Review by New York Times Review
"WHEN I WAS 7, I knew exactly who I was." With these words, Violet, the principal narrator of Amy Tan's latest novel, "The Valley of Amazement," begins her story. Yet over the course of the book, Violet's certainty about her identity - and nearly everything else - will be turned upside down. An American child (or so she thinks), Violet lives in Shanghai in 1905, in an establishment called Hidden Jade Path, a first-class courtesan house that caters to both Westerners and Chinese. It is run by her cool, aloof and seductive mother, who goes by several names, among them Lulu Mimi. A lonely, difficult child - one of Tan's signature prickly heroines - Violet takes solace in playing with her ferocious pet cat and in spying on the courtesans' lovemaking. She yearns for her mother's affection - and for any clue about the identity of her father. Seven years later, in 1912, the year of the dowager empress's abdication and the founding of the Chinese republic, a suave man called Lu Shing comes to visit. Eavesdropping, Violet is amazed to hear her mother expressing feelings she never thought Lulu had. With a shock of horror, Violet realizes that Lu Shing is her father - which means she is half Chinese, caught between two very different societies and fitting into neither. Worse, she has an unknown brother back in California, a boy her mother seems to love far more than she loves Violet. Desperate to see him, Lulu sails for San Francisco. In an unexpected plot twist, Violet is left behind. This is just the beginning of a long and ultimately heart-wrenching narrative that covers more than four decades and moves from Shanghai in the 1920s and '30s to the Hudson River Valley to a mountain village in rural China, with an interlude of backtracking in late-19th-century San Francisco. The epic history of these times is woven into the complex background of the story of three generations of women, its events seen as they would have seen them. Their private lives and private pain take center stage. Sold to a courtesan house by a loathsome yet charming friend of her mother's, Violet is reunited with one of the women she knew at Hidden Jade Path, a kind soul called Magic Gourd, who teaches her young charge how to survive the tough courtesan world - what songs to sing, what stories to tell and how to tell them, when to give a coquettish sideways glance, how to identify the best clients and manipulate them into giving expensive gifts. But when Violet meets a man named Loyalty Fang, all these instructions fly out the window. Violet refuses to acknowledge that, like all Chinese men, he will marry the woman his family chooses. For him and her other suitors, she will always be just "a singing sparrow in a cage." Reluctantly, Violet learns to treat her life as the other courtesans do, as a job. Many customers later, an earnest American named Edward Ivory offers "solace, companionship and the careful mending of wounds." Ivory also has a wife - in his case, safely back in America - so Violet moves in with him and they have a child, a daughter called Flora. But the Spanish flu epidemic of 1918 and the appearance of the real Mrs. Ivory threaten Violet's new life. Although the narrative becomes progressively darker, Magic Gourd is always there to inject a note of humor. But when she and Violet attempt to escape the increasing instability and danger of Shanghai and make the grueling journey to Moon Pond Village, the supposedly peaceful ancestral home of a Chinese poet, even she finds it difficult to cope with their dismal prospects. It's only at this point that Tan begins to share Violet's mother's story, turning the clock back to 1897 San Francisco. Far from the cold and calculating figure Violet knew as Lulu, Lucia Minturn is revealed as an adventurous young woman who defies her family and sails to Shanghai in the vain hope of marrying her Chinese lover: "I had let infatuation guide me ... toward a golden vale that did not exist, toward a city at the other end of the sea." Gradually, the puzzle pieces of the plot fall into place. That "golden vale that did not exist" is depicted in "The Valley of Amazement," the enigmatic painting that gives the novel its title. It's everywhere and everything - the view from the mansion where Violet's American lover lived as a boy, Violet's first sight of Moon Pond Village, even an expression of her mother's "immortal spirit." Each person finds a different message in this landscape. "Was the painting meant to depict a feeling of hope or was it hopelessness?" Violet wonders when she first sees it. "The painting reminded me of those illusions that changed as you turned them upside down or sideways." Written in Tan's characteristically economical and matter-of-fact style, "The Valley of Amazement" is filled with memorably idiosyncratic characters. And its array of colorful multilayered stories is given further depth by Tan's affecting depictions of mothers and daughters. Here are strong women struggling to survive all that life has to throw at them, created by a writer skilled at evoking the roil of emotions and mad exploits they experience when they follow their hearts. For her patrons, the courtesan heroine will always be 'a singing sparrow in a cage.' Lesley downer is a British writer of Chinese and Canadian descent. Her most recent book is a novel, "The Samurai's Daughter."
