Critics' Opinion:
Readers' rating:
Published Feb 2003
320 pages
Genre: Literary Fiction
Publication Information
Jenny and Amanda Ruth were best friends in a small Alabama town until eighteen-years-old Amanda Ruth was murdered. Now, fourteen years later, Jenny has traveled with her husband to China to scatter Amanda Ruth’s ashes and finally fulfill her friend’s dream of visiting her Chinese father’s homeland. It’s also, Jenny hopes, an opportunity to repair her own troubled marriage. But as she journeys through a foreign landscape, the guilty secrets of Jenny’s past rise up and her life will be inexorably altered.
"Though Richmond poses provocative questions about grief and desire, the shallow characters and sensational plot twists don't allow her to explore them in much depth." - Publishers Weekly
"Some characters, particularly Jenny's husband, seem one-dimensional, but Jenny and Amanda Ruth's Alabama childhood is richly drawn. Richmond is a writer to watch." - Library Journal
"An exotic and nimbly fashioned first novel." - Kirkus Reviews
"Issues of love, loyalty, prejudice, history, passion, and compassion elbow each other for space on each page. But even with its crowded feeling, the book is finely crafted and compelling, and its emotions resonate true and clear." - Booklist
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Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Michelle Richmond is the author of the award-winning story collection The Girl in the Fall-Away Dress, the novels Dream of the Blue Room and No One You Know, and the New York Times and international bestseller The Year of Fog. Her new novel, Golden State, will be published in February, 2014. Her new story collection, Hum, winner of the Catherine Doctorow Innovative Fiction Prize, will be also be published in 2014.
Richmond has received the Hillsdale Award for Fiction from the Fellowship of Southern Writers, the Associated Writing Programs Award, and the Mississippi Review Fiction Prize. Her stories and essays have appeared in Glimmer Train, the Oxford American, Salon, Playboy, The Guardian, The Believer, Best American Fantasy, The Kenyon Review, The Missouri Review, and many magazines ...
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