Ms. Hen reviews Girl in Translation

Girl in Translation

Jean Kwok

Riverhead Books

2010

 

Ms. Hen picked up this book at a Little Free Library near where she lives. She didn’t know anything about the book or the author, but she read the back quickly, and thought it would be something she liked. This book was part of an event in the town where she lives called Malden Reads, which tries to have people read the same book so they can all discuss it. It is run by the Malden Cultural Council. Ms. Hen has never been to any of their events, but she has read some of the books the group has suggested.

 

This novel is about a young girl, Ah-Kim or Kimberly and her mother who are from Hong Kong, but emigrate to New York. Kimberly is twelve when she arrives, and she barely knows any English. She and her mother live in a dirty apartment with roaches and rodents that does not have heat. Her mother works in a sweatshop that is run by her sister. Her mother has to pay off her sister for her trip to America, and also helping her to recover from tuberculosis. Kimberly works with her mother in the factory because her mother gets paid by the piece, which is illegal.

 

Kimberly was always the smartest person in her school in Hong Kong, but she initially struggles in school in New York. She eventually gets into a prestigious high school, and works hard to get good grades so she can get a decent job in the future and support her mother. She suffers in school at first because she is the only Asian person, and she is poor and wears homemade clothes. She falls in love with one of the boys that works in the factory with his mother, and flirts with other boys in the school. She is industrious, and does not want to be distracted from her goals.

 

Ms. Hen found this novel gripping. There are parts which are like everyone’s life in school, how it’s embarrassing, and awkward, but for Kimberly everything seems much worse, because she’s so different. This is not a young adult novel, even though it’s written about a teenager. There are a lot of colorful descriptions, and unique ways of saying things, especially when the characters are speaking in Chinese. Ms. Hen is fascinated by the immigrant experience, most likely because she is not an immigrant, and does not know what it’s like to leave everything behind and start a new life.

 

Some chickens appear in this novel, which Ms Hen appreciates. A great scene is when Kimberly’s mother gives the teacher, Mr. Bogart, a Christmas gift, “He raised his eyebrows and then slowly flipped open the cover of the container to reveal a large soy sauce drumstick inside.” Kimberly was mortified, also because she and her mother could not afford such luxuries. Ms. Hen knows this does not mention a chicken, but she assumes the drumstick is chicken. Ms. Hen thinks this scene is sad, and she knows things like this happen to children all the time.

 

Ms. Hen loved this book. She thinks that the character is fascinating; she goes from rags to riches, a true American dream story. Ms. Hen admires people who can work hard, and achieve a lot, and though this is fiction, there are stories like this everywhere. Ms. Hen understands that this novel was partly based on the author’s life, which Ms. Hen is impressed with because even though the novel is not completely true, the author made the character's life into something different and fascinating in its own way. Ms. Hen adores books like this.

 

 

 

 

Ms. Hen reviews To the Lighthouse

 

To the Lighthouse

Virginia Woolf

Harcourt, Inc.

1927

 

Ms. Hen read this novel twice many years ago, and she didn’t like it either time. She had heard that a lot of writers love this book, and she didn’t understand why because she thought it was boring. She found it at a Little Free Library in her neighborhood recently, and she decided to give it another chance. She’s glad she did.

 

Ms. Hen believes the reason she didn’t like it before was because she was an uneducated reader, and didn’t understand that plot is not supposed to be the most important aspect of this novel. She was frustrated that the characters talk about going to the lighthouse, and then at the end of the book they go to the lighthouse. But that is not the whole story.

 

This novel is about a family, the Ramsays, and their summer house off the coast of Scotland. They have people stay with them, and they are on break from ordinary life. Mrs. Ramsay is a beautiful fifty-year old woman with eight children, and she likes to take care of people. Mr. Ramsay is a philosopher, and is cantankerous. One of their guests, Lily Briscoe, is an unmarried woman who Mrs. Ramsay hopes will marry soon. James, their son, is a young boy who wants to go to the lighthouse, and is crushed when his father says they cannot go in the first part of the novel.

 

TO THE LIGHTHOUSE consists of up the different points of view of the characters. The reader gets to go into each character’s head and find out what each is thinking. Everyone is pondering something different, and the thoughts are not linear, one thought bounces to the next in a realistic fashion, the way people think and not usually the way things are written. This is Modernist writing.

 

This novel is about the passing of time, and dealing with loss. Grief hurts, but as time goes by it gets easier for some people, for others, the ache never disappears. Ms. Hen could not understand that the first two times she read this novel, but she does now. Grief is something that stays with you, but you can hide it, or do things to help ease the feeling.

