A dry coming-of-age tale of modern Chinese history that nevertheless provides a unique perspective on an underexplored era.
Yang’s (Shanghai Girl, 2001) novel follows Mo Mo, a precocious mixed-race girl, as she grows up amid the turmoil of 20th-century Communist China.
Readers follow Mo Mo as she moves to a new area, meets new friends, acclimates to school life, struggles to find and keep love and finally grows into a young woman of talent, determination and resolve. The girl’s mother is mercurial and capricious and her protectiveness of her daughter is matched by her frustration with the constraints of motherhood; when someone who could whisk her off to New York refuses to marry her, and when her career stalls, she blames Mo Mo. The reader experiences 20th-century China—the Cultural Revolution, the industrialization of the coastal regions and the transformation of Hong Kong—through Mo Mo’s struggles and triumphs and the novel progresses competently from episode to episode. Yang uses the constraints of life in Communist China—issues surrounding job choices, visas, curmudgeonly authorities and curtailed travel—to demonstrate the hardships for Mo Mo’s family, who live with more limited opportunities than those American readers likely grew up enjoying. This gives the book a pleasing, consistent tension that is unfortunately undercut by the main character’s passivity; when Mo Mo discovers her father’s true identity, she reacts with resignation to the realization that she knew him, a moment that could have been more effectively mined for drama. The novel is structured as an Asian woman recounting her life story to a Westerner, and as such brings to mind Arthur Golden’s massively successful Memoirs of a Geisha, especially considering the similarity of the two books’ titles. Despite these superficial likenesses, however, the protagonists of the novels are entirely different. And while Geisha gave a delicately crafted look at the exotic, Yang’s tale is more relatable, but not necessarily as exciting.
A dry coming-of-age tale of modern Chinese history that nevertheless provides a unique perspective on an underexplored era.Pub Date: June 22, 2011
ISBN: 978-1461013419
Page Count: 216
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: June 13, 2011
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
Genetically engineered dinosaurs run amok in Crichton's new, vastly entertaining science thriller. From the introduction alone—a classically Crichton-clear discussion of the implications of biotechnological research—it's evident that the Harvard M.D. has bounced back from the science-fantasy silliness of Sphere (1987) for another taut reworking of the Frankenstein theme, as in The Andromeda Strain and The Terminal Man. Here, Dr. Frankenstein is aging billionaire John Hammond, whose monster is a manmade ecosystem based on a Costa Rican island. Designed as the world's ultimate theme park, the ecosystem boasts climate and flora of the Jurassic Age and—most spectacularly—15 varieties of dinosaurs, created by elaborate genetic engineering that Crichton explains in fascinating detail, rich with dino-lore and complete with graphics. Into the park, for a safety check before its opening, comes the novel's band of characters—who, though well drawn, double as symbolic types in this unsubtle morality play. Among them are hero Alan Grant, noble paleontologist; Hammond, venal and obsessed; amoral dino-designer Henry Wu; Hammond's two innocent grandchildren; and mathematician Ian Malcolm, who in long diatribes serves as Crichton's mouthpiece to lament the folly of science. Upon arrival, the visitors tour the park; meanwhile, an industrial spy steals some dino embryos by shutting down the island's power—and its security grid, allowing the beasts to run loose. The bulk of the remaining narrative consists of dinos—ferocious T. Rex's, voracious velociraptors, venom-spitting dilophosaurs—stalking, ripping, and eating the cast in fast, furious, and suspenseful set-pieces as the ecosystem spins apart. And can Grant prevent the dinos from escaping to the mainland to create unchecked havoc? Though intrusive, the moralizing rarely slows this tornado-paced tale, a slick package of info-thrills that's Crichton's most clever since Congo (1980)—and easily the most exciting dinosaur novel ever written. A sure-fire best-seller.
Pub Date: Nov. 7, 1990
ISBN: 0394588169
Page Count: 424
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 21, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1990
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