DREAMS OF THE RED PHOENIX

Name: DREAMS OF THE RED PHOENIX
Author: Virginia Pye
ISBN: 978-1-60953-123-2

by Virginia Pye ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 13, 2015

There’s a comparison to Ballard’s Empire of the Sun, but this unflinching look at a brutal era in a faraway place shares...

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A missionary family is trapped by the invading Imperial Japanese Army in the "hard and disastrous land" that’s northern China, 1937.

Shirley Carson’s husband, Caleb, died in a mudslide while assisting resistance fighters. She grieves, leaving teenage son Charles to fend for himself. Caleb (appearing in a surprising narrative thread) and Shirley connect their humanitarian beliefs—"Humans are inherently good and cooperative"—with the lure of the communist ideal, but they’re oblivious: "there is much you do not know and much you will never know," a Chinese friend tells Charles, and the same applies to his parents. A Japanese attack spurs Shirley, once a nurse, to passionate action: she turns her home into a clinic, even treating revolutionary soldiers at the behest of Capt. Hsu, a man she admires as an exemplar of the Red Army. While Charles plans to return to America, Shirley wants to join the revolutionaries. Even as Charles sees Chinese friends turn away or reject him—"No more foreign devils here!"—Shirley becomes further entangled with the revolutionaries until she’s forced to make a not-quite Sophie’s Choice but one that leaves her morally bereft. Unfortunately, Pye’s (River of Dust, 2013) portrait of Charles grants him resolution and insight beyond teenage capacity. Pye’s other characterizations flex, grow, and live: the amah Lian, whose silent sacrifices sustain the oblivious Carsons; the Japanese commandant, Gen. Shiga, his silver flask a Princeton ’15 memento; Dao-Ming, a seemingly simple servant girl; and Kathryn, a dilettante teacher, who each stand as metaphor for the chasm of misperceptions.

There’s a comparison to Ballard’s Empire of the Sun, but this unflinching look at a brutal era in a faraway place shares truth in its own way.

Pub Date: Oct. 13, 2015

ISBN: 978-1-60953-123-2

Page Count: 288

Publisher: Unbridled Books

Review Posted Online: July 14, 2015

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2015

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

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THE HELP

by Kathryn Stockett ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 10, 2009

This genuine page-turner offers a whiff of white liberal self-congratulation that won’t hurt its appeal and probably spells...

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The relationships between white middle-class women and their black maids in Jackson, Miss., circa 1962, reflect larger issues of racial upheaval in Mississippi-native Stockett’s ambitious first novel.

Still unmarried, to her mother’s dismay, recent Ole Miss graduate Skeeter returns to Jackson longing to be a serious writer. While playing bridge with her friends Hilly and Elizabeth, she asks Elizabeth’s seemingly docile maid Aibileen for housekeeping advice to fill the column she’s been hired to pen for a local paper. The two women begin what Skeeter considers a semi-friendship, but Aibileen, mourning her son’s recent death and devoted to Elizabeth’s neglected young daughter, is careful what she shares. Aibileen’s good friend Minnie, who works for Hilly’s increasingly senile mother, is less adept at playing the subservient game than Aibileen. When Hilly, an aggressively racist social climber, fires and then blackballs her for speaking too freely, Minnie’s audacious act of vengeance almost destroys her livelihood. Unlike oblivious Elizabeth and vicious Hilly, Skeeter is at the verge of enlightenment. Encouraged by a New York editor, she decides to write a book about the experience of black maids and enlists Aibileen’s help. For Skeeter the book is primarily a chance to prove herself as a writer. The stakes are much higher for the black women who put their lives on the line by telling their true stories. Although the exposé is published anonymously, the town’s social fabric is permanently torn. Stockett uses telling details to capture the era and does not shy from showing Skeeter’s dangerous naïveté. Skeeter’s narration is alive with complexity—her loyalty to her traditional Southern mother remains even after she learns why the beloved black maid who raised her has disappeared. In contrast, Stockett never truly gets inside Aibileen and Minnie’s heads (a risk the author acknowledges in her postscript). The scenes written in their voices verge on patronizing.

This genuine page-turner offers a whiff of white liberal self-congratulation that won’t hurt its appeal and probably spells big success.

Pub Date: Feb. 10, 2009

ISBN: 978-0-399-15534-5

Page Count: 464

Publisher: Amy Einhorn/Putnam

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2009

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

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THE POISONWOOD BIBLE

by Barbara Kingsolver ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 1, 1998

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The first novel in five years from the ever-popular Kingsolver (Pigs in Heaven, 1993, etc.) is a large-scale saga of an American family’s enlightening and disillusioning African adventure. It begins with a stunningly written backward look: Orleanna Price’s embittered memory of the uncompromising zeal that impelled her husband, Baptist missionary Nathan Price, to take her and their four daughters to the (then) Belgian Congo in 1959, and remain there despite dangerous evidence of the country’s instability under Patrice Lumumba’s ill-starred independence movement, Belgian and American interference and condescension, and Joseph Mobutu’s murderous military dictatorship. The bulk of the story, which is set in the superbly realized native village of Kilanga, is narrated in turn by the four Price girls: Leah, the “smart” twin, whose worshipful respect for her father will undergo a rigorous trial by fire; her —retarded” counterpart Adah, disabled and mute (though in the depths of her mind articulate and playfully intelligent); eldest sister Rachel, a self-important whiner given to hilarious malapropisms (“feminine tuition”; “I prefer to remain anomalous”); and youngest sister Ruth May, whose childish fantasies of union with the surrounding, smothering landscape are cruelly fulfilled. Kingsolver skillfully orchestrates her characters— varied responses to Africa into a consistently absorbing narrative that reaches climax after climax—and that, even after you’re sure it must be nearing its end, continues for a wrenching hundred pages or more, spelling out in unforgettable dramatic and lyric terms the fates of the surviving Prices. Little recent fiction has so successfully fused the personal with the political. Better even than Robert Stone in his otherwise brilliant Damascus Gate, Kingsolver convinces us that her characters are, first and foremost, breathing, fallible human beings and only secondarily conduits for her book’s vigorously expressed and argued social and political ideas. A triumph.