A deep immersion in everyday life in Beijing after the Cultural Revolution.
Covering one 12-hour day in December 1982, Liu's magnum opus focuses on all aspects of a working-class wedding, from the earliest preparations to the final farewells, while telling intersecting stories about the inhabitants of the Beijing building where the celebration occurs.
The novel is stuffed with Chinese history, the specifics of life in 1982 (including architecture, food, and clothing), and philosophical musings on time and what it means to be human. Each character in the Dickensian cast undergoes a private drama: They're all fully developed people, with complete histories showing the varied and complex impact of Chinese communism, particularly the Cultural Revolution, on individual fortunes. The wedding takes place in a siheyuan, a building built around a courtyard that in feudal times housed one wealthy extended family but by 1982 is divided into multiple apartments with a variety of residents, from a high-level bureaucrat and a poetry editor to a warehouse guard and a cobbler. Retired grocery store clerk Auntie Xue wants to throw her son, Jiyue, the perfect wedding, hiring young chef Lu Xichun to cook a traditional multicourse feast. The ostensible plot surrounds the wedding’s success or failure, in particular a crisis that arises over the gold-plated watch the Xues have spent their savings to buy as a gift for Jiyue’s bride. But a host of subplots involving flawed yet empathetic characters vie for attention; among them is an unflappable government bureau chief who receives a shocking letter that could destroy his career, a British-educated translator whose uneducated father disapproves of his intellectual fiance, a busybody no one likes despite her good deeds, and an opera singer whose profession and marriage collide. The novel’s heart lies with quiet, passionately competent chef Xichun, whose cooking never falters and who never loses sight of his and others’ humanity.
A deep immersion in everyday life in Beijing after the Cultural Revolution.Pub Date: Nov. 16, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-5420-3120-2
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Amazon Crossing
Review Posted Online: Sept. 28, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 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
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
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