a nightmare of an indeterminate future. A great fire has left the country covered in layers of ash and littered with incinerated corpses. Foraging through the wasteland are a father and son, neither named (though the son calls the father “Papa”). The father dimly remembers the world as it was and occasionally dreams of it. The son was born on the cusp of whatever has happened—apocalypse? holocaust?—and has never known anything else. His mother committed suicide rather than face the unspeakable horror. As they scavenge for survival, they consider themselves the “good guys,” carriers of the fire, while most of the few remaining survivors are “bad guys,” cannibals who eat babies. In order to live, they must keep moving amid this shadowy landscape, in which ashes have all but obliterated the sun. In their encounters along their pilgrimage to the coast, where things might not be better but where they can go no further, the boy emerges as the novel’s moral conscience. The relationship between father and son has a sweetness that represents all that’s good in a universe where conventional notions of good and evil have been extinguished. Amid the bleakness of survival—through which those who wish they’d never been born struggle to persevere—there are glimmers of comedy in an encounter with an old man who plays the philosophical role of the Shakespearean fool. Though the sentences of McCarthy’s recent work are shorter and simpler than they once were, his prose combines the cadence of prophecy with the indelible images of poetry.
A novel of horrific beauty, where death is the only truth.Pub Date: Oct. 2, 2006
ISBN: 0-307-26543-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2006
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by Chinua Achebe ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 23, 1958
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.
Written with quiet dignity that builds to a climax of tragic force, this book about the dissolution of an African tribe, its traditions, and values, represents a welcome departure from the familiar "Me, white brother" genre.
Written by a Nigerian African trained in missionary schools, this novel tells quietly the story of a brave man, Okonkwo, whose life has absolute validity in terms of his culture, and who exercises his prerogative as a warrior, father, and husband with unflinching single mindedness. But into the complex Nigerian village filters the teachings of strangers, teachings so alien to the tribe, that resistance is impossible. One must distinguish a force to be able to oppose it, and to most, the talk of Christian salvation is no more than the babbling of incoherent children. Still, with his guns and persistence, the white man, amoeba-like, gradually absorbs the native culture and in despair, Okonkwo, unable to withstand the corrosion of what he, alone, understands to be the life force of his people, hangs himself. In the formlessness of the dying culture, it is the missionary who takes note of the event, reminding himself to give Okonkwo's gesture a line or two in his work, The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger.
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.Pub Date: Jan. 23, 1958
ISBN: 0385474547
Page Count: 207
Publisher: McDowell, Obolensky
Review Posted Online: April 23, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1958
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