The Mao Case, Qiu Xiaolong

[meril.livejournal.com]

The Mao Case is the 6th in a crime fiction series about Inspector Chen Cao of the Shanghai police. The series is set during the 1990s and most of the books have mysteries involving the conflicted past of the previous three decades in China. This book is no exception. Chen is called to investigate a young woman who is the granddaughter of one of Mao's rumored mistresses; she may be in possession of personal materials involving Mao and the government wishes to have it in their hands before she sells it.

This isn't the best of the Inspector Chen books and it would really serve as a poor introduction to the series. It's too short and there's not enough character development. The side characters from previous books don't get enough screentime compared to their past appearances. I haven't read the first two yet; I started with the third. The best of them I've read so far is A Case of Two Cities because Qiu seems to have a far better grasp of St. Louis at this point than Shanghai.

(1/50 in my personal challenge list)

Zahrah the Windseeker (Nnedi Okorafor-Mbachu) [#4]

[chomiji]

The tradition-minded people of the Ooni Kingdom have only distant legends of what it means to be born dada, as Zahrah was. Although her family love her, they don't really understand what it's like for the young girl to grow up with living vines twining in her hair, and some of her classmates are cruel. Only her best friend, Dari, appreciates her and encourages her to explore what she is. But when a frightening episode in their experimentation and exploration leaves Dari poised on the brink of death, Zahrah must embark on a fearsome quest to save his life.

For the first few chapters, I was not impressed with this book, which has been billed as Young Adult. I finally decided that the age classification was a mistake: this is an older children's book, suitable for readers aged about 9 to 13 (depending on their reading level, of course). From that viewpoint, the book is a lot more effective, and Zahrah is eminently suited to join to ranks of Alice, Milo, Coraline, and all the other young heroes and heroines who must venture into strange lands beyond reality. In fact, this book most reminds me of The Phantom Tollbooth, although the tone is far more serious. In place of Norton Juster's inventive plays on words and numbers, however, Okorafor-Mbachu presents endlessly creative biology and botany as Zahrah journeys through the Forbidden Greeney Jungle. And the tone of Zahrah and Dari's rebellious search for knowledge despite the doubts and disapproval of their overly-comfortable people reminds me of the rebels' search for the truth in Carol Kendall's all-but-forgotten 1959 fantasy The Gammage Cup.

I'd have no hesitation recommending this for readers of what seems to be the suitable age, but I don't know whether I'm going to re-read it myself. It didn't capture my heart the way my old favorites do.

Spoiler: I think the reason for the YA classification is that Zahrah hits puberty during the course of the story. This is a pretty lame reason, however. No one has yet been silly enough to force a YA classification on one of the most famous books to have this life experience as an incident: The Long Secret, which is the sequel to Harriet the Spy.

A note about my tagging: Okorafor-Mbachu's site says: "Nnedi Okorafor was born in the United States to two Igbo (Nigerian) immigrant parents... [t]hough American-born, Nnedi's muse is Nigeria." So I have tagged this as both "African writers" and "African-American."

Other Reviews of This in 50books_poc:
• by akamarykate