An entertaining and touching debut from a new voice in Chinese American literature.
An ambitious debut novel that follows a Chinese immigrant, his daughter, and a White lawyer over three decades.
Tony Zhang is a quick-tempered engineer from Dalian who uproots his life in China and moves with his wife and daughter to New York in search of a better future. He finds work as a handyman at The Rosewood, a fancy apartment building, where Oliver, a handsome lawyer at a white-shoe firm with a dark family history, resides. The novel opens in 1997, when a violent incident brings Oliver into the lives of the Zhangs. Told in alternating perspectives—those of Tony; his daughter, Tammy; and Oliver—the novel reprises staple themes of Asian American fiction: generational differences, anti-Asian racism, the dogged pursuit of the American dream, and the challenges of dating across racial lines. As the novel progresses, Tony lands a job at an engineering firm and moves up its ranks, Tammy grows up to become a Harvard-educated, headstrong young lawyer, and Oliver becomes the youngest partner at his firm. The prose is at times bogged down with exposition; lengthy internal dialogue often unnecessarily supplements direct speech. The characters also verge on caricatures (that an attractive White lawyer from a wealthy background is conceited and cowardly is surely no surprise to anyone, nor is the trope of him being changed by his acquaintance with a young woman from a working-class family). But the plot is propulsive, prompting the reader to keep turning the pages, and the novel as a whole is undeniably enjoyable.
An entertaining and touching debut from a new voice in Chinese American literature.Pub Date: May 2, 2023
ISBN: 9781335426888
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Hanover Square Press
Review Posted Online: March 13, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2023
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
I Who Have Never Known Men ($22.00; May 1997; 224 pp.; 1-888363-43-6): In this futuristic fantasy (which is immediately reminiscent of Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale), the nameless narrator passes from her adolescent captivity among women who are kept in underground cages following some unspecified global catastrophe, to a life as, apparently, the last woman on earth. The material is stretched thin, but Harpman's eye for detail and command of tone (effectively translated from the French original) give powerful credibility to her portrayal of a human tabula rasa gradually acquiring a fragmentary comprehension of the phenomena of life and loving, and a moving plangency to her muted cri de coeur (``I am the sterile offspring of a race about which I know nothing, not even whether it has become extinct'').
Pub Date: May 1, 1997
ISBN: 1-888363-43-6
Page Count: 224
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1997
BOOK REVIEW
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