Book Review: Mambo in Chinatown by Jean Kwok

Mambo in Chinatown

Mambo in Chinatown by Jean Kwok is set in modern day America and has several ethnicities represented in its American story of immigrants old and new.

Book beginning:

My name is Charlie Wong and I'm the daughter of a dancer and a noodle-maker. My mother was once a star ballerina at the famed Beijing Dance Academy before she ran off to marry my father, the handsomest noodle-maker in Beijing - or at least that's what she always called him before she died. Hand in hand, they escaped to America to start their family. 

Page 56:

The dress was quite modest but revealed my neck and collarbones. I understood the moment Pa paused that I'd done wrong.
"Don't you like it?" I asked, already knowing the answer.
"You look like a dancing girl," he said.
"Ma was one," Lisa said.
"Your mother was a dancer," he said. 

My comments:

Charlie Wong is American-born Chinese (ABC) and her parents were born in China (FOB - fresh off the boat. Don't you just love these acronyms!).

Charlie breaks out of a Manhattan Chinatown mold and enters the world of dance, a world her mother, a former Beijing Opera dancer, had introduced her to. Charlie meets Caucasians, American Blacks, Hispanics, and international dancers and changes her limited future to one that opens for new opportunities. She also helps her troubled younger sister Lisa to find optimism and her place in American society.

Informative look at some new Americans and some of the difficulties between the modern and the traditional cultures many young American immigrants face. Excellent characterizations and storytelling, Mambo in Chinatown pulls you into the world of a young woman inspired by her mother to make a better life for herself in America.

Friday 56 Rules:

 *Grab a book, any book. *Turn to page 56 or 56% in your eReader  *Find any sentence, (or few, just don't spoil it) that grabs you. *Post it. *Add your (url) post in Linky at Freda's Voice Also Book Beginnings by Rose City Reader.

London's Book Benches

I found out about the book benches of London through a post from Euro Crime which had a picture of a fabulous painted bench.Check it out on her blog.

For more benches, check out Books About Town, which will give you links to the locations and pictures of various literary book benches. Here are a few:

Peter Pan

Sherlock Holmes

Pride and Prejudice

Hercule Poirot and the Green Shore Folly

War Horse

The themes also include children's books.

That's not my meerkat

The Jungle Book

Go ahead and look at all the London book benches at Books About Town....have fun! Which one would you choose for a seating place while you read?

If you must have one of those benches, they are being auctioned later on, in London!

The Hidden Girl by Louise Millar: Waiting on Wednesday

Waiting on Wednesday is a weekly event, hosted by Breaking the Spine, that spotlights upcoming releases that we're eagerly anticipating.

The Hidden Girl

The Hidden Girl by Louise Millar will be published in paperback August 26, 2014 by Emily Bestler/Atria.

In a remote village in the Suffolk countryside,
"...this gripping psychological thriller follows a young woman who uncovers a terrible secret in her idyllic suburban neighborhood—but who will believe her?"

I have read and reviewed Millar's The Playdate, a light psychological suspense novel about three neighbors, one of whom needs after-school care for a child. I am eager to see what the author has written in this new novel.

What new book release are you waiting for?

Murder, Simply Stitched by Isabella Alan: First Chapter

First Chapter, First Paragraph is a weekly meme hosted by Bibliophile by the Sea.

Murder, Simply Stitched

Book beginning:

When my mother enrolled me in the Little Miss Texas Butterfly Beauty Pageant at the age of eleven, I don't believe it ever crossed her mind that one day I'd be lying in the dirt with my arms around the neck of a runaway goat. 

Petunia the Nubian goat baaed and kicked at me with her sharp hooves. I shifted my body away from her reach, and one of her long tawny-colored ears smacked me in the face. Two minutes ago when Petunia had raced past me as I made my way to the auction barn, jumping on her back seemed like a fantastic idea. 

From the book description: Angie, owner of an Amish quilt shop, decides to sell her quilts in the Rolling Brook Amish Auction... The quilts promise to be a hit—but the gavel comes down on the lively event when Angie stumbles upon the body of township trustee Wanda Hunt behind a canning shed. The cause of death: a poisoned blueberry fry pie from Rachel Miller’s bakery table. Now Angie’s closest friend is a murder suspect. 

Based on the opening sentences and the book description, would you keep reading?

Book Review: Leaving Time by Jodi Picoult

Welcome to the Sunday Salon where bloggers share their reading each week. Also visit The Sunday Post hosted by The Caffeinated Book Reviewer, It's Monday: What Are You Reading hosted by Book Journey, and Mailbox Monday each week. Also visit Tynga's Reviews at Stacking the Shelves.

Went to the outdoor pool at the gym today. Glorious, and not too busy. Got swim exercises and some reading done. Trying again tomorrow in between watching soccer games on TV.

I have finished reading the newest Jodi Picoult book, Leaving Time, to be released October 14. Thanks to the publisher for sending an Advanced Reader's Edition. Here are the comments I posted on Goodreads, which did not give away the crucial elements of the plot, as the author has requested:

My first Jodi Picoult book. How lucky to have read this one as my first. Part mystery, part science, it's mainly a novel about close but sometimes tenuous mother-daughter relationships that are mirrored in the animal world - among wild elephant herds, the bond between these animal mothers and daughters last all through their lives. Extremely moving on the human level, this novel is also a plea to help elephants abused in captivity or prevent their slaughter by poachers who sell their ivory. 

The novel is engrossing, with believable, sympathetic, and captivating human (and animal) characters. The plot has surprises as it goes along - one of the marks of  excellent writing.

I later realized I had read an earlier Picoult, Songs of the Humpback Whale, which I also liked. I gave Leaving Time a 5 star rating and highly recommend it. It caught my attention as soon as it arrived in the mail and I read it right away!

