cross-cultural fiction Archives - The Pencil Princess Workshop

Jade City

I’ve been meaning to read Jade City for a while, and I don’t know what took me so long.

Once I finally got into it, I found this book totally lived up to its hype. It’s a brilliant story, with intricate plotting and rich world-building

The real stars, though, are the characters. My favorite is Kaul Shaelinsan, the prodigal daughter returned to her hometown to lick her wounds and try not to get caught up in the family business. But I also love her brothers, and her cousin. And the dozens of minor characters who fill out this magical city-state.

If you like young adult fantasy, or martial arts, or stories about crime syndicates, or just a wonderful story well-told, I’d recommend Jade City. (And if you don’t like any of those things, why are you reading book reviews?)

Look Both Ways in the Barrio Blanco

Jacinta and Miss learn a lot from each other in this sweet and sometimes sad foray into the life of a young woman and her “amiga.” At the beginning, neither one understands much about the others’ world, and that lack of knowledge leads to sometimes funny and sometimes heartbreaking problems.

This was a good story (though I got somewhat annoyed at the highlighted vocabulary words–and I believe I would have been even more annoyed by them when I was the target age for this story–I was very touchy when I felt people were talking down to me back then).

Despite that, I found this story enlightening. Reading it as an adult, I’m reminded that in life, good intentions are often not enough. Fools rush in…

Way too often, I’m a fool.

Shanghai Girls

A beautifully-written book about two sisters who are chased from their beautiful life in 1930s Shanghai to the US by their father’s gambling debts and the Japanese invasion. The characters and setting are very well drawn, and the plot is both enlightening and heartbreaking. Immigration to this country has never been easy, especially for those who have to deal with racism on top of the trauma of leaving their homeland.

The ending doesn’t give me as much closure as I prefer, but I still found this a very, very good book.

Does My Head Look Big In This?

This is a frequently funny, occasionally poignant story about an Arab-Australian teenager who decides she’s going to start wearing the hijab full-time (including to her private school.) It dives right into serious issues without making them seem at all heavy (faith, women’s rights, cross-cultural communication, the immigrant experience, getting along in families). It also touches on lots of lighter teenage experiences. It was a fun, worthwhile read.

The Frozen Sky

At the beginning of this story, I felt disoriented and unconnected from the characters. I almost gave up on the book.

I’m glad I didn’t. While the character development wasn’t as rich as I’d prefer, it got better. The real strength of the piece, though, was the exploration of how two radically different cultures might interact at first contact (and how politics would play into that interaction).

Well worth reading.

Flask of the Drunken Master

Susan Spann’s Shinobi Mystery series is great fun. I love that it locates me firmly in a place and time in history that I know little about. What’s even better is that it does this in a way that keeps a pretty puzzle and interesting people at the heart of the story.

In this particular book, Hiro and Father Mateo must prove the innocence of a brewer they know (Hiro owes him a favor) before the man is punished for murdering a competitor. It’s a complicated little problem, set in a destabilized Kyoto (a situation which brings its own complexities), and the strain of navigating these troubling waters reveals some fault lines–or at least pressure points–in Hiro and Father Mateo’s relationship. The descriptions are rich, the writing well-done. It was a great pleasure to read, and I’ll be picking up Susan Spann’s next book when I can.

The Poisonwood Bible

Lush with Barbara Kinsolver’s typical detail, this story transported me to a time and place I knew little about. The characters have distinct, interesting voices, and though I could see the train-wreck of a culture clash coming from the very first page, I read on, pulled inexorably toward the disaster, and then through it to the interesting things the surviving characters made of their lives afterward. I came away wanting to know more about the history of the Congo and maybe all of Africa.

As always when I read something like this, I found myself wondering what other important twentieth century events and movements my high school “World History” managed to completely skip.

I did find it difficult to believe a Southern Baptist preacher would be as immersed in the Apocrypha as the Reverend Price was, and that made me wonder about how accurately other cultures might be portrayed in the book. But perhaps Kingsolver took more trouble to research the various African groups than the American cultures she wasn’t fully part of.

This issue, however, is trifling, and on the whole, The Poisonwood Bible was well worth reading. Not, perhaps, good enough to make it onto my keeper shelf (for books I frequently reread), but close.