RaveBooklist Online\"Chen draws a lovable protagonist in San San, and her deft use of suspense makes the novel a quick and satisfying read. Other characters are less successful, especially Ah Liam and his father, whose plotlines fall to the background and are largely unresolved. Chen has drawn an engaging, if uneven, portrait of China in the late 1950s during the rise of Maoism.\
Nafissa Thompson-Spires
PositiveBooklist\"Thompson-Spires occasionally breaks the wall between the narrator and the audience in a way that’s unexpected and effective, and she uses perfectly timed asides and parentheticals to underline a theme or deliver a joke. With a well-tuned ear for the cadence of comedy and dialogue, Thompson-Spires uses her characters to illustrate what real conversations about identity can be—sometimes awkward, occasionally hilarious, but never simple.\
Richard Lloyd Parry
RaveBooklistParry follows the parents of the children who died—as well as the few who survived—as they struggle to uncover the mistakes that led to their children’s deaths. The stories that Parry gives voice to are not only deeply personal but they are accompanied with essential historical and cultural context that enable the reader to understand the roles of death, grief, and responsibility in Japanese culture—and why some survivors may always remain haunted.