Also on my To Be Read list of new books are:

Once Upon a Time in Rio by Brazilian playwright, Francisco Azevedo, a novel about three generations of a family whose kitchen contains the secret ingredient for happiness. Published June 24, 2014 by Atria Books.

Vertigo 42 by Martha Grimes - the inimitable Scotland Yard Superintendent Richard Jury returns in the 23rd in the detective series. This one has "literary references from Thomas Hardy to Yeats," a sure draw for lovers of mystery and literature. Published June 3, 2014 by Scribner.

Mr. Mercedes by Stephen King goes in a new direction. This one is a thriller, not horror, in which three unlikely heroes "try to stop a lone killer from blowing up thousands." Since King is a master of the art of writing, I have high hopes for this one. Published June 3,2014 by Simon & Schuster.

I Stand Corrected: How TEaching Western Manners in China Became Its Own Unforgettable Lesson by Eden Collinsworth is "a fusion of memoir, manners, and cultural history from a successful businesswoman well versed in the unique challenges of working in contemporary China." I am also looking forward to reading this one. Publication October 7, 2014 by Nan A. Talese


I picked up a publishing mystery from my TBR pile and am reading

A Dangerous Fiction by Barbara Rogan. It's intriguing as a mystery involving literary agents and demanding and sometimes vengeful? unpublished writers.We'll see who the culprit of some nasty tricks turns out to be.....The book was published July 25, 2013 by Viking Adult.

I'll be reading The Sea Garden by Deborah Lawrenson for a book tour early July.

Happy July 4th holiday coming up!

Book Review: The Beautiful American by Jeanne Mackin

Friday 56 Rules:

 *Grab a book, any book. *Turn to page 56 or 56% in your eReader  *Find any sentence, (or few, just don't spoil it) that grabs you. *Post it. *Add your (url) post in Linky at Freda's Voice Also Book Beginnings by Rose City Reader.

The Beautiful American

Book beginning:

In the ornate doorway of Harrods' perfume hall people rushed past me as I stood, frozen.

A radio played somewhere, Churchill's voice rising over the crowd, commending the English again for surviving the storm-beaten voyage. The war was over; we were picking up the pieces and carefully, slowly putting out lives back together. But my daughter was lost, in her own way another war casualty. The grief struck me anew and I was immobile in a doorway, unable to go forward or backward, unmoored by grief. 

Page 56: 

A few times I thought I saw her. I'd glimpse the back of a tall blond strolling the Champs-Elysees, or a profile of a woman sitting in a cafe with Lee's long, elegant nose. 

My comments: Set in Paris in the 1920s and during WWII and after, the novel tells the story of two very different American women and how their lives interact. The fictional Nora Tours encounters her childhood playmate in Paris after WWII - Lee Miller, a photographer known for her war photos and her marriage to another famous photographer, Man Ray. At the time, Nora is searching for her teenage daughter Dahlia who has gone missing in Paris.

The Beautiful American, published June 3, 2014, gives us another taste of the 20s, and references to Lee Miller's WWII photos. In that sense, it is a successful historical novel. I saw the first half of the novel primarily as a showcase for 1920s Paris and its famous artists. Characters make cameo appearances and names are dropped here and there - characters such as Chanel, Diaghilev, Nijinsky. Even Pablo Picasso and his wife Olga have a part in the novel. I would recommend The Beautiful American for its setting and the historical people it includes.

I was unable to become caught up in the second half of the book, however, the fictional story of Nora's life with her husband Jamie and her daughter Dahlia. They were overshadowed by the real life Lee Miller and the personalities in the Paris of the first half of the book, I felt.

Thanks to the publisher for a review copy of this book.

THE VISITORS by Sally Beauman

Waiting on Wednesday is a weekly event, hosted by Breaking the Spine, that spotlights upcoming releases that we're eagerly anticipating.
Here's an historical novel of Egypt that will be published soon...

The Visitors: A Novel by Sally Beauman, to be published July 8, 2014 by Harper.

When I was in Cairo a week,  I was taken to the pyramids; it was there that I saw Frances for the first time. It was January 1922, and Miss Mackenzie, in loco parentis, my guardian for our travels in Egypt, planned our visit with great care. She believed that if I could see the pyramids, 'One of the greatest wonders of the ancient world, remember, Lucy, dear,' and see them in the most powerful way possible - at sunrise - they would effect a change. (ch. 1, uncorrected proof; final copy may differ)  

"Based on a true story of discovery, The Visitors is a recreation of the hunt for Tutankhamun’s tomb in Egypt’s Valley of the Kings—a blend of fact and fiction that brings to life a lost world of exploration, adventure, and danger, and the audacious men willing to sacrifice everything to find a lost treasure. (publisher)

In 1922, when eleven year-old Lucy is sent to Egypt to recuperate from typhoid, she meets Frances, the daughter of an American archaeologist. The friendship draws the impressionable young girl into the thrilling world of Lord Carnarvon and Howard Carter, who are searching for the tomb of boy pharaoh Tutankhamun in the Valley of the Kings.

The Visitors retells the story of Carter and Carnarvon’s hunt and their historical discovery, witnessed through the eyes of a vulnerable child whose fate becomes entangled in their dramatic quest. As events unfold, Lucy will discover the lengths some people will go to fulfill their deepest desires—and the lies that become the foundation of their lives. The novel recalls the decadence of Egypt’s aristocratic colonial society, and illuminates the obsessive, daring men willing to risk everything—even their sanity—to claim a piece of the ancient past. The search for King Tut’s tomb is made vivid and immediate in a.... dazzling feat of imagination." (publisher)

What book are you waiting for, to be published?