Review by Booklist Review
Li's fiction since her son's tragic suicide seems to have catapulted her away from her the Asian roots that define her earlier award-winning fiction. Her latest begins on a pastoral farm in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, where Agnès, known as the "French bride," lives with her husband without children but with chickens and geese with French names. A letter from her mother announces that Agnès' childhood best friend, Fabienne, at just 27, is dead in their home village of Saint-Rémy. Agnès has already warned readers, "The name you should pay attention to in this story is Fabienne"; Fabienne's death gives Agnès the permission to become a writer of truth--her truth, anyway--reclaiming her life, her memories, and her words after unwanted teenage fame as a "faux-prodigy" author. "The real story was beyond our ability to tell: our girlhood, our friendship, our love--all monumental, all inconsequential. The world had no place for two girls like us." From post-WWII rural France, where there was never enough, to a posh finishing school in England, Li creates an achingly controlled narrative simmering with desperation to be truly seen and heard.
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Li follows Must I Go with an intriguing novel of two devious teenage friends who are coping with the aftermath of WWII. Fabienne helps her drunken father, a widower, on their Saint Rèmy farm, and her friend Agnès lives with her parents and attends the village school. One of their "games" involves Fabienne dictating a series of stories about little children who die in various ghastly ways, which Agnès records in a notebook that they share with the recently widowed postmaster, M. Devaux, whose friendship they pursue on a lark. Devaux, an author himself, helps get them published, and Agnès, whom Fabienne decides should get sole credit, becomes famous. Her rise from peasant girl to author becomes a big story, and she is given free education at a finishing school in England. Then, on a whim, Fabienne lies and frames Devaux for a drunken sexual assault on her, forcing him to leave town in disgrace. As the story unfolds, Agnès reckons with a frightening series of episodes in which she takes on Fabienne's mischievous traits. Bringing to mind Elena Ferrante's My Brilliant Friend, by way of Anita Brookner's quietly dramatic prose, this makes for a powerful Cinderella fable with memorable characters. It's an accomplished new turn for Li. Agent: Sarah Chalfant, Wylie Agency. (Sept.)
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Review by Library Journal Review
Two adolescent girls, Agnes and Fabienne, share an unusual friendship in a rural French village in the years following World War II. Spurred on by family trauma and Fabienne's dark imagination, the girls, with the assistance of a widowed postmaster, write a book of morbid tales. For reasons she doesn't explain, Fabienne wants Agnes to be the "face" of the book, which they manage to publish. Agnes briefly becomes a sensation, is declared a prodigy, and is whisked away to a British boarding school led by Mrs. Townsend, who has motives of her own. Thematically, Li's novel shares similarities with Elena Ferrante's "Neapolitan Novels," depicting an intense friendship between intelligent, impoverished girls and what happens when one has opportunities to broaden her scope. However, this latest from MacArthur fellow Li (Must I Go) is more tightly focused, and the nature of the relationship between the two girls differs in some striking ways from Ferrante's work. VERDICT Li's understated prose belies the intensity of the emotions being depicted, and the story takes many unpredictable turns. Knowing only that the adult Agnes married an American, lives in the United States, and keeps geese, readers don't learn the meaning of the title until the novel's end. Highly recommended.--Christine DeZelar-Tiedman
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Review by Kirkus Book Review
Who lives, who dies, who tells your story--and is it your story to tell? (Apologies to Lin-Manuel Miranda.) Inseparable young teens Agnès and Fabienne share a world they've created for themselves in rural, ruined, post--World War II France. Fabienne is unschooled and rebellious, while the more passive Agnès is disenfranchised from her schoolmates and family members. A "game" concocted by the girls--that of writing stories so the world will (ostensibly) know how they lived--launches a series of events that propels Agnès to Paris and London and into the publishing world and a finishing school, while Fabienne remains at home in their rural village, tending to farm animals. The arc of their intense adolescent friendship comes under Agnès' critical lens when she learns of Fabienne's death after years of emotional and geographic distance between the two. Now freed to write her own story, Agnès narrates the course of events which thrust her into the world as a teen prodigy at the same time she was removed, reluctantly, from Fabienne's orbit. Li's measured and exquisite delivery of Agnès' revelations conveys the balance and rebalance of the girls' relationship over time but also illuminates the motivations of writers (fame, revenge, escape) and how power within a relationship mutates and exploits. The combination the girls bring to their intimate relationship and endeavors (one seeking to experience things she could not achieve alone, the other providing the experiences) leads Agnès first to believe they were two halves of a whole. Knives, minerals, oranges, and the game of Rock Paper Scissors sneak into Agnès' narrative as she relates the trajectory of a once-unbreakable union. The relative hardness of those substances is a clue to understanding it all. Stunners: Li's memorable duo, their lives, their losses. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
