My latest book review

This is a review of Anchee Min’s Pearl of China that I wrote for the Associated Press. It’s always nice to see my byline. Once a journalist, always a writer.

Min spins fictional account of Buck’s early life
By MONICA RHOR, For The Associated Press
Mon Mar 29, 12:00 am ET

“Pearl of China” (Bloomsbury USA, 288 pages, $24), by Anchee Min: Pearl S. Buck was an intensely prolific author, the winner of a Pulitzer Prize for her 1931 novel, “The Good Earth,” and the first American woman to win a Nobel Prize for literature. Her tales of peasant life in China, where she was raised by missionary parents, provided intimate glimpses into a world then unknown to most Westerners.

Today, Buck’s childhood home in China houses a museum dedicated to her legacy, while her grave in the Pennsylvania countryside bears a tombstone with her Chinese name — a nod to the cultural duality that marked the writer’s life and work.

In “Pearl of China,” Anchee Min, whose best-selling memoir “Red Azalea” recounted the story of her childhood in communist China, spins a fictional account of Buck’s early life in China and her imagined friendship with the narrator, a young Chinese girl named Willow Yee. The two women form a spiritual and emotional bond that resists political turmoil, the violence of civil war, romantic rivalry and eventually, the distance imposed by communism.

Click here to read the entire article.