Filled with tragedy yet touched with life-affirming passion.
Against the backdrop of China's Cultural Revolution, a husband and wife are afraid to share their deepest longings and regrets.
Debut novelist Feng writes within the context of two Chinese concepts: yuanfen and zaohua. As explained in a chapter called “The Improviser’s Guide to Untranslatable Words,” yuanfen concerns the relationship between two people “brought together in ways large or small, for a few minutes or for decades,” while zaohua encapsulates the insignificance of the individual in “the makings and transmutations” of a world “indifferent to human pain.” When Cassia and Momo meet in 1973, they both avoid sharing the yuanfen experiences that have already deeply marked them. While an engineering student in Beijing in the '60s, Momo was deeply influenced by a young violinist. Dawn—who goes on to follow her unforeseeable trajectory in a parallel subplot—introduced Momo to music. Although his commitment to proletariat ideals at the time conflicted with Dawn’s commitment to art, music will remain crucial to him in ways he can’t explain to Cassia. Meanwhile, Cassia’s belief in yuanfen and zaohua has been sharpened by a trauma she is too ashamed to share with Momo: When she was 23, she witnessed the gruesome death of the young man she loved when he fell from a fifth story window while being interrogated by revolutionary vanguard members. Based on their pasts, Cassia and Momo react differently to their daughter Junie, who was born without legs beneath her knees. Ever optimistic Momo dotes on Junie while pessimistic Cassia’s love is tinged with guilt and a sense of zaohua. Momo goes to America for grad school in 1981, and Cassia follows several years later, leaving Junie with her paternal grandparents, who give her the nurturing Cassia knows she can’t. With disarmingly quiet prose, Feng digs beneath Cassia’s and Momo’s reluctance to mine their emotional depths as they struggle to grasp their individual experiences as well as their fractured relationship.
Filled with tragedy yet touched with life-affirming passion.Pub Date: May 11, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-982129-39-2
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2021
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
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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