An often-charming exploration of learning, love and loss.
A young Chinese woman travels to London on a student visa and falls in love with a much older English bachelor.
New in town and eager to learn English so she can better help her family run their shoe factory back in rural China, lonely 23-year-old Zhuang (“Z”) meets her unnamed 40-something lover at an artsy German film. The attraction between them is immediate, but it is her literal interpretation of his “be my guest” invitation that has her moving into his Hackney flat within a week. A sculptor specializing in pained-looking human forms, he is also a vegetarian who, prior to Z, led a mostly gay life. His bisexuality seems to bother her less than the fact that he won’t eat pork, but he is initially delighted by her youth, naiveté and absolute dependence on him. There is much that Z does not understand about western culture, and her ever-improving ESL narration of London living is both fascinating and amusing, such as when she reads a Pet House magazine to improve her language skills. As the lovers settle into a domestic routine, their relationship deepens and she realizes that speaking his mother tongue won’t necessarily help her understand her broody Englishman. The existential angst that seems “noble” to her comes across as self-indulgent to the reader. For his part, he grows tired of Z’s neediness and encourages her to backpack around Europe, where she meets a series of men, but never stops thinking of him. Back in their shared flat, in between bouts of lovemaking, Z struggles to balance her practical life plans with her romantic ideals, and by the bittersweet conclusion it is clear that she has grown in ways that neither she nor her lover could have ever imagined. Guo’s U.S. debut quickly overcomes the early chapters’ self-conscious winsomeness to become a compelling and moving tale of first love.
An often-charming exploration of learning, love and loss.Pub Date: Sept. 4, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-385-52029-4
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Nan A. Talese
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2007
Absolutely enthralling. Read it.
A young Irish couple gets together, splits up, gets together, splits up—sorry, can't tell you how it ends!
Irish writer Rooney has made a trans-Atlantic splash since publishing her first novel, Conversations With Friends, in 2017. Her second has already won the Costa Novel Award, among other honors, since it was published in Ireland and Britain last year. In outline it's a simple story, but Rooney tells it with bravura intelligence, wit, and delicacy. Connell Waldron and Marianne Sheridan are classmates in the small Irish town of Carricklea, where his mother works for her family as a cleaner. It's 2011, after the financial crisis, which hovers around the edges of the book like a ghost. Connell is popular in school, good at soccer, and nice; Marianne is strange and friendless. They're the smartest kids in their class, and they forge an intimacy when Connell picks his mother up from Marianne's house. Soon they're having sex, but Connell doesn't want anyone to know and Marianne doesn't mind; either she really doesn't care, or it's all she thinks she deserves. Or both. Though one time when she's forced into a social situation with some of their classmates, she briefly fantasizes about what would happen if she revealed their connection: "How much terrifying and bewildering status would accrue to her in this one moment, how destabilising it would be, how destructive." When they both move to Dublin for Trinity College, their positions are swapped: Marianne now seems electric and in-demand while Connell feels adrift in this unfamiliar environment. Rooney's genius lies in her ability to track her characters' subtle shifts in power, both within themselves and in relation to each other, and the ways they do and don't know each other; they both feel most like themselves when they're together, but they still have disastrous failures of communication. "Sorry about last night," Marianne says to Connell in February 2012. Then Rooney elaborates: "She tries to pronounce this in a way that communicates several things: apology, painful embarrassment, some additional pained embarrassment that serves to ironise and dilute the painful kind, a sense that she knows she will be forgiven or is already, a desire not to 'make a big deal.' " Then: "Forget about it, he says." Rooney precisely articulates everything that's going on below the surface; there's humor and insight here as well as the pleasure of getting to know two prickly, complicated people as they try to figure out who they are and who they want to become.
Absolutely enthralling. Read it.Pub Date: April 16, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-984-82217-8
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Hogarth
Review Posted Online: Feb. 17, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
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"This soil," concludes the young narrator of this quiet chronicle of garrotted innocence, "is bad for all kinds of flowers. Certain seeds it will not nurture, certain fruit it will not bear." And among the exclusions of white rural Ohio, echoed by black respectability, is ugly, black, loveless, twelve-year-old Pecola. But in a world where blue-eyed gifts are clucked over and admired, and the Pecolas are simply not seen, there is always the possibility of the dream and wish—for blue eyes. Born of a mother who adjusted her life to the clarity and serenity of white households and "acquired virtues that were easy to maintain" and a father, Cholly, stunted by early rejections and humiliations, Pecola just might have been loved—for in raping his daughter Cholly did at least touch her. But "Love is never better than the lover," and with the death of her baby, the child herself, accepting absolutely the gift of blue eyes from a faith healer (whose perverse interest in little girls does not preclude understanding), inches over into madness. A skillful understated tribute to the fall of a sparrow for whose small tragedy there was no watching eye.
Pub Date: Oct. 29, 1970
ISBN: 0375411550
Page Count: -
Publisher: Holt Rinehart & Winston
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1970
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