English

February 2, 2009
For 12-year-old Love Liu, foreign languages are a way of life: he lives in gossipy Xinjiang in far northwest China, where the sounds of Uyghur, Russian and Chinese mingle. But when Second Prize Wang, a dashing English teacher from Shanghai, arrives at his school, Love Liu wonders what use it would be to learn English. However, he's enamored of the confident and cosmopolitan teacher. Love Liu dives into his studies and soon befriends Second Prize Wang, and their unconventional friendship becomes one of the only constants in Love Liu's world as the Cultural Revolution wears away at the people of Xinjiang. Love Liu's friends are smacked with accusations, his school gets closed down for months at a time and his parents are alternately lauded and condemned. The more quotidian aspects of the novel can be repetitive—Love Liu cycles endlessly through the same handful of teenage tribulations—but the novel's larger portrait of Love Liu and Second Prize Wang's friendship emerges with touching clarity and provides a perfect counterbalance to the corruption and confusion of the Cultural Revolution.

February 15, 2009
In a remote corner of China, the Cultural Revolution becomes a human drama, observed and acted out by a boy increasingly obsessed with sex and language.

Ironies, tragedies and harsh life lessons pile up in Wang's novel, a bestseller in his native China. Narrated by Love Liu, the child of talented architects forced to conceal their skepticism for the communist regime and their Western tastes, it delivers a tragicomic perspective on a period of fear and uncertainty. Teenage Love Liu looks on his parents' behavior—his father's weakness; his mother's affair with the school principal—with critical detachment. With puberty dawning, he is more attracted to fellow pupil Sunrise Huang, competing with her for the title of English class representative; sympathizing when her father commits suicide; sensing jealousy when their English teacher, Second Prize Wang, gives her special attention; and feeling pangs of desire for her developing body. Love Liu begins to see the teacher as a role model and when Sunrise Huang is pressured into accusing Second Prize Wang of"questionable morals," Love Liu urges her to exonerate him using a Maoist wall poster. The power of words, to enthrall or destroy, is illustrated often and symbolized in Second Prize Wang's English dictionary, which Love Liu covets and attempts to steal. But the friendship with the older man matters more, weathering many storms, assisting Love Liu to grow up and offering significant joys, large and small.

A loner comes of age in a telling, appreciably non-Western narrative enriched by politics and poetry.

(COPYRIGHT (2009) KIRKUS REVIEWS/NIELSEN BUSINESS MEDIA, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.)

March 15, 2009
Youve got to treat children the same as you treat political reactionaries, one parent states in this compelling coming-of-age novel set in the remote village of Urumchi during the Cultural Revolution in China and narrated by precocious 12-year-old Love Liu. Second Prize Wang arrives at Lius school to teach English and quickly attracts the suspicion and ire of the students parents when he starts giving private lessons to girls in his apartment. Love Liu is envious of the girls, eager to master the language himself and coveting his teachers English dictionary. Love Liu clings to his friendship with his teacher, even after his classmate and friend Sunrise Huang is pressured into falsely denouncing the man. Sunrise eventually recants, allowing Second Prize Wang to reclaim his jobuntil Love Liu himself leads his teacher astray over a beautiful woman they both long for. Based on his own experiences, Gangs novel paints a vivid picture of what life was like during the Cultural Revolution, with paranoia, suspicion, and distrust informing every relationship, even the closest ones.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2009, American Library Association.)

April 27, 2009
Wang's novel—based partially on his own experience—of learning English study during China's Cultural Revolution—is rather botched by a confusing performance by Christopher Lee. Lee's stop-and-start reading, overly careful parsing and somewhat stilted performance of the book's dialogue impedes listeners from immersing themselves in this critically and commercially successful Chinese novel. The pauses, rather than adding to the drama, conspire to suck it out of this story of totalitarian inhumanity, familial squabbling and the glories of learning English. Lee sounds like he is reading from a script he is unfamiliar with, with meaning and momentum taking a backseat to his careful pronunciation. A Viking hardcover (Reviews, Feb. 2).