A chronicle of lives of quiet desperation lived half a world away, understated and thoughtful, cheerless without being...
Generational novel of loss and miscommunication in a Chinese village.
The sins of the fathers are always visited on the children. Often mentioned as China’s leading candidate for the Nobel Prize in literature, Liu (The Cook, The Crook, and the Real Estate Tycoon, 2015, etc.) writes of a simple tofu peddler who inherited the job and doesn’t want it. Yang Baishun’s father has only one friend, a carter, and even when it turns out that the friend doesn’t feel the same about him, Old Yang takes a forgiving attitude: “He shouldn’t have had to drive a cart all his life,” he sighs. His son also thinks he has a friend but does not, and so the younger Yang heads out to seek his fortune doing anything other than selling tofu. In time he has a wife and daughter, each of whom he loses: one runs away, one, it seems, is kidnapped. But by whom? The story jumps ahead two generations, and the same things are happening in a newer China: “When he turned thirty-five,” writes Liu of a descendant, “Niu Aiguo knew that there were only three people he could count on if he ran into trouble.” Run into trouble he does, as marriages dissolve, siblings vie, and the members of Yang’s bloodline look back into the past to ponder their mother’s disappearance years earlier. That mystery is in plain sight, for Liu seems concerned with other truths. Though he gives the storyline an indefinite air by not providing a firm chronology, he wants us to know that the story links two worlds, the old China of tiny villages and warlords and the new post-revolutionary one of party dictatorship and a command economy, even as nothing ever changes: “He had lied to her,” he writes. “It was only a minor lie that day. But he had started lying to her a week before, and that was major.” Friendless, untruthful, and unheard, his characters simply endure.
A chronicle of lives of quiet desperation lived half a world away, understated and thoughtful, cheerless without being morose.Pub Date: March 20, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-8223-7083-3
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Duke Univ.
Review Posted Online: Dec. 23, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2018
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.
Life lessons.
Angie Malone, the youngest of a big, warm Italian-American family, returns to her Pacific Northwest hometown to wrestle with various midlife disappointments: her divorce, Papa’s death, a downturn in business at the family restaurant, and, above all, her childlessness. After several miscarriages, she, a successful ad exec, and husband Conlan, a reporter, befriended a pregnant young girl and planned to adopt her baby—and then the birth mother changed her mind. Angie and Conlan drifted apart and soon found they just didn’t love each other anymore. Metaphorically speaking, “her need for a child had been a high tide, an overwhelming force that drowned them. A year ago, she could have kicked to the surface but not now.” Sadder but wiser, Angie goes to work in the struggling family restaurant, bickering with Mama over updating the menu and replacing the ancient waitress. Soon, Angie befriends another young girl, Lauren Ribido, who’s eager to learn and desperately needs a job. Lauren’s family lives on the wrong side of the tracks, and her mother is a promiscuous alcoholic, but Angie knows nothing of this sad story and welcomes Lauren into the DeSaria family circle. The girl listens in, wide-eyed, as the sisters argue and make wisecracks and—gee-whiz—are actually nice to each other. Nothing at all like her relationship with her sluttish mother, who throws Lauren out when boyfriend David, en route to Stanford, gets her pregnant. Will Lauren, who’s just been accepted to USC, let Angie adopt her baby? Well, a bit of a twist at the end keeps things from becoming too predictable.
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.Pub Date: July 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-345-46750-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2004
More of the same: Sparks has his recipe, and not a bit of it is missing here. It’s the literary equivalent of high fructose...
Sparks (The Longest Ride, 2013, etc.) serves up another heaping helping of sentimental Southern bodice-rippage.
Gone are the blondes of yore, but otherwise the Sparks-ian formula is the same: a decent fellow from a good family who’s gone through some rough patches falls in love with a decent girl from a good family who’s gone through some rough patches—and is still suffering the consequences. The guy is innately intelligent but too quick to throw a punch, the girl beautiful and scary smart. If you hold a fatalistic worldview, then you’ll know that a love between them can end only in tears. If you hold a Sparks-ian one, then true love will prevail, though not without a fight. Voilà: plug in the character names, and off the story goes. In this case, Colin Hancock is the misunderstood lad who’s decided to reform his hard-knuckle ways but just can’t keep himself from connecting fist to face from time to time. Maria Sanchez is the dedicated lawyer in harm’s way—and not just because her boss is a masher. Simple enough. All Colin has to do is punch the partner’s lights out: “The sexual harassment was bad enough, but Ken was a bully as well, and Colin knew from his own experience that people like that didn’t stop abusing their power unless someone made them. Or put the fear of God into them.” No? No, because bound up in Maria’s story, wrinkled with the doings of an equally comely sister, there’s a stalker and a closet full of skeletons. Add Colin’s back story, and there’s a perfect couple in need of constant therapy, as well as a menacing cop. Get Colin and Maria to smooching, and the plot thickens as the storylines entangle. Forget about love—can they survive the evil that awaits them out in the kudzu-choked woods?
More of the same: Sparks has his recipe, and not a bit of it is missing here. It’s the literary equivalent of high fructose corn syrup, stickily sweet but irresistible.Pub Date: Oct. 13, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-4555-2061-9
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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