A rich and insightful coming-of-age story of not only a woman, but an artist and the country in which she was born.
A gripping memoir about growing up in—and leaving—China, from one of Britain's most acclaimed young novelists.
Guo (I Am China, 2014, etc.) spent most of her childhood unwanted: first, by parents who gave her away to a peasant couple, and later, by those adopted parents, who returned her as a sickly 2-year-old child to ailing, illiterate grandparents in a struggling fishing village. Poor, emaciated, and uneducated, Guo experienced a harsh childhood scraping by on rice porridge and the promise a Taoist monk made to her and her grandmother: "The girl is a peasant warrior….She will cross the sea and travel the Nine Continents." When the author’s parents came to reclaim her following her grandfather's suicide, her long and often heartbreaking journey to making that prediction come true began. In the communist compound of Wenling, she lived as the "unwanted one," beaten by her mother, ignored by her older brother, and abused by her community. Her love of art kept her going until she landed a coveted spot at the prestigious Beijing Film Academy. However, even in a city overflowing with culture and rebellion, oppression and censorship reigned supreme, and it wasn't until a scholarship from England granted Guo the opportunity to leave China that she was able to find artistic and personal freedom. After a decade abroad, the birth of her daughter forced her to return home to confront her family and the tragedies of her past. In evocative, captivating prose that reads like fiction, Guo brings to life her lifelong struggles against the chains of poverty, gender, and censorship. A talented wordsmith, she unabashedly lays bare her personal history with raw emotion and unflinching honesty, and she is unafraid to express her anger, disappointment, or joy at every turn.
A rich and insightful coming-of-age story of not only a woman, but an artist and the country in which she was born.Pub Date: Oct. 10, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-8021-2713-6
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: Aug. 6, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2017
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered...
The incredible true story of three Jewish women who survived the Holocaust.
Priska, Rachel, and Anka were married Jewish women in their early 20s when the Nazis took control of Europe. Like millions of other Jews, they were forced to give up their normal lives, all of their belongings, and their homes. Shuttled into ghettos and then off to one of the most notorious camps, Auschwitz II-Birkenau, they suffered through the Nazis’ increasing atrocities. But these three women all held a secret: they were pregnant. They were moved from Auschwitz and ended up in Mauthausen, another notorious death camp. With facing the most horrible conditions imaginable, all three gave birth right before the Allies accepted Germany’s surrender. In this meticulously detailed account, Holden (Haatchi & Little B: The Inspiring True Story of One Boy and His Dog, 2014, etc.) compiles an enormous amount of information from interviews, letters, historical records, and personal visits to the sites where this story unfolded. The graphic history places readers in the moment and provides a sense of the enduring power of love that Priska, Rachel, and Anka had for their unborn children and for the husbands they so desperately hoped to see after the war. Even though it occurred more than 70 years ago, the story’s truth is so chillingly portrayed that it seems as if it could have happened recently. These three women and their infants survived in the face of death, and, Holden writes, “their babies went on to have babies of their own and create a second and then a third generation, all of whom continue to live their lives in defiance of Hitler’s plan to erase them from history and from memory.”
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered through at the hands of the Nazis.Pub Date: May 5, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-237025-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 28, 2015
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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