Stylish, with a dash of noir and heaps of the exotic and elegant setting, A Hundred Suns flips the script of bored society ladies into something altogether more devious and delicious.
Tanabe shows the gaping disparities between the life of leisure and richesse led by the French occupiers, and that of the oppressed Indochinese, who can barely scrape by ... This is a book of secrets, but not of great subtlety. Where the reader could have been left to make inferences, the characters spell out their emotional conditions. The plot moves quickly, often in long passages of expository dialogue ... has a cinematic quality — which may be telling, given that Tanabe’s second novel, The Gilded Years, is being made into a film starring Zendaya. This view of French occupation in Indochina is replete with love affairs, revenge and secrets, not to mention a history lesson about the evils of colonialism.
Shifting focus back and forth between characters, Tanabe reveals secrets in exquisitely paced steps—just when the reader thinks she knows who can be trusted, Tanabe’s tale twists into another back alley, exposing another unexpected skeleton in a closet. With doubt clouding every corner, Tanabe ratchets up the tension as Marcelle seeks political and personal vengeance, and Jessie increasingly cannot tell reality from imagination ... A smart, riveting psychological thriller.
Tanabe transports readers to the beauty and danger of 1930s Indochina in this stirring, elegant romance ... Tanabe’s richly drawn novel is complete with multidimensional characters who gradually reveal their secrets, leading Jessie to discover that her frequent bouts of confusion are not only caused by opium. Fans of historical fiction will be enthralled.
