RaveLos Angeles Review of BooksMysterious, but it bears its mystery lightly, with Li’s understated style touching on large ideas ... The novel could be read as a reflection on the impossibility of the writer’s art—that continued resistance, always falling short, to the given categories of real and unreal. But it is also a comment on how easily the writer’s fabrications are familiarized, exploited, and misunderstood.
Te-Ping Chen
PositiveThe Los Angeles Review of Books... acutely observed stories ... [Chen] knows her protagonists as people even as she is able to render their stories into parables about the country ... The Cultural Revolution has, of course, been a staple of Chinese literature...What makes it particularly poignant here is the reader’s realization that the generation involved directly in the affairs of that era is passing on and its legacy — often unacknowledged as this story shows — now increasingly belongs to those who were children then ... Chen’s stories abound in such telling images — the extraordinarily high human costs of creating the new China, so reminiscent of those that have been paid before.
