Often melodramatic, but Da Chen’s sweeping tale, reminiscent of Zhang Yimou’s film To Live, successfully transports Chinese...
From Shaolin to the sugarloaf mountains of Gwangdong to Tiananmen Square and the skyscrapers of New York: an epic novel that neatly distills modern Chinese history.
It’s a staple conceit of martial-arts movies that brothers separated at birth will search for each other all their lives, only to fight to the death. Exiled Chinese novelist Da Chen (Colors of the Mountain, 2000, etc.) takes this stratagem and runs with it. The paterfamilias is a great general named Ding Long, a stalwart of Maoism. Stationed away from his family in South China, he sires a young son with a local woman. Ashamed, she leaps from a cliff and into legend. Young Shento’s adoptive parents are in turn massacred by Vietnamese, but not before he has been entrusted with the secret of his birth. Packed off to a military camp, he falls in love with the beautiful Sumi Wo. When events force them apart, Shento becomes a secret agent, assassin and presidential bodyguard, all the while nursing his hatred for his missing father—whose “real” family has been in turn blessed with every favor, including a brilliant son, Tan Long, who seems destined for great things in the new China. “Money will change this country, not Marxism,” Tan Long intones. “And then when we all have more money, life will be better and misery and hunger will be gone.” Of course, Tan Long’s path crosses Sumi Wo’s, both brothers thus tasting bittersweet love. Tan Long becomes a political prisoner, then exile, while Shento helps suppress China’s nascent democracy movement. Yet blood is blood, and Da Chen’s elegantly written novel ends on the promise of redemption and perhaps even reconciliation, as Shento realizes that “reality is often the antithesis of one’s dream.”
Often melodramatic, but Da Chen’s sweeping tale, reminiscent of Zhang Yimou’s film To Live, successfully transports Chinese conventions into English to recount the agony of history.Pub Date: Sept. 19, 2006
ISBN: 1-4000-9728-2
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Shaye Areheart/Harmony
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2006
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
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.
Life lessons.
Angie Malone, the youngest of a big, warm Italian-American family, returns to her Pacific Northwest hometown to wrestle with various midlife disappointments: her divorce, Papa’s death, a downturn in business at the family restaurant, and, above all, her childlessness. After several miscarriages, she, a successful ad exec, and husband Conlan, a reporter, befriended a pregnant young girl and planned to adopt her baby—and then the birth mother changed her mind. Angie and Conlan drifted apart and soon found they just didn’t love each other anymore. Metaphorically speaking, “her need for a child had been a high tide, an overwhelming force that drowned them. A year ago, she could have kicked to the surface but not now.” Sadder but wiser, Angie goes to work in the struggling family restaurant, bickering with Mama over updating the menu and replacing the ancient waitress. Soon, Angie befriends another young girl, Lauren Ribido, who’s eager to learn and desperately needs a job. Lauren’s family lives on the wrong side of the tracks, and her mother is a promiscuous alcoholic, but Angie knows nothing of this sad story and welcomes Lauren into the DeSaria family circle. The girl listens in, wide-eyed, as the sisters argue and make wisecracks and—gee-whiz—are actually nice to each other. Nothing at all like her relationship with her sluttish mother, who throws Lauren out when boyfriend David, en route to Stanford, gets her pregnant. Will Lauren, who’s just been accepted to USC, let Angie adopt her baby? Well, a bit of a twist at the end keeps things from becoming too predictable.
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.Pub Date: July 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-345-46750-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2004
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