This sympathetic account of a silver-screen legend flies admirably between triumph and tragedy but struggles to soar.
A pioneering Chinese American actress reflects on her life in Hollywood and the prejudice she faced throughout her career in this biofiction.
As a child coming of age in early-20th-century Los Angeles, Anna May Wong longed to be an actress—and she made it happen. This would have been unimaginable if it weren’t true, considering that Wong rose to fame in an era of the Chinese Exclusion Act, anti-miscegenation laws, and morality codes in the United States. As the book begins, Wong is traveling by train from California to New York in 1960, near the end of her life, and she's reading over three notebooks in which she's chronicled her stardom, dazzling social life, complicated family life, activism, and struggles with racism, misogyny, alcohol, and health. There's no doubt that the breadth of Wong’s life is worthy of artistic treatment, and she’s inspired many Asian American writers, including novelist Peter Ho Davies and poet Sally Wen Mao. The U.S. Mint released an Anna May Wong quarter in 2022. Tsukiyama presents Wong as a complex, savvy, iconoclastic artist caught between cultures as she surfs the tides of history. The novel demonstrates how Wong courageously weathered the industry's transition from silent films to talkies to the advent of television as well as her tumultuous times, from the Roaring ’20s through the aftermath of World War II. She had fascinating friendships with the likes of Josephine Baker and Marlene Dietrich and experiences working across America, Europe, and Asia. But in offering so much painstaking, historically accurate detail, Tsukiyama sacrifices story. For readers familiar with Wong’s biography, the book reads too much like an elevated Wikipedia entry. Swaths of the novel are repetitive, summarizing previous events as if they were weekly series recaps or emphasizing Wong’s struggles as a third-generation Chinese American woman without imagining any more of her internal landscape.
This sympathetic account of a silver-screen legend flies admirably between triumph and tragedy but struggles to soar.Pub Date: June 20, 2023
ISBN: 9780063213753
Page Count: 352
Publisher: HarperVia
Review Posted Online: April 11, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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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