Kitchen Chinese
By Ann Mah
Avon, 2010
The Real Gorbals Story: True Tales from Glasgow’s Meanest Streets
By Colin MacFarlane
Mainstream Publishing, 2007
The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society
By Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows
Dial Press, 2009
Kitchen Chinese is the story of Isabelle Lee, a 33-year-old Chinese-American woman. Faced with a career-ending catastrophe, she decides to take her friends’ advice on a whim and move to China from New York so she can redirect her life and start over.
The book chronicles her adventures in Beijing. She’s faced with a language barrier, culture shock, an unsteady job and the reunion with her mysterious sister Claire, whom she barely knows despite growing up with her. Isabelle gets a job as a food critic for an expatriate magazine and is forced to travel the country to report on different types of cuisines.
Because the book is laced with themes of cross-cultural ideals of beauty, body image and fleeting love triangles, it reads better for a female audience. At the same time, other overarching themes such as cultural discovery and cuisine make it suitable for anyone who wishes to find out more about contemporary life in China.
Isabelle’s character represents the everyday person who questions themselves when faced with things bigger than they are. From her, the reader can draw lessons of the importance of humility and open-heartedness as important tools to use when seeking a change of life.
The biggest downfall of this novel is perhaps the plot, which tends to drag at certain points with needless descriptions of well-known facts and events. This isn’t true for the last 100 pages, though, which are full of interesting plot twists.
Overall, Kitchen Chinese is an excellent book for the culturally curious to cozy up in bed on a Sunday afternoon and let themselves be taken on a journey of what can be best described as fast-paced hesitation and cultural discovery.
—Aleks Dhefto
I grew up on a steady diet of stories about various gangs such as “the chocolate-legs gang,” and the “googly-four-eyes gang,” that supposedly haunted my mum’s neighbourhood as a child. The Real Gorbals Story presented me with the opportunity to read about the real razor-gangs, the Cumbie and the Tongs, and gave me a funny, heart-warming picture of life in this surly area of Glasgow known as Gorbals.
Author Colin MacFarlane writes an of his childhood and teens spent in the Gorbals; colourfully illustrating his schooling experiences, police encounters, gang wars, tenement living and an eventual departure from the mean streets. Although some of the characters are rough around the edges, readers will be drawn into the lives of the populace, who are able to enjoy a good laugh and night out at the pub even when the landlord is hammering at their door for rent.
MacFarlane, who gets into more than his fair share of trouble, recounts his exploits with such humour that his misdemeanors seem to be simple acts of benign boyish mischief.
Canadian readers might find it difficult to relate to a child who roams the streets at night with no parental supervision, but it’s impossible to repress a chuckle at the ingenuity of kids who work together to help drunken bar-goers home while simultaneously pick-pocketing them.
What stands out the most in his recollections is his strong love of the family and the community; the women uniting in the steamie to do laundry and gossip, the men gathering at the local pub after receiving their weekly pay cheque.
The incorporation of the “Gorbals patter” into the dialogue adds to the work’s authenticity, transporting the reader into one of Glasgow’s most notorious neighbourhoods. The brutality of the area is countered by the sense of community and belonging, which heightens the sense of MacFarlane’s nostalgia for the 1960s Gorbals.
—Sierra Yanush
The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society is a cozy compilation of stories about post-World War Two tribulations in London and the Channel Islands. Letters offer insight into the characters like stories within a story.
The form is refreshing as the reader’s relationship to secondary characters builds alongside protagonist Juliet’s in a seemingly natural way. The story has multiple plot lines throughout: Juliet and her love interest with a sophisticated American, her growth as a mother figure to Kit, the rebuilding of a life from a Nazi war victim Remy and the interactions between London socialites and charming Guernsey literary folk. The content of the book is surprisingly dense as Shaffer sweetly melds the narrations together.
Juliet’s publisher Sidney and sister Sophie are confidantes and deeply trustworthy friends. Shaffer and Burrow provide the reader with a sense of intimacy from the variety of narrations, which provide different angles as the characters are shaped within the story. The plot can at times be a little too cute, à la Anne of Green Gables, with their quaint lives a picture of perfect as they collect shells, paint wildflowers and have picnics. However, the novel is balanced with personal s of some of the horrors in Nazi concentration camps and features a kind of emotional intensity and care-freeness.
The intertextuality of poets, novelist and biographers along with the creation of the Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society will entice avid readers. The novel places us in the context of classics such as the publishing battle over discoveries of Oscar Wilde letters.
Reading in our present context is enhanced by Juliet’s struggle as a female writer during post-World War Two, as she chooses between her work as a novelist and the wife behind a fast-paced upper-class husband.
