A taut, chilling novel about the weaponization of language as a tool of oppression.
In Lau’s dark, provocative debut about two Chinese language teachers in an increasingly suppressed Hong Kong, politics becomes personal.
Two months after Wai’s gruesome suicide by an electric drill, her cubicle remains untouched. Even the bizarre mirrors that cover her desk and bookcase stay in place, a sight that the other teachers in the Chinese department at the Sing Din Secondary School avoid. But Ling, who sat closest to Wai, is reminded every afternoon when the sea of mirrors reflects the glare of the sunlight. Her life has changed dramatically since Wai’s death; forced to teach Wai’s classes, Ling finds that her workload has increased to the point that “she didn’t leave school until eight or nine o’clock each night.” Worse, her principal is pressuring her to take the LPAT, a test used to measure Chinese language teachers’ ability to teach in Mandarin. Many schools in Hong Kong are switching from teaching in the native Cantonese to the Mandarin of the Chinese mainland. The principal warns, “Competition is fierce. Ling, you’re smart. You understand what I’m getting at.” The author skillfully toggles the narrative between the present and the past to contrast the two teachers’ approaches to an unavoidable professional challenge. Awkward Wai alienates her colleagues by insisting on speaking Mandarin in staff meetings. Clever Ling’s social savviness, which enabled her to coast at the school for 10 years, is no longer enough to save her from mirroring her colleague’s downward spiral—unless she makes a radical change. The use of mirrors (the word is repeated more than 100 times throughout the novel) is a powerful metaphor, not only for Ling’s lack of self-reflection but also for a society that values surface appearances (designer brands and plastic surgery are popular topics of discussion in the teachers’ office). Translator Feeley’s concluding essay offers insightful context on Hong Kong’s current political situation.
A taut, chilling novel about the weaponization of language as a tool of oppression.Pub Date: June 11, 2024
ISBN: 978-1-55861-318-8
Page Count: 280
Publisher: Feminist Press
Review Posted Online: April 5, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2024
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.
A woman accused of shooting her husband six times in the face refuses to speak.
"Alicia Berenson was thirty-three years old when she killed her husband. They had been married for seven years. They were both artists—Alicia was a painter, and Gabriel was a well-known fashion photographer." Michaelides' debut is narrated in the voice of psychotherapist Theo Faber, who applies for a job at the institution where Alicia is incarcerated because he's fascinated with her case and believes he will be able to get her to talk. The narration of the increasingly unrealistic events that follow is interwoven with excerpts from Alicia's diary. Ah, yes, the old interwoven diary trick. When you read Alicia's diary you'll conclude the woman could well have been a novelist instead of a painter because it contains page after page of detailed dialogue, scenes, and conversations quite unlike those in any journal you've ever seen. " 'What's the matter?' 'I can't talk about it on the phone, I need to see you.' 'It's just—I'm not sure I can make it up to Cambridge at the minute.' 'I'll come to you. This afternoon. Okay?' Something in Paul's voice made me agree without thinking about it. He sounded desperate. 'Okay. Are you sure you can't tell me about it now?' 'I'll see you later.' Paul hung up." Wouldn't all this appear in a diary as "Paul wouldn't tell me what was wrong"? An even more improbable entry is the one that pins the tail on the killer. While much of the book is clumsy, contrived, and silly, it is while reading passages of the diary that one may actually find oneself laughing out loud.
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.Pub Date: Feb. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-30169-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Nov. 3, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.
Another sweltering month in Charlotte, another boatload of mysteries past and present for overworked, overstressed forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan.
A week after the night she chases but fails to catch a mysterious trespasser outside her town house, some unknown party texts Tempe four images of a corpse that looks as if it’s been chewed by wild hogs, because it has been. Showboat Medical Examiner Margot Heavner makes it clear that, breaking with her department’s earlier practice (The Bone Collection, 2016, etc.), she has no intention of calling in Tempe as a consultant and promptly identifies the faceless body herself as that of a young Asian man. Nettled by several errors in Heavner’s analysis, and even more by her willingness to share the gory details at a press conference, Tempe launches her own investigation, which is not so much off the books as against the books. Heavner isn’t exactly mollified when Tempe, aided by retired police detective Skinny Slidell and a host of experts, puts a name to the dead man. But the hints of other crimes Tempe’s identification uncovers, particularly crimes against children, spur her on to redouble her efforts despite the new M.E.’s splenetic outbursts. Before he died, it seems, Felix Vodyanov was linked to a passenger ferry that sank in 1994, an even earlier U.S. government project to research biological agents that could control human behavior, the hinky spiritual retreat Sparkling Waters, the dark web site DeepUnder, and the disappearances of at least four schoolchildren, two of whom have also turned up dead. And why on earth was Vodyanov carrying Tempe’s own contact information? The mounting evidence of ever more and ever worse skulduggery will pull Tempe deeper and deeper down what even she sees as a rabbit hole before she confronts a ringleader implicated in “Drugs. Fraud. Breaking and entering. Arson. Kidnapping. How does attempted murder sound?”
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.Pub Date: March 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-3888-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
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