By far her most painfully personal yet — an unflinching assessment of her life and career and the role those dearest to her played in both ... In simple, straightforward prose, Chang describes in new detail the horrors her parents suffered through during China's Cultural Revolution ... It is also a book of enduring filial love ... Chang has a talent for tapping the history of the individual to speak to the broader societal forces at play around them.
Few can match Chang’s ability to bring Chinese history and politics to life through deeply felt personal narrative, and few have shaped western understanding of China as broadly. Nearly 35 years on from the book that made her name, this story of suffering and success has the air of a closing chapter, a reckoning with both her achievements and the cost of the path she chose.
By far the most interesting section of the book is the chapters that cover the thirteen years between Chang’s arrival in London and the publication of Wild Swans ... It doesn’t seem a stretch to say that one of the unstated aims of Fly, Wild Swans is to process some of this traumatic material, but as I read deeper into the book, I wondered how she would face the challenge of doing so in a memoir intended for publication ... She is also prone to exaggerating the significance of her experiences ... I finished the book feeling that it was a missed opportunity to go beyond the facts of the past fifty years of their lives. I would have preferred her to reflect.
Although packed with poignant snapshots of family history and juicy episodes of literary life under state scrutiny, Fly, Wild Swans reads like an uneasy hybrid ... New readers might first want to discover the epic narrative of Wild Swans itself.
