PositiveStrange HorizonsThough this is a literary novel, Zhang’s choice not to anchor the narrative in specific dates and places creates a quality of a dreamy myth-telling, almost a fantasy fairy tale of two children lost in a strange and wild land. The reader gets lost along with the children amid the unknown and unknowable. We are both excited and disorientated by wandering ... For readers who understand some Mandarin, and who understand some of the history of Chinese immigration, the use of mixed language and the fluid historical placement disorientates and unsettles in an empathic way. (For example, the Mandarin has no tone markers and uses pinyin Romanization instead of Chinese characters, so the meaning has to be extracted through context, mirroring the experience of those who don’t have full fluency in their parents’ language.) The narrative feels incomplete, half-untold. What is left unsaid, whether in Mandarin or in the descriptions of time and place, speaks as loud as what is on the page. This mirrors Lucy and Sam’s experience, of piecing together meaning from scattered bits of words and memories.
