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Summary: The Best Book I Have Read This Year
Review: "Dream of the Walled City" is an emotionally moving account of the life of Jade Virtue, a self-described ordinary woman who chronicles extraordinary times. The writing is fluid, if not poetic (reminiscent, in places, of Virginia Wolff), and the characters are at once dynamic and realistic. The story exquisitely weaves the quotidian events of Jade's life with the seismic political and industrial developments of Twentieth Century China. The story is immediately enrapturing and also provides a unique overview of some of the important events in the history of modern China. "Walled City" tells its story with grace: it is superbly written; it is at times humorous, at others tragic or shocking (or both); and it is at all times engrossing. The New Yorker recently praised the book and I was not surprised to read in that review a favorable comparison to Dickens's "Tale of Two Cities.""Walled City" is the best book I've read this year, by far.
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Summary: WOW -- What an Awesome Story!
Review: "Dream of the Walled City" is the BEST book about China I've ever read -- and I've read HUNDREDS! My grandfather went to China from Sweden in 1892, about the time Lisa's "grandmother" was born. My father was born in Xian in 1904, as was I in 1942. Like Lisa's, my family fled to Taiwan in 1950, where my son was born in 1968. The main difference between Lisa's "family" and mine is that we are "white Chinese" Americans. We share much, but because we're Anglos, much is also different. What we do share are those memorable China roots -- and Lisa has written about those roots with such eloquent style, superb storytelling, and fascinating accuracy. I'm getting this book for Christmas for my friends and family. Thanks, Lisa, for a poignant look back in time that makes our todays richer!
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Summary: Accurate Historical novel about Hunan Province
Review: Heart rending portrayal of women's lives in Hunan Province beginning at the turn of the century and continuing to the Japanese invasion during WWII. Great read for those who are interested in Chinese history, but find history books too dry. The author has woven figures important in the history of China beautifully into the tapestry of this story.
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Summary: one of my new favorites
Review: I adored this book, couldn't put it down. Incredibly well written and facts made interesting. I often buy books that I give away because I know I will never read them again. This one is staying with me!
Rating: 
Summary: A good first novel
Review: I believe this is Lisa Huang Fleischman's first novel, and it's a fine piece of work. From what I understand, this is her maternal grandmother's life story, and Fleischman relates it very well. The story is compelling and the characters are captivating. If anything, the greatest weakness of the story may be that of all the characters, the main character is the least interesting of all. The narrative itself, however, is quite interesting, if only for the observations it lends of life in China during the rise of communism.
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Summary: A good first novel
Review: I believe this is Lisa Huang Fleischman's first novel, and it's a fine piece of work. From what I understand, this is her maternal grandmother's life story, and Fleischman relates it very well. The story is compelling and the characters are captivating. If anything, the greatest weakness of the story may be that of all the characters, the main character is the least interesting of all. The narrative itself, however, is quite interesting, if only for the observations it lends of life in China during the rise of communism.
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Summary: Haunting, a thinly veiled memoir of an extraoridinary family
Review: I have read quite a few books of this genre and was surprised to have become so engrossed in this one. The author gives an amazing description of an ordinary woman alive and trying to survive during extraordinary times. She sees the world through incredibly intelligent eyes. She is brave, strong, dependable, completely flawed and utterly human. I loved her. The author describes places and events with beautiful language and clarity that lends itself to the dreamlike quality interwoven throughout this book. A must read for anyone interested in China and Chinese history.
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Summary: Fleischman tried too hard to write a good story.
Review: I started this novel yesterday evening and decided to skim through the rest of it after one hour of intense reading. It utterly failed to engage me because I was constantly annoyed with the author's attempts to incorporate every possible life lesson at the end of each paragraph!!! While I applaud Fleischman's effort to bring forth another perspective of a China of the early 20th century, her prose does not flow smoothly and her plot tends to ignore the rules of a plausible timeline (e.g. her character ages eight years after two paragraphs!). As a result, her heroine, Jade Virtue, is disappointingly unconvincing as a possible historical figure. Overall, Fleischman should have spent more time tuning her plot than inserting superfluous adjectives into each sentence.
