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
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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