Rating: 
Summary: Clumsy and mechanical
Review: I tend to agree with reviewer from Sunnyvale, Ca. I am currently on page 85 of book, and have been informed perhaps ten times, that Joan is a. obbsessed with movies and, for some unknown reason, enamoured of cooking....and that Emma is artistic, by reason of carrying around a sketch pad , musically inclined, so far one sentence to that effect; and also studious and full of wanderlust to see captols of the world..for me, none of the characters in the book seem particularly interesting due to lack of depth. If this were an layperson's autobiographical memoir of a childhood in wartime Hong Kong, I would find it much more engrossing for the insights into two particular young girl's lives, but I believe literature demands more of a professional writer.
Rating:
Summary: lacks depth
Review: I tend to agree with reviewer from Sunnyvale, Ca. I am currently on page 85 of book, and have been informed perhaps ten times, that Joan is a. obbsessed with movies and, for some unknown reason, enamoured of cooking....and that Emma is artistic, by reason of carrying around a sketch pad , musically inclined, so far one sentence to that effect; and also studious and full of wanderlust to see captols of the world..for me, none of the characters in the book seem particularly interesting due to lack of depth. If this were an layperson's autobiographical memoir of a childhood in wartime Hong Kong, I would find it much more engrossing for the insights into two particular young girl's lives, but I believe literature demands more of a professional writer.
Rating: 
Summary: Beautiful touching book
Review: If you love culture and food, then you must read this book.
Rating:
Summary: Excellent detail of two sister's struggle for their identity
Review: In Night of Many Dream there is a rich tapestry of cultural exchanges and a break from tradition that is very real and relevant to our day and age. Two sisters develop their own lifestyle aided by a strong and independent Aunt and supported by their own individual strenghts. A very good book.
Rating: 
Summary: Interesting but not very involving
Review: Night of Many Dreams has a very interesting plot and very interesting characters. However, the writing style was too superficial. You were not emotionally involved with the characters because Tsukiyama never really reveals the inner feelings of those characters. As I read the novel, I felt as if I were watching the characters from afar, rather than viewing the world around them from their eyes. I also didn't get the real sense of the surroundings when I read Tsukiyama's descriptions. As I said earlier, the plot was interesting, but the novel was not engaging.
Rating: 
Summary: Nicely written story of 2 sisters in WWII-era China
Review: Night of Many Dreams is the story of two Chinese sisters, Joan and Emma, growing up in Hong Kong during and after World War II. Their mother is a traditional Chinese woman who wants to pair them up with respected and successful husbands; their father runs a business that keeps him in Japan the bulk of the time; and their Auntie Go runs a successful knitting factory and has never married. During the course of the book, they flee the Japanese occupation to the nearby Portuguese island of Macao, return to Hong Kong to start over again, and gradually return to prosperity. The book focuses on the two daughters, both of them strong and independent in different ways, and how they each find their own way. With the mother and aunt as role models, we expect that Joan, the beautiful one, will find a good husband, and Emma, the smart one, will pursue a career. In the end, though, they each make choices that suit their personality without necessarily fulfilling the expectations others had of them.Like Tsukiyama's Women of the Silk, this book is nicely written and gives a good sense of the culture and values during this time in Hong Kong. I liked this one a little better than Silk, though, because it had a broader array of interesting characters and I felt I came to understand them better, especially Auntie Go, Joan & Emma. Both Joan and Emma seem to grow and learn from their experiences, and I enjoyed seeing how each of them would handle some of the difficult choices they faced. I like how Tsukiyama creates strong female characters who find their own way within their culture, subtly challenging the status quo but without explicitly rejecting the system. I don't know enough about that area's history to know how realistic the story is, but I hope it is plausible.
Rating:
Summary: Brilliant!
Review: The best that I have ever read! I was so into it from the moment I started. Would definitely recommend this book to anyone who have sister(s) and/or best friend that live far away just like mine.
Rating:
Summary: Brilliant!
Review: The best that I have ever read! I was so into it from the moment I started. Would definitely recommend this book to anyone who have sister(s) and/or best friend that live far away just like mine.
Rating:
Summary: Incredibly disappointing
Review: This book had a great deal of potential to be a fascinating book about a fascinating and turbulent time period. It profiles a family living in Hong Kong during the time of the Japanese occupation, focussing especially on their two young daughters-Emma, who decides to head to America all alone to study art, and Joan, who decides that she wants to be a movie star. The author could have explored the difficulties that an Asian-American woman would have experienced adjusting to the United States or even the difficulties of a woman in college at a time when very few women pursued a higher education. She could have explored the difficulties that the family faced during the military occupation of their country. She could have explored the racial impossibility of Joan's dreams of conquering 1950's Hollywood. There were so many things that she COULD have done. Instead she wove together a vapid, conventional, soap opera fairy-tale about true love and pretty dresses that showed no talent for character development or even for spinning a good yarn. The one redeeming quality of the book is the beautifully delicate and spare style of Tsukiyama's prose. It has an air of twinkling magic in its simplicity, reminiscent of traditional Chinese poetry. Even this prose style can only take the book so far, however, since it is much more suited to the passages describing the girl's childhood memories, which are rooted in innocence and magic, than it is to the later sections about things like first dates at San Francisco burger joints or grueling days on movie sets. Predictable. Dull. Shallow. Enough said.
Rating:
Summary: I loved it! Excellent read!
Review: This book really touched me and I have already passed it along to several other people. I can't wait for Ms. Tsukiyama's next book. She is able to give you all the essential elements of a fine novel: well-developed characters on many levels, a magical sense of place (I feel like I am there seeing the place through the eyes of the characters) and stories of real people in their real lives. I can't wait to go to Hong Kong and experience real Chinese cooking. Also, I think my knowledge of real life in Hong Kong (at least during this period of time) has been greatly expanded.
|
