An inspiring and informative, if tragic, tale of Taiwan.
Lee’s historical novel, translated from the Mandarin, Hoklo, and Japanese by Smith, recounts the true story of a man who massively expanded Taiwan’s banana trade during dark days of martial law.
Ngôo Tsín-suī is from an agricultural area in southern Taiwan. His goal is to benefit local farmers, improve product quality, and expand Taiwan’s dominance of the Japanese banana market. He has remarkable success, bolstered by his concern for the farmers’ finances and his negotiation skills. He rises to become the director of an industry group, and becomes known locally as the Banana King, but his life at his farm with his wife, Gio̍k-ìn, and their beloved water buffalo, Mari, is where his heart is. Taiwan is in a state of upheaval as World War II ends; Japanese colonizers leave, and Chinese Nationalists arrive. Tsín-suī, who speaks a native Taiwanese language, Hoklo, as well as Japanese, must now learn Mandarin. The resentful local population stages a revolt that the Chinese Nationalist government brutally puts down. Tsín-suī survives the aftermath and continues to flourish in the banana business, but his stature and reputation are threatened when corrupt officials fabricate a fraud case against him. Lee’s historical novel offers readers an impressive amount of detail about a difficult period of Taiwanese history and of a figure whose grand ambition ultimately didn’t succeed (as noted in a foreword). His characterization of Ngôo Tsín-suī as the face of Taiwanese success is highly readable as various challenges, including literal storms, swirl around him. However, readers may find that the granular level of detail sometimes bogs the story down. Lee’s depiction of Tsín-suī as an innovator who put cash in the hands of small farmers is inspiring, and his story offers life lessons as well as obvious warnings about authoritarian government. Smith’s translation uses natural, contemporary English while preserving what he can of the original languages (“He must have eaten some tshau-phang sweet potatoes. Must be that’s why his stomach is so bloated”), along with providing explanatory footnotes (in this case, defining tshau-phang as “giving off a rotting odor”).
An inspiring and informative, if tragic, tale of Taiwan.Pub Date: May 30, 2024
ISBN: 9781945049446
Page Count: 458
Publisher: Shadelandhouse Modern Press, LLC
Review Posted Online: Aug. 22, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
Uneven but fitfully amusing.
Betrayed by her husband, a severely depressed young woman gets drawn into the over-the-top festivities at a lavish wedding.
Phoebe Stone, who teaches English literature at a St. Louis college, is plotting her own demise. Her husband, Matt, has left her for another woman, and Phoebe is taking it hard. Indeed, she's determined just where and how she will end it all: at an oceanfront hotel in Newport, where she will lie on a king-sized canopy bed and take a bottle of her cat’s painkillers. At the hotel, Phoebe meets bride-to-be Lila, a headstrong rich girl presiding over her own extravagant six-day wedding celebration. Lila thought she had booked every room in the hotel, and learning of Phoebe's suicidal intentions, she forbids this stray guest from disrupting the nuptials: “No. You definitely can’t kill yourself. This is my wedding week.” After the punchy opening, a grim flashback to the meltdown of Phoebe's marriage temporarily darkens the mood, but things pick up when spoiled Lila interrupts Phoebe's preparations and sweeps her up in the wedding juggernaut. The slide from earnest drama to broad farce is somewhat jarring, but from this point on, Espach crafts an enjoyable—if overstuffed—comedy of manners. When the original maid of honor drops out, Phoebe is persuaded, against her better judgment, to take her place. There’s some fun to be had here: The wedding party—including groom-to-be Gary, a widower, and his 11-year-old daughter—takes surfing lessons; the women in the group have a session with a Sex Woman. But it all goes on too long, and the humor can seem forced, reaching a low point when someone has sex with the vintage wedding car (you don’t want to know the details). Later, when two characters have a meet-cute in a hot tub, readers will guess exactly how the marriage plot resolves.
Uneven but fitfully amusing.Pub Date: July 30, 2024
ISBN: 9781250899576
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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