... marvelous ... These adventures are illuminated with lovely, painstaking details that bring to vivid life the broader currents of history ... Truong’s lush style is on gorgeous display in these pages, her imagery evoking hidden emotional depths ... While the lives, loves and adventures of Lafcadio Hearn hold center stage in this novel, these are set off by a rich brocade of social critiques — of slavery, colonization and the repression of women. With great generosity and compassion, Truong explores the difference between writing and telling stories, with the question of who gets to speak and who remains silent.

Truong, whose family’s violent 1975 displacement from Vietnam when she was six makes her intimately familiar with peripatetic longing, stupendously imagined the life of Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas’ Vietnamese Parisian cook in her award-winning debut, The Book of Salt ... She displays similar ingenuity in her extraordinary new book (an eight-year effort) presenting Lafcadio Hearn through the four most important women in his life ... By reclaiming these exemplary women’s voices, Truong enhances history with illuminating herstory too long overlooked.

Containing minimal dialog, this work is rich in descriptive detail that some readers will enjoy, though others who prefer more character-driven interaction may be daunted. Nevertheless, those who follow the work through to the end will discover three fascinating women whose stories clarify the life of a man just as remarkable in his time.

Beauty has come to be expected of Monique Truong’s prose, words brimming and vibrant, her evocative expressions and thoughtful sequencing in storytelling remarkable. But there is also substance in Truong’s writing, a pursuit of recovering voices erased from history — stories that cannot be told and that are at times overwritten ... The novel...is nothing less than an exciting new development in [Truong's] writing career ... Truong’s figures are more like voices that gradually coalesce, as they all on one level address one person: Patricio, Pat, Yakumo are all referred to as 'you.' Collectively, the stories merge to create a critical perspective to be shored up against nonfiction prose ... The Sweetest Fruits gives readers permission to read historical accounts against the grain, and teaches us how ... The...refuses to participate in singularly protecting the mythical stature of Lafcadio Hearn. What happens when the frame is shifted, the central hero now an empty center? The answer might be disappointment, incomprehension, or premature dismissiveness. The novel is not meant for that reader. For anyone whose life feels overshadowed by a more powerful figure, or even just not centered at any point in life for reasons beyond one’s control, reading the novel can be a vindicating experience ... The historical novel is a kind of time traveling vehicle/vessel. We, the readers, are the time travelers, who have returned from 1909, and in that moment of return, with our fresh eyes, we see the present anew. We question it anew. We engage with it analytically anew. We respond to it emotionally anew.

Truong’s delicate, impressionistic tale is broken into thirds, with each section narrated by a woman who at one time loved the man history will remember as Lafcadio Hearn, the 19th-century author who was the first Westerner to write about a newly opened Japan. At first, this structure seems disjointed, but soon it becomes clear that the interplay of these voices will carry the story. As she did in her previous novel...Truong is exploring personal memory in all its creative and contradictory subjectivity ... Truong’s novel is propelled not by action but by the retrospective piecing together that happens once a relationship is over. Spurred by nostalgia, regret, longing and anger, each woman examines her memories. The truth becomes murky as the history of this man they have all loved is subjectively recorded for posterity. As Setsu observes, 'to tell another’s story is to bring him to life,' but here it’s the women who achieve that feat rather than the man who connected them.

... [a] rich historical novel ... beautiful, moving ... Truong's superb novel provides a powerful feminist retelling of this saga ... It's not the suspense of 'what will happen next?' that drives this tale, but rather the author's skilled and sympathetic presentation of the three women, whose rich interior dialogue and powerful, resilient personalities keep the reader glued to the page ... Hearn is still highly regarded as an early writer and researcher on Japan (his books are considered classics), but Truong's novel does an excellent (if somewhat speculative) job of putting him in his place, and reconsidering his legacy from the perspective of the women whose lives were affected by him ... Truong deserves considerable praise for the beautiful, complex story she has wrought in this novel (for which she conducted extensive historical research, spending time in each of the locales that feature in the tale). As a moving, poignant novel it is magnificent; as a recontextualization of malestream history, it is long overdue.

Truong creates distinct, engaging voices for these women. Rosa’s story is permeated with a sense of loss, but she also shares some rather tart wisdom with the young woman who is writing down her words. Alethea’s tone is matter-of-fact and occasionally confrontational ... Truong gives Setsu her own style, too, one that is spare, elliptical, and personal without being obviously intimate. This creates a distance between novel and reader that is widened by the fact that Setsu is speaking not to a scribe unfamiliar with her story but rather to her dead husband. In order to impart important details to the reader, Truong has to force Setsu to tell Hearn things he already knows. Some readers will be unperturbed. Others may find their willingness to suspend disbelief tested. Bold, original, and uneven.

...[a] remarkable novel about love, the power of memory, and betrayal. ... Interwoven through these richly imagined narratives are excerpts from the first, actual biography of Lafcadio Hearn, published in 1906. Truong is dazzling on the sentence level, and she inhabits each of these three women brilliantly. Truong’s command of voice and historical knowledge brings the stories of these remarkable women to life.