An inventive, melancholy debut.
A North Korean woman recounts a dramatic and traumatic life.
The protagonist and occasional narrator of Lee’s smart, complex debut contains multitudes. Asked by a writer to describe herself, she responds: “Slave. Escape-artist. Murderer. Terrorist. Spy. Lover. And Mother.” In the pages that follow, she describes all those roles and more. During her childhood she poisons her violently abusive father. During World War II she’s taken by the Japanese army and sent to a “Comfort Station” in Indonesia where she and others are routinely raped by soldiers. During the Korean War she translates for U.S. troops whom she is eventually determined to undermine. After the war she settles into a more comfortable life in Pyongyang, but her survival skills make her both insular and an expert at deception—a perfect temperament for a spy, which is a gift (and burden) she passes on to her daughter. Though Lee jumbles the timeline somewhat, it’s clear that the trickster of the title has had to develop a Scheherazade-like talent as a storyteller and deceiver as survival tactics, and Lee’s style echoes the cool, unaffected delivery of someone who’s seen it all. The narrator is defiantly proud, for instance, in describing her childhood habit of eating dirt: “I savored its taste, its tang and texture that are like no other in this world.” But as her daughter, Mihee, claims more of the story in the novel’s later pages, it’s clear that a lifetime of abuse and deceit took a serious toll. Mihee has inherited her mother’s wit and capacity to change personas as easily as clothing, but it means swallowing tyrannical treatment from men and the state, and Lee’s understated approach puts the damage in clearer relief.
An inventive, melancholy debut.Pub Date: June 13, 2023
ISBN: 9780063240421
Page Count: 304
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: April 24, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2023
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
A welcome literary resurrection that deserves a place alongside Wright’s best-known work.
A falsely accused Black man goes into hiding in this masterful novella by Wright (1908-1960), finally published in full.
Written in 1941 and '42, between Wright’s classics Native Son and Black Boy, this short novel concerns Fred Daniels, a modest laborer who’s arrested by police officers and bullied into signing a false confession that he killed the residents of a house near where he was working. In a brief unsupervised moment, he escapes through a manhole and goes into hiding in a sewer. A series of allegorical, surrealistic set pieces ensues as Fred explores the nether reaches of a church, a real estate firm, and a jewelry store. Each stop is an opportunity for Wright to explore themes of hope, greed, and exploitation; the real estate firm, Wright notes, “collected hundreds of thousands of dollars in rent from poor colored folks.” But Fred’s deepening existential crisis and growing distance from society keep the scenes from feeling like potted commentaries. As he wallpapers his underground warren with cash, mocking and invalidating the currency, he registers a surrealistic but engrossing protest against divisive social norms. The novel, rejected by Wright’s publisher, has only appeared as a substantially truncated short story until now, without the opening setup and with a different ending. Wright's take on racial injustice seems to have unsettled his publisher: A note reveals that an editor found reading about Fred’s treatment by the police “unbearable.” That may explain why Wright, in an essay included here, says its focus on race is “rather muted,” emphasizing broader existential themes. Regardless, as an afterword by Wright’s grandson Malcolm attests, the story now serves as an allegory both of Wright (he moved to France, an “exile beyond the reach of Jim Crow and American bigotry”) and American life. Today, it resonates deeply as a story about race and the struggle to envision a different, better world.
A welcome literary resurrection that deserves a place alongside Wright’s best-known work.Pub Date: April 20, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-59853-676-8
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Library of America
Review Posted Online: March 16, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2021
BOOK TO SCREEN
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