 

This is a subtle novel full of complexities and nuances. The characters suffer, especially the women. This novel is about how difficult life is, especially for women, either married or unmarried. Ms. Hen realized that this novel was published almost one hundred years ago, and it’s about situations that would have occurred about a hundred years ago. It makes her think of how much the world has changed since then, especially for women. Lily Briscoe was an unmarried woman, and she had to deal with that; these days, if she was not married at her age, her life would not be as marked, and not as ostracized. The world changes, and it does not, and time marches on, and people live and die, and in between we struggle to survive.

 

Ms. Woolf writes in elongated sentences that have multiple commas and semicolons. Ms. Hen has read several of her other books, and she always wonders if she writes such long thoughts because she was a person with undiagnosed bipolar disorder, and she wasn’t on medication. She wonders if she was on medication that her ideas would be shorter. The world will never know. Ms. Woolf wrote an enormous amount for the period of time she was writing.

 

This might not be her favorite novel that Ms. Hen has read, but it is one that makes a person think a lot about life and the world and the passing of time. The writing is beautiful, and it is not a fast read, but it is a good book to read at the end of the summer, possibly by the ocean, but Ms. Hen did not do that. She did read some of it by a river on her lunch break, the water tossing at the edge, similar to the characters' trip to the lighthouse.

Ms. Hen reviews Opium and Absinthe

 

Opium and Absinthe

Lydia Kang

Lake Union Publishing

2020

 

Ms. Hen read this because she leaned that it was about vampires, and she is into vampires right now. She knew nothing about the author at first, but Ms. Hen found out that she is a physician. She thinks the cover of the book is beautiful, and was intrigued by the story.

 

This novel is about a young woman in 1899 New York, Tillie Pembroke, whose sister dies, and right before that she is in a horse accident and she breaks her clavicle. Tillie is in a lot of pain, so she goes to the doctor, and is prescribed laudanum, which is type of opium, and she becomes addicted to it, and it affects her senses. Her sister Lucy is found murdered, with two puncture marks at her throat and a bottle of absinthe next to her.

 

Tillie, determined to find out who killed her sister, goes on a quest to find the murderer. She lives in the house with her mother and her grandmother, and they decide to keep a tight reign on her after her sister’s death. Tillie’s family has a lot of money, and they live in the stylish section of New York. Tillie manages to sneak out of the house and find assistance from Ian, a young man who sells newspapers, or as they are called, a newsie.

 

Tillie is adventurous and is not afraid to try to uncover the circumstances surround Lucy’s death. She has always been a person who is interested in learning, she reads the dictionary, and she likes to find out information about the world around her. Living in that era, it would be difficult for a young woman to be like that because women weren’t supposed to be curious, the point of their lives was to find a husband, get married and have children.

 

When Ms. Hen started reading this, she thought it would actually be about vampires. There is a lot of mention of Bram Stoker’s DRACULA, because the novel takes place in the year that came out, and the murders that occur look like vampire killings. But no vampires actually appear, and Ms. Hen was disappointed. This is more of a historical gothic mystery than a vampire novel, which Ms. Hen is fine with when she realized that was the case. It’s a nice novel about a young woman finding herself and trying to solve the mystery of her sister’s death. It’s also a female empowerment novel, because Tillie does not take any garbage from anyone, she wants to do what she wants in life, and Ms. Hen doesn’t think there is anything that will stop her.

 

There is some talk in this novel about the coming new millennium, which Ms. Hen was confused about, but then she realized that was considered 1900 or the twentieth century. Ms. Hen thinks it’s interesting that people now think this century is the new millennium, but it was actually in 1900. Ms. Hen did some research about this, and found this article:

 https://abcnews.go.com/US/1900s-century-hype-millennial/story?id=89978#:~:text=%201900%27s%20New%20Century%20Hype%20Was%20Millennial%20,but%20the%20drumbeat%20started%20as%20early...%20More%20

Sometimes things aren’t what you expect them to be. This article talks about the technological advances in the nineteenth century, but just in the past thirty years there have been so many changes in the world, that Ms. Hen can’t keep up.

 

Ms. Hen liked this book, even though it wasn’t what she expected it to be. She kept waiting for the vampires and they never showed up. But that happens with lots of things in life, you want something to come, and it never does, but we deal with things anyways, and keep going on.

 

 

Ms. Hen reviews I am Madame X

 

I am Madame X

Gioia Diliberto

Scribner

2003

 

Ms. Hen picked up this book at a Little Free Library near where she lives, which she stumbled across one day walking around her neighborhood. She had heard about the book years ago when it first came out, and she was intrigued, because she likes art, and is also a fan of John Singer Sargent.

 

I AM MADAME X is a novel about a painting called Portrait of Madame X by John Singer Sargent. The painting caused a scandal when it was shows in the Paris Salon in 1884, because the French saw it as obscene. It didn’t help that both the artist and the model were Americans, because Paris society was always looking for a reason to make Americans the scapegoats.