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Summary: She had me on "hello"
Review: I was caught by this novel in its exotic, formal, intimate first sentence: "This person speaking is Jade Virtue." I got the feeling of a story to be told face to face, a personal narrative of a life lived in the turmoil of great events. The narrator of this story, Jade Virtue, is a woman born in the Hunanese city of Changsha (the Walled City of the title) in 1890, during imperial China's final gasp. The narrative follows her life for the next 60 years to 1949 when Mao Zedong proclaims the People's Republic from Tienanmen Square. The story focuses on the mundane as closely as on historical as we read about her imprisonment in the home of her first husband, an opium addict, and his bitter parents as a three thousand-year-old culture disintegrates around her. She eventually is freed, through a combination of circumstance and self-will, only to find that the ground underneath her, an unmarried upper-class woman in a society violently throwing off its upper classes as it heaves itself into the twentieth century, may not be steady ever again. Her shoulders brush against history as she meets and befriends some of its major players, including the young Mao Zedong and Cai Hesen. (Don't look for a romantic portrait of the "Chairman as a Young Man" here; he passes through the story, remarkably only because of his name, and moves on.) She forms a life-long friendship with a woman whose life, personally and politically, takes a very different route than her own. Along the way, she finds love and self-respect, and her own transformation becomes a metaphor for China's. Okay, it's not that simple, thank heavens. But you get the idea. The writing is clean and luxurious without being the least pretentious or "arch." Some of the book's set-pieces -- Jade Virtue's imprisonment and escape from a local warlord, for example -- successfully draw a picture of private life during a time of unprecedented upheaval. The novel is reportedly inspired by the real life story of the author's grandmother. Thus, this book's task, to stand as guardian to memory and to history, could have been very perilous for a first novelist. Lisa Huang Fleischman meets the challenge with grace and a talent for painting with words that is a pleasure to encounterin any novel, first or otherwise. I highly recommend this book.
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Summary: Enchanting
Review: I was surprised to catch myself finishing Fleischman's Dream of the Walled City in one sitting and enjoying it. This book could not on a bad day qualify as a "quick read," yet I sucked it up like a vacuum cleaner. Whoooooosh! Fleischman's writing reminded me a lot of Amy Tan. I suspect that's in part because the subject matter was very similar to Tan's work, set in the same time period that Tan often focuses on, though unlike Tan's main characters, Jade Virtue is far more self-assured. I liked her for that reason: she was independent without being extreme. She walked the line between two worlds, Communism and Nationalism, yet she didn't agonize daily over the repercussions of one or the other, bemoan herself for not choosing a side and sticking to it with an extremist's vigor; she didn't angst pointlessly, which I adored. Her insecurities were real and not melodramatic, or when they were, they were addressed thusly. As the back cover publicized, Dream of the Walled City was very much a book about people, not events. I was pleasantly surprised to find out that quite a few of the characters in the story were actual people. Obviously I knew who Mao Zedong was, and watching him grow up and develop, especially through the eyes of a nonjudgmental friend, gave me food for thought. It's really scary to realize that I probably could have easily been good friends with Mao had I grown up with him. All the characters were depicted so vividly, I felt as if I could identify with them all personally, meet them on the street somewhere even, and then to find out they were in fact real is testament to Fleischman's writing ability. She must have taken creative license at some point, but to be able to present historical figures with life and personality, that's a feat unto itself. Unlike Rise to Rebellion, which I never finished because the characterization within of various folks like Ben Franklin and John Adams came off painfully flat. I think Fleischman's work would be what one would get if they took Yukio Mishima and Amy Tan, squished them together, and came out with a book. I highly recommend Dream of the Walled City; I just can't believe I put off reading it for so long.
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