A well-turned tale of broken families across continents and decades.
An American GI, a Vietnamese woman, and an Amerasian man who grew up in an orphanage seek closure decades after the Vietnam War.
Nguyễn’s stirring if sometimes melodramatic second novel—following The Mountains Sing (2020)—braids three distinct experiences of war and trauma. Phong, mixed-race and certain he’s the son of a Black U.S. soldier, strives to acquire an American visa for himself and his family in 2016 under the Amerasian Homecoming Act, but without solid proof, his request is denied. At the same time, Dan, a veteran, is visiting the country, not telling his wife, Linda, that he’s hoping to find Kim, the Vietnamese woman he fell for while stationed there in 1969. The third thread looks back to that year and follows Kim—real name: Trang—as she and her sister, Quỳnh, head to Sài Gòn to work at a bar, chatting up soldiers to earn money to square their parents’ debts. The setup—based on Nguyễn’s dissertation research on Amerasian children of the Vietnam War—allows her to address various consequences of Americans’ presence. Phong suffers lifelong poverty, anguish over his search for his father, and racism; the novel’s title refers to one of many epithets flung his way. Trang is exploited, at times pressed into prostitution, and subjected to Dan’s moods. Dan, for his part, is carrying guilt over his abandonment of Trang and from keeping the relationship a secret from Linda. Nguyễn writes with an intimate, detailed understanding of Vietnamese women’s treatment during the war and the struggles of Amerasians seeking their parents in the present. The story’s impact is blunted somewhat by her efforts to wrap the story up tidily and by stilted dialogue. (“We share a common history that bonds us together stronger than any blood ties.”) But for a story spawned from academic research, it has the grace of a page-turner and sheds light on a neglected subject.
A well-turned tale of broken families across continents and decades.Pub Date: March 14, 2023
ISBN: 978-1-643-75275-4
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: Dec. 13, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
Suspenseful, full of incident, and not obviously necessary.
Atwood goes back to Gilead.
The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), consistently regarded as a masterpiece of 20th-century literature, has gained new attention in recent years with the success of the Hulu series as well as fresh appreciation from readers who feel like this story has new relevance in America’s current political climate. Atwood herself has spoken about how news headlines have made her dystopian fiction seem eerily plausible, and it’s not difficult to imagine her wanting to revisit Gilead as the TV show has sped past where her narrative ended. Like the novel that preceded it, this sequel is presented as found documents—first-person accounts of life inside a misogynistic theocracy from three informants. There is Agnes Jemima, a girl who rejects the marriage her family arranges for her but still has faith in God and Gilead. There’s Daisy, who learns on her 16th birthday that her whole life has been a lie. And there's Aunt Lydia, the woman responsible for turning women into Handmaids. This approach gives readers insight into different aspects of life inside and outside Gilead, but it also leads to a book that sometimes feels overstuffed. The Handmaid’s Tale combined exquisite lyricism with a powerful sense of urgency, as if a thoughtful, perceptive woman was racing against time to give witness to her experience. That narrator hinted at more than she said; Atwood seemed to trust readers to fill in the gaps. This dynamic created an atmosphere of intimacy. However curious we might be about Gilead and the resistance operating outside that country, what we learn here is that what Atwood left unsaid in the first novel generated more horror and outrage than explicit detail can. And the more we get to know Agnes, Daisy, and Aunt Lydia, the less convincing they become. It’s hard, of course, to compete with a beloved classic, so maybe the best way to read this new book is to forget about The Handmaid’s Tale and enjoy it as an artful feminist thriller.
Suspenseful, full of incident, and not obviously necessary.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-385-54378-1
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Nan A. Talese
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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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