 

The novel is an imagined life of Virginie Gautreau, the model of the portrait. When she is young, she lives in Louisiana on a plantation near New Orleans named Parlange. She lives with her grandmother and mother, uncle, and sister. Her parents separated, but her father dies in the Civil War. When the war hit, her mother takes Virginie and her sister Valentine to Paris and are supported by her aunt’s former fiancé, who her aunt did not marry because she jumped out the window on her wedding day.

 

Virginie and her mother and sister move back to Louisiana after the war, but the plantation does not make that much money. They move back to Paris when her mother gets an inheritance from her husband's estate. Her mother is materialistic and wants to launch herself into Paris society. She buys a house and has parties, and hopes to marry Virginie to a duke or an aristocrat.

 

Virginie is beautiful, exceptionally so. She has an affair with a doctor named Dr. Pozzi and gets pregnant. Her mother is furious, but Viginie gets married to a family friend Pierre, a marriage blanc, which means a marriage of convenience in which the couple can do what they wish. Pierre has a married lover, and he would carry on as usual. His family wanted him to be married because it was the right thing to do.

 

Virginie has love affairs and she eventually meets Sargent. She is vain and has always wanted her portrait painted. The Paris Salon is a scandal, and at first she is gossiped about as a harlot and Sargent has to leave Paris because he is ostracized and could never work there again.

 

Ms. Hen thinks it’s interesting how the world has changed. The painting now looks so innocent and elegant, compared to what is shown today. She would have thought that the French would love something like that, but she thinks they weren’t ready for it when it came out.

 

This novel reminded Ms. Hen of a couple of things she has read. The setting reminded her of Proust, of Paris society in the late nineteenth century. When she read the author’s notes, she learned that Dr. Pozzi was a real person who Proust based one of his characters on in IN SEARCH OF LOST TIME.

 

This also reminded Ms. Hen of a memoir she read called THE BASTARD or LA BATARDE in French by Violette Leduc, a book about her life as an illegitimate child and the problems being ugly. I AM MADAME X reminded her of this because the two characters were the case of extremes: one was the height of beauty and the other the height of ugliness. The also lived in Paris, and they lived through different wars.

 

Lots of chickens live in these pages, as they do in books about France. When Virginie lives on the plantation, she talks about her pets, “Or we’d spend hours playing with our pets at the barn. I had two chickens, which I had named Sanspareil and Papillon.” Ms. Hen likes that Virginie had pet chickens when she was young.

 

Ms. Hen enjoyed this book, even though the central character was vain, and the world she lived in was a superficial world, where everyone was obsessed with looks and trivialities. Ms. Hen is interested in art, and things that are beautiful, but she knows the fruit beneath the flower is what is more important.

Ms. Hen reviews The Woman in White

Ms. Hen on the porch with the Nose

The Woman in White

Wilkie Collins

All the Year Round

1860

Ms. Hen decided to read this novel because she wanted to read a book on her phone while she was at work, and this was inexpensive for her Kindle app. She didn’t realize how long it was when she started reading it, and it was difficult for her to read such a lengthy book on her phone! She will not make that mistake again. She liked the book, but the way she read it was frustrating to her.

This novel is considered one of the first sensational novels and the first detective novels. Wilkie Collins and Charles Dickens were friends, but Collins’ fame has diminished over the twentieth century and beyond, while Dickens’ has not. They both wrote serialized novels; THE WOMAN IN WHITE was published this way between November 1859 and August 1860. It is written in the epistolary form.

This novel is about a young man named Walter Hartright, a drawing instructor, who starts teaching at a house where two young women live with their uncle, and on the way there, he meets a woman dressed in white who she says escaped from an asylum. He is frightened, and he wants to help her, but she goes away. Hartright teaches at the house, and falls in love with one of his students, Laura Fairlie, but she is engaged to someone else. He leaves, heartbroken, and Laura’s sister Marian consoles him. He embarks a ship destined for the Americas where he is to be a cartographer in the New World.

Laura gets married to Sir Percival Glyde and travels to Italy after their wedding. When they come home, they bring Count Fosco and his wife, Laura’s aunt, to their house. Marian comes to live with them. What occurs and what is underlying in the story is complicated and twists and turns, and Ms. Hen had a hard time following it sometimes. There are a lot of secrets involved in the novel.

Ms. Hen liked this novel, but she thinks she would have enjoyed it more had she not read it on her phone. It is reminiscent of Charles Dickens, in the way things dragged out a lot. Ms. Hen heard that Dickens got paid by the word, and it must have been the same for Collins. Ms. Hen thinks that this novel is important because it is historical, and groundbreaking, and a new literary form is always something to pay attention to and learn from.

The view whilst reading The Woman in White