What I really loved about this book in addition to what I learned about China post Tiananmen Square, was the way the characters were always surprising me. The family members in My Good Son do not always make the best decisions, which makes them more real.
Nautilus Award Gold Winner IPPY Awards Gold Winner IBPA Benjamin Franklin Awards Gold Winners Lambda Literary Awards Finalist Winner of the University of New Orleans Publishing Lab Prize
"As with her previous books, 'Living Treasures' and 'My Old Faithful,' Huang's latest explores the generational push-pull of family life in post-Tiananmen China . . . Mr. Cai remains front and center, always compelling, a man doing everything for his boy, the way a good father―supposedly―should." ―Lysley Tenorio, The New York Times Book Review
"A poignant meditation on fathers and sons, American and Chinese cultures and traditions in the face of modernity,…
The original characters and settings are what really got me in this collection. I found myself captivated by story lines I had no connection to like a teenage boy going on night runs and a dancer trying to personify a rat.
In this Ravishing World is a sweeping, impassioned short story collection, ringing out with joy, despair, and hope for the natural world. Nine connected stories unfold, bringing together an unforgettable cast of dreamers, escapists, activists, and artists, creating a kaleidoscopic view of the climate crisis. An older woman who has spent her entire life fighting for the planet sinks into despair. A young boy is determined to bring the natural world to his bleak urban reality. A scientist working to solve the plastic problem grapples with whether to have a child. A ballet dancer endeavors to inhabit the consciousness of…
The subject matter is extremely difficult and yet the writing is so engaging I had trouble putting this book down. I had to know what happened to this very troubled family.
I'll kill the first person who comes through this door.' My father grips a baseball bat in his meaty hands. It is 1962 and Diane is three years old when her violent father moves their family - her, her pregnant mother, and her six siblings - to a remote farm in Upstate New York. There, she grabs the reader by the hand and takes them to the broken-down barns, barren fields, and rows of bunk beds in her rat-infested attic bedroom as she questions all that feels wrong about her new world. She watches her ever-pregnant mother grow emotionally colder…
Katya Cengel became a patient at the Roth Psychosomatic Unit at Children's Hospital at Stanford in 1986. She was 10 years old. Thirty years later Katya, now a journalist, discovers her young age was not the only thing that made her hospital stay unusual. The idea of psychosomatic units themselves, where patients have dual medical and psychological diagnoses, was a revolutionary one, since largely fallen out of favor. Katya documents this, tracking down the doctors, psychologists and counselors who once cared for her. What happened to her as a child is told in the voice of the troubled 10-year-old girl she once was. The two narratives unfold simultaneously. The result is a gut-wrenching account of childhood mental illness told from the inside interspersed with updates from experts in the field.
