White Ghost Girls
Registered by 
glade1
of McLeansville, North Carolina USA on 8/22/2009
This Book is Currently in the Wild!
glade1 of McLeansville, North Carolina USA on 8/22/2009 This Book is Currently in the Wild!
1 journaler for this copy...
Picked up from the free shelf at the used book store recently. From Amazon:
For all its dreamy lyricism, this debut novel about two teenaged American sisters growing up in Hong Kong one summer boasts a satisfyingly complicated plot and a devastating conclusion. While their father is away photographing the war in Vietnam for Time magazine, 13-year-old Kate, the book's now adult narrator, and her big sister, Frances, revel in the simple life of Pok Fu Lam village. They swim in the harbor, dive for sea slugs and urchins, and listen to housekeeper Ah Bing's intense folk wisdom. ("Having babies is hard and sore," she tells them. "If you die, your spirit will sit in a pool of blood.") Their mother, on the other hand, spends her time pining for their absent father and painting watercolors that picture grassy western knolls. As Frances grows wilder that summer, Kate is forced to look more closely at their father's growing addiction to war reporting and their mother's lack of engagement with her surroundings and her family. Meanwhile, Vietnam, the Maoist cultural revolution and Frances's budding adulthood all threaten the "shipwrecked" sisters' intimacy. Along with death and sex, Greenway makes the illicit excitement of war and the sisters' opposing natures inextricably entwined.
For all its dreamy lyricism, this debut novel about two teenaged American sisters growing up in Hong Kong one summer boasts a satisfyingly complicated plot and a devastating conclusion. While their father is away photographing the war in Vietnam for Time magazine, 13-year-old Kate, the book's now adult narrator, and her big sister, Frances, revel in the simple life of Pok Fu Lam village. They swim in the harbor, dive for sea slugs and urchins, and listen to housekeeper Ah Bing's intense folk wisdom. ("Having babies is hard and sore," she tells them. "If you die, your spirit will sit in a pool of blood.") Their mother, on the other hand, spends her time pining for their absent father and painting watercolors that picture grassy western knolls. As Frances grows wilder that summer, Kate is forced to look more closely at their father's growing addiction to war reporting and their mother's lack of engagement with her surroundings and her family. Meanwhile, Vietnam, the Maoist cultural revolution and Frances's budding adulthood all threaten the "shipwrecked" sisters' intimacy. Along with death and sex, Greenway makes the illicit excitement of war and the sisters' opposing natures inextricably entwined.
I thought this was a lovely book. It is more a novella than a novel. But it beautifully evokes the time and place and tells a sad but accessible story about two sisters who are "white ghost girls," white girls in Hong Kong in the late 1960s.
Journal Entry 3 by glade1 at Little Free Library at Eclectic By Nature in Greensboro, North Carolina USA on Monday, January 6, 2020
glade1 at Little Free Library at Eclectic By Nature in Greensboro, North Carolina USA on Monday, January 6, 2020
Released 4 yrs ago (12/24/2019 UTC) at Little Free Library at Eclectic By Nature in Greensboro, North Carolina USA
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