A confused tale of the People’s Republic, conveyed in unconvincing prose.
A young Chinese man’s worldview is challenged by personal tragedy in this debut historical novel, set in China during the Cultural Revolution.
Hua Jiansen is a teenager so intoxicated by Chinese Communist revolutionary ideology that he travels all the way to Beijing to see Chairman Mao. He proudly forms the Red Universe Fighting Column—a youthful group of rebels that terrorize teachers and students who don’t submit to Mao’s party line—and appoints himself its commander. Later, he pulls a childish prank—falsely reporting that two signal flares were shot by “class enemies”—but Su Qin, the commander of the largest rebel group in Tiaodong, receives the news with deadly seriousness; he orders an investigation that eventually ensnares Hua Zhongyong, Jiansen’s father. Zhongyong, a lonely factory worker who was abandoned by his wife, enjoyed a torrid assignation with his son’s teacher, Pu Xia. But she’s worried their encounter will cause her to lose face, so she plots against Zhongyong with Bu Yuelian, another lover, who makes spurious accusations. Debut author Liu, in this novel translated by Zhang, vividly depicts Jiansen’s vengeful rage in response to his father’s abuse, as well as his ensuing disenchantment with the revolution, due to injustices. Liu parallels Jiansen’s fate with that of Quan Bizheng, a dedicated revolutionary whose commitment to the cause ultimately drives him insane. The author lived through the tumultuous times that he depicts here, and he captures that feeling of chaos with astuteness and passion. However, the tone of the prose is alternately bland and breathlessly melodramatic: “You’re such a dish, a dreamboat, so drop-dead gorgeous, like a fairy in the heaven,” says Zhongyong at one point. “And you’re so learned, so knowledgeable. I’m nothing but a rough hand with a smoker’s breath.” Also, the plot is so disjointed that readers may find it exasperatingly difficult to decipher. In the end, Liu seems more interested in providing a historical parable than a readable story—a design that he all but announces in his introductory commentary.
A confused tale of the People’s Republic, conveyed in unconvincing prose.Pub Date: Aug. 7, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5462-4904-7
Page Count: 454
Publisher: AuthorHouse
Review Posted Online: Oct. 18, 2018
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
Miller makes Homer pertinent to women facing 21st-century monsters.
A retelling of ancient Greek lore gives exhilarating voice to a witch.
“Monsters are a boon for gods. Imagine all the prayers.” So says Circe, a sly, petulant, and finally commanding voice that narrates the entirety of Miller’s dazzling second novel. The writer returns to Homer, the wellspring that led her to an Orange Prize for The Song of Achilles (2012). This time, she dips into The Odyssey for the legend of Circe, a nymph who turns Odysseus’ crew of men into pigs. The novel, with its distinctive feminist tang, starts with the sentence: “When I was born, the name for what I was did not exist.” Readers will relish following the puzzle of this unpromising daughter of the sun god Helios and his wife, Perse, who had negligible use for their child. It takes banishment to the island Aeaea for Circe to sense her calling as a sorceress: “I will not be like a bird bred in a cage, I thought, too dull to fly even when the door stands open. I stepped into those woods and my life began.” This lonely, scorned figure learns herbs and potions, surrounds herself with lions, and, in a heart-stopping chapter, outwits the monster Scylla to propel Daedalus and his boat to safety. She makes lovers of Hermes and then two mortal men. She midwifes the birth of the Minotaur on Crete and performs her own C-section. And as she grows in power, she muses that “not even Odysseus could talk his way past [her] witchcraft. He had talked his way past the witch instead.” Circe’s fascination with mortals becomes the book’s marrow and delivers its thrilling ending. All the while, the supernatural sits intriguingly alongside “the tonic of ordinary things.” A few passages coil toward melodrama, and one inelegant line after a rape seems jarringly modern, but the spell holds fast. Expect Miller’s readership to mushroom like one of Circe’s spells.
Miller makes Homer pertinent to women facing 21st-century monsters.Pub Date: April 10, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-316-55634-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2018
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