Yesterday afternoon while waiting for prescriptions from Wal Mart I learned about a library that was close by. Needing to replace my lost SD library card anyway, I spent some time there and checked out "The Piano Teacher" by Janice Y. K. Lee. I remember I had read the review in the Costco magazine. It is her first novel.
In reading reviews, I was surprised at several who did not like it. I am really enjoying it, she reveals bits and pieces at a time of the characters. I am especially interested in Hong Kong during WWII and how it affects the Americans and British who were living there. Marie Arana gave this review and I like that she introduces me to three new books about WWII, which is a subject I like to read about. The fact that I actually can visualize some of the places in Hong Kong it mentions is really neat. Meagan flew me over there in 2005 and I especially remember the Peak area which plays a big role in the book.
"War. Love. Betrayal. The harsh lessons of history. These are big subjects for any veteran writer, and yet, in her first novel, Janice Y.K. Lee confronts them admirably. The Piano Teacher is an intricate tale about the British colony of Hong Kong during World War II, when the island's inhabitants were overrun by Japanese forces, suffered a harrowing occupation and emerged profoundly shaken -- their sense of self undone.
It's hard to imagine a more complicated theme. Few have dealt with it successfully: J.G. Ballard did so in Empire of the Sun, about a lone English boy in Shanghai during the Japanese invasion; Graham Greene, too, in The Quiet American, about the French in Saigon after the war; and J.G. Farrell in The Singapore Grip, about British bankers in 1939, on the verge of a terrible conflagration. These are superb novels that manage to convey the divided loyalties, sudden reversals of fortune and deadly opportunism that a colony in peril can breed."
Anyway, good read and three more to come, yea.
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