Overall, the story allows you to grasp a different understanding of WWII not often told from the perspective of English Channel Islanders in a light and tender manner.
—Haley Mitchell
Carpentaria
By Alexis Wright
Atria, 2009
The Cellist of Sarajevo
By Steven Galloway
Vintage Canada, 2009
Dark Star Safari
By Paul Theroux
Mariner Books, 2004
Three words came to mind after reading Alexis Wright’s novel Carpentaria: confusion, intrigue and curiosity.
The novel tells the story of different characters inhabiting a fictitious town in Australia known as Desperance. The characters face many of the classic struggles that burden Aboriginals in industrialized countries within their clan, with people outside of their communities and finally with the constraints society imposes on them.
The novel begins with the captivating character of Normal Phantom. Normal Phantom seems to be a perfect reflection of Karate Kid’s Mr. Miyagi. He draws readers in with his mystical personality and his ion for the world. The Phantom family with Elias Smith (another Aboriginal in the town of Desperance) together create a magical realism by bringing readers into the world of Aboriginal folklore.
As someone with no exposure to Aboriginal literature (both Canadian and Australian), this novel was confusing. Wright has a compelling writing style that combines various tales of Aboriginal folklore with the struggles faced by the characters in the story. The parallel narratives allow one to appreciate the imagery and symbolism of the folklore and the characters themselves. But often when reading it—especially if you’re reading right before bed—an important plotline will be missed. There’s so much going on that it can be overwhelming. Wright is an up-and-coming Australian author that will make a big name for herself with Carpentaria. If one can follow along, the book contains a mystery that will make you laugh, cry and most of all bring you into a magical world of the lives of the Pricklebush people.
—Alanna Ryan
What do we do when our whole world falls apart? Steven Galloway creates a haunting tale of the lives of three people fighting to survive in Sarajevo during the Yugoslav wars in the 1990s.
The Cellist of Sarajevo circulates around the story of the lead cellist of the symphonic orchestra who watched as 22 of his friends and neighbours were killed by a bomb as they waited in line for bread. As a tribute to these people, he decides to play Albinoni’s Adagio once a day for 22 days, once for each victim. Arrow, a female sniper working to protect the city of her childhood, is assigned the job of protecting the cellist from enemy snipers fighting to destroy this symbol of hope for the people of Sarajevo.
Galloway’s prose portrays the beautiful city of Sarajevo as it was before the outbreak of war, and as it has now become—displaying what the characters describe as the key sign of modernity. The streetcars, left scattered around the city in flames, act as hideouts for snipers.
The Kite Runner of Yugoslavia, the Cellist of Sarajevo tells a rarely shared tale of civilians trapped inside the walls of their city under siege. Do they stay and protect their way of life, or do they accept that it has already ended and try to flee?
—Martha Nelson
Paul Theroux gives a vivid, enlightening of Africa from his journey through Cairo to Cape Town. Theroux, often lauded as one of the great travel writers of the 21st century, is trying to rediscover his beloved Africa from the time he spent there in the 1960s. Instead, Theroux finds himself in a place ravaged with corruption, violence, AIDS and poverty. Determined to tell the continent’s untold tales and find the hope beneath the misery, Theroux provides a comprehensive guide to contemporary Africa.
Through Theroux’s bravery and boldness readers are navigated through some of Africa’s most conflicted regions and unfamiliar territory. His descriptions are detailed and observant, allowing the reader to experience this once-in-a-lifetime adventure with him. His experiences vary from camping in the Nubian Desert, meetings with the Ugandan Prime Minister and visiting archaeological sites in South Africa.
Well written and easy to read, Dark Star Safari provides a multi-faceted of the many peoples in Africa. Since Theroux’s journey is great in magnitude—travelling from Cairo to Cape Town—he is able to illustrate the rich diversities between the cultures as he travels, paying attention to the different tribes, languages and religions that make up the complexity that is Africa.
Theroux combines vivid imagery and the necessary historical, political and cultural information so readers are given as detailed an as possible. His encounters with locals, important African figures, writers, tourists and everyone in between give perspective and insight into the struggles the continent is facing, as well as the brilliant cultures that persist through it all.
Theroux is relentlessly honest in his storytelling, not withholding his opinions on the politics of corruption, aid work and foreign policy. However through all of his scepticism, Theroux displays his deep respect and wonder for Africa and its people, and the emotional attachment he feels to them. This book is an excellent read as it spans a large portion of the continent, providing s of many of its cultures and much of its recent history. His journey is adventurous and exciting, a trip definitely worth taking with him.
—Carolyn Flanagan
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