A multifaceted tale of complex characters finding new lives in their new world.
Ravaged by the Vietnam War, a culturally ingrained family from Laos leaves everything behind to pursue a dangerous journey across the Mekong River leading them from Thailand to the United States in Russell’s novel.
Violence interrupts the lush Laotian landscape: Bullets spray from the rifles of Communist soldiers, while indifferent American helicopters unleash bombs from above. A family makes the harrowing, death-defying struggle to elude patrolling soldiers and cross the Mekong River into Thailand. Nou, who later goes by Laura, recalls that half her family, including her two older brothers, perished during the escape. She was a mere child at the time, but the devastating effects of the loss lingered in her mother Yer’s fluctuating states of depression. Interestingly, Russell changes perspective throughout the story, including but not limited to Nou, Yer and Pao, the father. As each character’s internal conflicts unfold, his or her unique voice sheds light on the different aspects of Hmong culture while Nou’s family survives in the hope that the war will soon be over. After three years, Pao takes the search for a better life to America: Minneapolis, Minn. Shifting from Hmong culture to American, the family finds a stark contrast in lifestyle. Here, other ethnic groups are quick to blame the Asians for the Vietnam War and the ensuing loss of American soldiers. In school, Nou becomes the perfect target for teasing, while her childhood is spent playing the “adult” as her mother drifts deeper into depression. The novel takes another twist (thankfully the plot’s expansiveness is seamless) when the family moves to Sacramento, where Russell aptly integrates the culture clash as Nou changes her name to Laura and begins to see a life outside of Hmong cultural traditions of early, arranged marriage and many children. While her father is immersed in his farming business and her mother is intent on marrying her off to Dang—a respectable Hmong man—Laura dares to tread the boundaries of the Hmong culture, hoping that she will be able to pursue a career rather than marrying at a young age. The family’s richly drawn tension culminates in a grueling court case that affects all involved. Laura must decide if she is willing to sacrifice Hmong traditions in order to live the life she desires.
A multifaceted tale of complex characters finding new lives in their new world.Pub Date: Aug. 6, 2012
ISBN: 978-1466338104
Page Count: 278
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Feb. 17, 2012
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
The Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. During the only one that actually comes off, a local farmer happens upon them—and they kill him. But the death isn't ruled a murder—and might never have been if one of the gang—a cadging sybarite named Bunny Corcoran—hadn't shown signs of cracking under the secret's weight. And so he too is dispatched. The narrator, a blank-slate Californian named Richard Pepen chronicles the coverup. But if you're thinking remorse-drama, conscience masque, or even semi-trashy who'll-break-first? page-turner, forget it: This is a straight gee-whiz, first-to-have-ever-noticed college novel—"Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally thought to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion." First-novelist Tartt goes muzzy when she has to describe human confrontations (the murder, or sex, or even the ping-ponging of fear), and is much more comfortable in transcribing aimless dorm-room paranoia or the TV shows that the malefactors anesthetize themselves with as fate ticks down. By telegraphing the murders, Tartt wants us to be continually horrified at these kids—while inviting us to semi-enjoy their manneristic fetishes and refined tastes. This ersatz-Fitzgerald mix of moralizing and mirror-looking (Jay McInerney shook and poured the shaker first) is very 80's—and in Tartt's strenuous version already seems dated, formulaic. Les Nerds du Mal—and about as deep (if not nearly as involving) as a TV movie.
Pub Date: Sept. 16, 1992
ISBN: 1400031702
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1992
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and...
An amazingly intricate and ambitious first novel - ten years in the making - that puts an engrossing new spin on the traditional haunted-house tale.
Texts within texts, preceded by intriguing introductory material and followed by 150 pages of appendices and related "documents" and photographs, tell the story of a mysterious old house in a Virginia suburb inhabited by esteemed photographer-filmmaker Will Navidson, his companion Karen Green (an ex-fashion model), and their young children Daisy and Chad. The record of their experiences therein is preserved in Will's film The Davidson Record - which is the subject of an unpublished manuscript left behind by a (possibly insane) old man, Frank Zampano - which falls into the possession of Johnny Truant, a drifter who has survived an abusive childhood and the perverse possessiveness of his mad mother (who is institutionalized). As Johnny reads Zampano's manuscript, he adds his own (autobiographical) annotations to the scholarly ones that already adorn and clutter the text (a trick perhaps influenced by David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest) - and begins experiencing panic attacks and episodes of disorientation that echo with ominous precision the content of Davidson's film (their house's interior proves, "impossibly," to be larger than its exterior; previously unnoticed doors and corridors extend inward inexplicably, and swallow up or traumatize all who dare to "explore" their recesses). Danielewski skillfully manipulates the reader's expectations and fears, employing ingeniously skewed typography, and throwing out hints that the house's apparent malevolence may be related to the history of the Jamestown colony, or to Davidson's Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph of a dying Vietnamese child stalked by a waiting vulture. Or, as "some critics [have suggested,] the house's mutations reflect the psychology of anyone who enters it."
The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and cinema-derived rhetoric up the ante continuously, and stunningly. One of the most impressive excursions into the supernatural in many a year.Pub Date: March 6, 2000
ISBN: 0-375-70376-4
Page Count: 704
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2000
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