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [November 10, 2013]
Review by Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Lulu, an American, is the only white woman running a first-class courtesan house in Shanghai in 1905. Burdened with secret anguish and loss, she relies on her loyal associate, Golden Dove, to help her create an enclave of confidentiality, courtly seduction, and voluptuous pleasure for the city's most influential men. Her lonely young daughter, Violet, has taken to eavesdropping and spying to survive. Shocked to be outed as half-Chinese, Violet thinks, half-breed, half-hated, and indeed, this exposure is only the beginning of an all-out assault against her sense of self and freedom. In her first novel in eight years, Tan (Saving Fish from Drowning, 2005) returns to her signature mother-daughter focus as she pulls back the curtain on an aggressively sexist society after the fall of the last Chinese dynasty precipitates monumental change. Reaching back to Lulu's San Francisco childhood and forward to Violet's operatic struggles and traumas and reliance on her smart, loyal mentor, Magic Gourd, this scrolling saga is practically a how-to on courtesan life and a veritable orgy of suspense and sorrow. Ultimately, Tan's prodigious, sumptuously descriptive, historically grounded, sexually candid, and elaborately plotted novel counters violence, exploitation, betrayal, and tragic cultural divides with beauty, wit, and transcendent friendships between women. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: An ambitious, 20-city author tour backed by extensive advertising and promotion will help make Tan's bold epic a blockbuster.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2010 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
In Tan's novel, Violet Minturn, the daughter of the American madam of the premiere courtesan house in Shanghai, experiences life quite differently from other children. Her privileged lifestyle provides opportunities, but like her mother before her, Violet must grapple with history, lovers, and family life. In this audio edition, the use of three narrators is well executed. Each reader provides a strong vocal representation of the characters. Although Tan's performance is solid, she sometimes doesn't have the skill and flair demonstrated by Wu and Bean, who offer up more nuanced readings. Still, Tan's performance more than does justice to her novel and its characters. An Ecco hardcover. (Nov.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Tan (The Joy Luck Club) is in familiar territory here as a mother and daughter must battle others-and sometimes each other-to survive and prosper. The story starts in 1897, and the setting shifts between San Francisco and Shanghai. Lucia was born in America and has a daughter, Violet, with a Chinese man. Later, she becomes the owner of a high-end establishment in Shanghai that supplies courtesans to wealthy Easterners and Westerners. Violet is abandoned by her mother and becomes a courtesan herself, though her quest for love seems doomed. The overly detailed descriptions of everything from furniture to clothing to sex acts bogs down the story. Unfortunately, character development is also poorly executed. The multiple narrators-Nancy Wu, Joyce Bean, and Tan-skillfully present the characters as they age and their situations change. Verdict Those who favor in-depth description and international settings will particularly enjoy. ["This utterly engrossing novel is highly recommended to all readers who appreciate an author's ability to transport them to a new world they will not forget," read the more positive starred review of the Ecco: HarperCollins hc, LJ 8/13.]-Susan G. Baird, formerly with Oak Lawn P.L., IL (c) Copyright 2014. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Tan, who made her name with The Joy Luck Club (1989), blends two favorite settings, Shanghai and San Francisco, in a tale that spans generations. Granted that courtesans and the places that sheltered them were (and in some places still are) culturally significant in East Asia, Tan takes what might seem an unnecessary risk by setting her latest novel in that too-familiar demimonde (Miss Saigon, Memoirs of a Geisha, etc.). Tan is a skilled storyteller, capable of working her way into and out of most fictional problems, but the reader will be forgiven a sinking feeling at the scenario with which she opens, featuring "the only white woman who owned a first-class courtesan house in Shanghai." Where are the Boxers when you need them? Said white woman, Lulu Minturn, aka Lulu Mimi, is in Shanghai for a reason--and on that reason hinges a larger conceit, the one embodied by the book's title. She has a daughter, and the daughter, naturally enough, has cause to wonder about her ancestry, if little time to worry overmuch about some of the details, since her mom leaves her to fend for herself, not entirely willingly. The chinoiserie and exoticism aside, Violet makes a tough and compelling character, a sort of female equivalent to Yul Brynner as played by Lucy Liu. The members of the "Cloud Beauties," who give Violet her sentimental education, make an interesting lot themselves, but most of the attention is on Violet and the narrative track that finds her on a parallel journey, literally and figuratively, always haunted by "those damned paintings that had belonged to my mother" and that will eventually reveal their secrets. Tan's story sometimes suffers from longueurs, but the occasional breathless, steamy scene evens the score: "He lifted my hips and my head soared and I lost all my senses except for the one that bound us and could not be pulled apart." A satisfyingly complete, expertly paced yarn.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
