by Yiyun Li ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 10, 2009
A complex, downbeat, ultimately admirable tale of a cloaked portion of Chinese history.
A harrowing portrait of a woman’s execution by an oppressive Chinese regime, and how her death affects an entire provincial town.
The debut novel by Li (stories: A Thousand Years of Good Prayers, 2005) takes place across a brief stretch of days in Muddy River, a poor town hundreds of miles from Beijing. But the modest setting and short time span belie this rich, expansive novel, which captures the anxieties and brutality of life during the last days of Maoism. In the spring of 1979, a young woman named Gu Shan is scheduled to be executed for protesting the Cultural Revolution. Her parents, Teacher Gu and Mrs. Gu, are understandably heartbroken, and Shan’s death has an impact well beyond one household. On the day the townspeople gather in a nearby stadium for the mandated “denunciation ceremony,” we meet a cross-section of residents: Tong, a boy whose self-awareness grows beyond the indoctrination at his elementary school and the abuses of his alcoholic father; Kai, a former classmate of Shan’s who sympathizes with her politics even while married to a doctor eager to flatter party leaders; Nini, a crippled adolescent who’s practically enslaved by her parents; and Bashi, the town know-it-all who courts Nini even while mourning his grandmother’s death. As the story moves along it becomes clear how straitjacketed everybody’s lives are. Moreover, the reader gets graphic glimpses of Shan’s wrecked psyche before her execution and her ruined body after. Yet Li’s story has an empathetic, uncannily graceful tone. It helps that her characters aren’t strictly mournful: Tong has a boyish curiosity, Bashi is appealingly pranksterish, and Teacher Gu is admirably even-tempered, even as he slowly discovers how he was used as a political pawn for much of his life.
A complex, downbeat, ultimately admirable tale of a cloaked portion of Chinese history.Pub Date: Feb. 10, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-4000-6313-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2008
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by Yiyun Li
BOOK REVIEW
by Yiyun Li
by Hanya Yanagihara ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 10, 2015
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
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Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
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by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 1, 2006
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.
Sisters work together to solve a child-abandonment case.
Ellie and Julia Cates have never been close. Julia is shy and brainy; Ellie gets by on charm and looks. Their differences must be tossed aside when a traumatized young girl wanders in from the forest into their hometown in Washington. The sisters’ professional skills are put to the test. Julia is a world-renowned child psychologist who has lost her edge. She is reeling from a case that went publicly sour. Though she was cleared of all wrongdoing, Julia’s name was tarnished, forcing her to shutter her Beverly Hills practice. Ellie Barton is the local police chief in Rain Valley, who’s never faced a tougher case. This is her chance to prove she is more than just a fading homecoming queen, but a scarcity of clues and a reluctant victim make locating the girl’s parents nearly impossible. Ellie places an SOS call to her sister; she needs an expert to rehabilitate this wild-child who has been living outside of civilization for years. Confronted with her professional demons, Julia once again has the opportunity to display her talents and salvage her reputation. Hannah (The Things We Do for Love, 2004, etc.) is at her best when writing from the girl’s perspective. The feral wolf-child keeps the reader interested long after the other, transparent characters have grown tiresome. Hannah’s torturously over-written romance passages are stale, but there are surprises in store as the sisters set about unearthing Alice’s past and creating a home for her.
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.Pub Date: March 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-345-46752-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2005
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