A compelling portrait of the Chinese diaspora experience that doesn’t quite land as either literary fiction or thriller.
A debut novel calls out institutionalized imperialism in the Western world.
While working at Harvard’s Sackler Museum, Will Chen, a senior majoring in art history, witnesses a robbery of Chinese art. He quickly finds himself caught up in the investigation. The problem: He’s actually running the heist. Will and four other Chinese American college students—Will’s sister and several acquaintances—have been contracted by China’s youngest billionaire, the CEO of a shadowy company called China Poly, to steal five bronze fountainheads from museums around the world and return them to China. These real-life fountainheads were looted from Beijing’s Old Summer Palace by the French and British in 1860 during the Second Opium War. The novel’s title, therefore, refers to not only the idealistic heisters, but also the art museums that knowingly purchased China’s stolen artifacts. If Will and his crew can recover all five pieces, they’ll split a $50 million payout. For each, the payout represents a release from the pressures they associate with Chinese diaspora identity: achieving financial success and making a name for themselves. The characters’ meditations on the loss and hybridity of their identity—never feeling fully at home in China or America—are spot-on. The problem is that these sections gum up the pace of the thriller. Moreover, Li’s characters are so educated, career driven, and emotionally aware that it’s hard to believe they would agree to jeopardize their futures by doing the heist in the first place. While restoring the fountainheads to China is ethically sound, why do they buy into this brawn-before-brain method of retribution? The characters themselves admit that most successful art repatriations have come about by orchestrated public outcry. Their nuanced views of their own lives do not extend to China’s politics or even the fact that they aren’t really working for China but rather for a corporation—China Poly. It’s as if the two are one and the same.
A compelling portrait of the Chinese diaspora experience that doesn’t quite land as either literary fiction or thriller.Pub Date: April 5, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-593-18473-8
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Tiny Reparations
Review Posted Online: March 1, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2022
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.
A young woman’s experience as a nurse in Vietnam casts a deep shadow over her life.
When we learn that the farewell party in the opening scene is for Frances “Frankie” McGrath’s older brother—“a golden boy, a wild child who could make the hardest heart soften”—who is leaving to serve in Vietnam in 1966, we feel pretty certain that poor Finley McGrath is marked for death. Still, it’s a surprise when the fateful doorbell rings less than 20 pages later. His death inspires his sister to enlist as an Army nurse, and this turn of events is just the beginning of a roller coaster of a plot that’s impressive and engrossing if at times a bit formulaic. Hannah renders the experiences of the young women who served in Vietnam in all-encompassing detail. The first half of the book, set in gore-drenched hospital wards, mildewed dorm rooms, and boozy officers’ clubs, is an exciting read, tracking the transformation of virginal, uptight Frankie into a crack surgical nurse and woman of the world. Her tensely platonic romance with a married surgeon ends when his broken, unbreathing body is airlifted out by helicopter; she throws her pent-up passion into a wild affair with a soldier who happens to be her dead brother’s best friend. In the second part of the book, after the war, Frankie seems to experience every possible bad break. A drawback of the story is that none of the secondary characters in her life are fully three-dimensional: Her dismissive, chauvinistic father and tight-lipped, pill-popping mother, her fellow nurses, and her various love interests are more plot devices than people. You’ll wish you could have gone to Vegas and placed a bet on the ending—while it’s against all the odds, you’ll see it coming from a mile away.
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2024
ISBN: 9781250178633
Page Count: 480
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 4, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2023
PERSPECTIVES
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
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